Issue #6 - WINTER/2011

Italy has the most ancient universities in the world. But it would be better to say: "the oldest". A few days ago, the minister of Economy, coherently with his vision of society, declared: "la cultura non si mangia" ("culture cannot be eaten"). He's right: whoever wants to study and eat as well, in this country, has to go abroad. Otherwise he/she can fight. Climbing roofs, facing truncheons, occupying faculties. Conscious that tomorrow the situation won't have changed.
As we know, the Italian university system is at its last gasp. But inside it there are forces that exist and endure, despite the systematic repression (economic, cultural and at times also physical) they have undergone for decades. And they manage to - make themselves heard. A sure sign of this is, for instance, the research that we here introduce.
The department of Architecture and Urban Planning of the Politecnico of Milan, in collaboration with AIM (Agency for Metropolitan Interests), commissioned students and researchers an enquiry about the university system's impact from a social, urban and cultural point of view. The result is the publication: Milano, la città  degli studi. Storia, geografia e politiche delle università milanesi (Milan, city of studies. History, geography and policies of universities in Milan). Some of the works published have been realized by members of MilanoCittàAperta.

University as a space of work and of daily life, as a chance of estethic change of the outskirts, as a multi-ethnic meeting point, as a mediation territory between city and country, as a chance to study the human being, as a stage on the path of education and professional training. This issue of miciap proposes works that talk about our city, about the young that study -here and their relationship with the public system of knowledge. Trying to change things, bsides understanding them.

INDEX
• University landscape
by Daniele Pennati
The impact of university settlements in the suburbs of Milan and their reciprocal influence, both esthetic and structural.
• Tale of a place
by Alberto Locatelli
The narration of the transformation of a workspace in a place animated by the students that every day move across it.
• Univer City
by Mirko Cecchi
University as a crossroads of stories, faces and people coming from all over the world, multi-ethnic meeting place between past and future.
• Inneres Auge
by Pavlove Der Visionaer
Portrait of the artist as a young man seen as a narration of the post-university limbo caught just for a moment in the suspension and depth of a closed-eye gaze.
• Unexpected places
by Thomas Pagani
University spaces beyond stereotypes, discovering some of the most unknown places of the agrarian faculty of Milan.
• Interiors
by Jacopo Farina
Silent and unmoved, the dummies of the morphology faculty guard the lecture halls in the via Mangiagalli building, showing all their disarming humanity.

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