An International Multidisciplinary Cross-Cultural Cooperation Project of Urban Regeneration

Abstract

The challenges of conducting a project such as the “Sustainable Social Economic and Environmental Revitalization in the Historic Core of Multan City” were unprecedented in the framework of Italian academic institutions. As a matter of fact, such an undertaking meant to perform a multidisciplinary cross-cultural project in a framework characterised by a region such as Punjab in Pakistan, with an important history, strong traditions, many tangible environmental and urban difficulties, low incomes and a rapid demographic growth. To combine so many technical and social objectives, to be achieved working in different continents, needed innovative ways and approaches in order to coordinate research activities, technical approaches and project groups; it was at the same time necessary to find the best way to transfer the obtained results and to have the related applications quickly employed and implemented on the ground.

The activities demanded first of all to design the right mix of actions, to specify the principal options to the preparation of strategies and projects, to offer a way of obtaining a better knowledge of a region and a city with its populations, to understand the ways to operate in a country of particular administrative structure and to cooperate with local stakeholders and representatives.

A special team, operating both in Milan and in Pakistan, has been created with different competencies: urbanism, architecture, buildings, cultural heritage conservation, energy, environmental engineering, economics, industrial design and project and innovation management. The activities of the team have been developed considering the whole context of action outlined by the Pakistani–Italian Development cooperation, balancing the aims of poverty alleviation with the environmentally sustainable resource use. Our efforts aspired to obtain and harmonise actions of socio-economic development, environmental protection (in our case in the priority sectors of health and education) and basic infrastructure renewal, trying to verify the possibility of synergies and triggering further collaborations to guarantee the prosecution of interventions beyond the duration of the specific approved project and the extinction of the corresponding funds up to now allocated.

The results obtained in the first 6-month phase of the project, and the preparation of the plan for the second phase of 30 months, encourage the strategy of the Fondazione Politecnico di Milano (FPM) of exploiting the technical and cultural competencies and skills of the Politecnico di Milano in international cooperation projects. Such cooperation projects are very likely to prove themselves excellent opportunities of methodological and educational growth and of sharing fruitful knowledges to support progress and to generate interesting research outcomes and fallouts.