Learning from the past to support everyday well-being: rediscovering hidden landscape patterns for proximity planning in Monza (Italy)

Contemporary debates on the 15-minute city highlight the need to rethink accessibility, proximity, and quality of life through integrated spatial, social, and environmental perspectives. This paper contributes to this discussion by proposing a landscape-oriented and historically grounded approach to proximity planning, based on a long-term analysis of urban planning instruments in Monza (Italy), a medium-sized city within the Milan urban region. Through a critical reconstruction of the succession of general town plans from 1925 to 2022, the study examines how past planning decisions have shaped current conditions of accessibility, public space provision, and everyday well-being. Rather than interpreting proximity as a purely time-based metric, the paper argues that quality of life is shaped by the interaction between the distribution of services, the continuity of green and open spaces, and the capacity of urban environments to support diverse daily practices. The analysis reveals that fragmented yet persistent landscape structures, including residual green spaces, waterways, tree-lined boulevards, and urban–rural interfaces, constitute a dispersed fabric with significant potential to enhance well-being and everyday accessibility. By “possible landscape pattern”, the paper refers to an interpretive and project-oriented framework that reconnects inherited, residual, and under-recognised spatial resources rather than prescribing a fixed masterplan.