Peripheral Corridors as Central Territories in the Wider Milan Region

Rural and peri-urban landscapes across the Lombardy’s central plain in northern Italy have become primary locations for logistics, data centres, intensive agriculture and other highly impactful functions at multiple scales. These “operational landscapes” are managed as mere service backyards of the urban–regional system (Armondi et al., 2024; Brenner & Katsikis, 2020; Balducci et al., 2017; Brenner & Schmid, 2015), despite geo-historical stratifications and local identities (Dematteis, 1995). These corridors resonate with current debates on suburban infrastructures and “peripheral centralities” (Keil, 2018; Phelps, 2015), which reconceptualise non-core territories as structurally central to metropolitan reproduction. Infrastructural and functional layering produces fragmentation (Graham & Marvin, 2001), ecological and social ruptures (Larkin, 2013; Halbwachs, 1992; Connerton, 1989) and a systematic neglect of landscape quality in planning and policy debates concerning these peripheral territories. Nonetheless, they function as central spaces, operating as social infrastructures where the reorganisation of labour and logistics reshapes everyday mobility, access to welfare and local forms of inhabiting. New allochthonous communities live alongside entrenched local memories, reshaping meanings of places and belongings (Neilson & Rossiter, 2021; Cowen, 2014; Castells, 2010; Sassen, 2001; Nora, 1989) and reconfiguring civic networks that sustain collective action (Putnam, 1993). This PhD research takes infrastructural corridors as its main entry point. It examines how analytical frameworks and governance instruments can be configured to relate landscapes, memories and social relations, and how changing labour geographies and the arrival of new populations reshape everyday accessibility and demand for welfare services in these peripheral centralities. In methodological terms, the study combines analysis of governance arrangements with a qualitative reading of narratives, conflicts and public representations of these landscapes. The material produced supports interpretive frameworks that guide reflexive planning and governance of operational landscapes and connect debates on peripheral centralities with everyday mobility and accessibility in metropolitan regions.