Milan - The City of Ivy and Hornbeam

This project details the futures of 10,000 towns and cities across the globe as though they've somehow overcome all environmental challenges and become super-ecofriendly. This week, we highlight the future of Milan, Italy.

A City That Turned Back to the Ground

In the early twenty-first century, Milan’s global image became entangled with vertical greenery, most famously embodied in Bosco Verticale, where trees climbed skyward alongside glass and steel. But the Milan we imagine here chooses a quieter, more radical departure. Instead of building upward, it began to rework the ground itself—its streets, its façades, and the slow, shared spaces of everyday life. Cars gradually disappeared from the historic core, not through abrupt prohibition but through steady redesign. Asphalt gave way to permeable stone, intersections dissolved into continuous pedestrian surfaces, and what had once been corridors of movement became places to linger. The city did not empty out; it softened. Sound shifted from engines to conversation, from acceleration to presence.

What emerged was not a futuristic spectacle but something almost familiar, even nostalgic at first glance: rows of low-rise buildings, their proportions echoing classical Milanese architecture. Arched windows, colonnades, and textured façades suggested continuity with the past, yet these structures were not restorations. They were reinterpreted forms, designed from the outset to host living systems. This was a city no longer interested in separating the built from the grown, but in allowing them to co-evolve.

Where Plants Took on Civic Roles

Two plant species came to define this transformation, not because they were rare or exotic, but precisely because they were ordinary and local. The European hornbeam and common ivy, long present in the region, were invited into new forms of partnership with the city. Hornbeams were shaped into living arcades, their branches trained over walkways so that streets gained a shifting canopy that thickened in summer and thinned in winter. Ivy was allowed, even encouraged, to climb across façades designed to receive it, rooting into surfaces that accommodated growth rather than resisted it.

Over time, these plants began to do more than simply exist alongside urban life; they started to structure it. On hot days, the hornbeam canopy cooled entire streets, making walking not just possible but pleasurable even in rising temperatures. Ivy moderated the buildings it covered, holding warmth in winter and deflecting heat in summer, reducing the need for mechanical systems. Rainwater, once rushed away through drains, now filtered slowly through soil and root networks beneath the pavement. The city’s environmental systems became visible and tangible, embedded in everyday experience.

Yet their influence extended beyond the environmental. The presence of these plants subtly reorganized social space. A dense stretch of canopy invited markets or gatherings, while quieter, ivy-lined façades signaled retreat and domesticity. Boundaries became less rigid, defined not by walls or zoning codes but by gradients of shade, enclosure, and growth. The plants did not merely decorate the city; they participated in shaping its rhythms and relationships.

The Street as a Shared Shaded Forest Interior

As Milan’s streets transformed, they began to feel less like infrastructure and more like collective rooms. Without cars, the distinction between movement and dwelling blurred. Children crossed freely from doorway to courtyard, merchants extended their spaces outward under green arcades, and older residents reclaimed the public realm as a place of daily presence rather than negotiation with traffic. The hornbeam canopy overhead functioned almost like a ceiling, giving coherence to spaces that had once been fragmented, while ivy softened the vertical edges, dissolving the hard line between public and private.

What is striking about this Milan is not its technological ambition, but its restraint. It does not rely on complex systems or monumental gestures, but on the careful alignment of architecture with ecological processes already native to the region. In doing so, it offers a different model of urban futures—one that can be replicated, adapted, and grown incrementally. Beauty here is not found in spectacle, but in immersion: in the filtered light through leaves, in the texture of living walls, in the quiet return of streets to human scale. The city has not rejected its past, nor has it chased an abstract vision of the future. Instead, it has allowed itself to be rewritten slowly, through the patient work of plants and people learning, once again, how to share space.