Urban-Rural Symbiosis 01"One-third of the land in the Milan metropolitan area is voluntarily designated as an agricultural park, where residents farm and raise livestock, enjoying a pastoral life

Farming in a fashion capital where land is worth its weight in gold sounds like a pipe dream, but Andrea Falappi made it come true. His farm is less than four kilometers from the cathedral in central Milan, and just a ten-minute walk to the subway station. On 88 hectares of fields, cows graze while he grows rice and forage grass and makes cheese. Surrounded by poplar trees, white storks - commonly known as the "baby-delivering birds" - stroll through the grass, a gentle breeze rustles softly, and birds chirp from the woods, singing a pastoral idyll amid the hustle and bustle of the city.

As urbanization spread, a mayor once said: farmers should simply disappear from modern Milan

This farmland adjacent to the city center is like taking Daan Forest Park near Taipei 101 and tripling it to grow crops and raise cattle. Andrea rides his scooter through a red-tiled brick gateway and stops in front of a farmhouse with more than 300 years of history. He says the dream began as a nightmare.

That was an era when money flooded Italy. The country rose rapidly from the ruins of World War II with swift industrialization and booming economic growth. As Italy's economic locomotive, Milan was paved with gold, wave after wave of rural people poured into the city to seek their fortune, and one high-rise after another sprang up overnight, occupying abandoned suburban villages, while concrete, steel and asphalt swallowed one fertile field after another.

Northern central Milan was already crowded with high-rises, so developers went hunting for land in the south, with cheap farmland as the prime target. Some villages that originally had only a few hundred people suddenly saw tens of thousands of new residents pour in, building houses, bridges and roads as the pace of modernization moved forward in great strides. To Andrea's eyes, the prosperous future promised by developers was instead the end of the fields, a wasteland where farmers had no place to stand, and the fertile soil cultivated painstakingly by generations of ancestors turned to dust. He recalls, "Farmers had almost vanished. One mayor even told me that farmers should rightly disappear from modern Milan."

Linking 61 towns and townships to form the "South Milan Agricultural Park," where farming life preserves the townscape

Anarchic urbanization spread like cancer. Not only the countryside, but the city itself could barely breathe, with air pollution and environmental degradation. Beginning in the 1970s, environmental groups and local lovers of their homeland successively advocated leaving a ring of parks around the city center so that green space could embrace Milan.

Seeing the northern suburbs rapidly conquered by developers, the towns and townships south of the Milan metropolitan area began to link up in the 1980s, and in 1990 succeeded in passing legislation to designate an area covering 61 towns and townships, totaling 46,000 hectares - equivalent to 1.7 times the size of Taipei City - as the "South Milan Agricultural Park." An agricultural park is not an agricultural industrial zone; it promotes agricultural development and restricts building development, but it also preserves the model of urban-rural symbiosis that has lasted for a thousand years. On 37,000 hectares of farmland, 900 farming households grow rice, corn and forage grass, and there are 400 livestock farms raising cattle, pigs, horses or sheep. The existing townscape is also preserved here, with churches and monasteries.

Residents and farmers stood on the same side and defeated the big shark developer

Even so, Andrea's nightmare was not over. The deep-pocketed developer Salvatore Ligresti took a liking in 1982 to Andrea's farm in the "golden core" area, bribed officials in the urban development bureau to bypass prohibitions, and quietly bought part of the property rights to the farm's land. Andrea, who leased the farm, saw his pastoral dream about to shatter.

Andrea was unwilling to surrender. With the help of the South Milan Park Association, he launched a struggle. The methods of resistance were diverse: street marches, flash mobs, and court battles with the developer and the government. He also held various celebrations and activities at the farm, bringing residents who had come to appreciate the beauty of rural life onto the same side, gathering 5,000 signatures for a petition to make the 88 hectares of land around the farm into Parco del Ticinello.

"More radically, we even occupied the council." Speaking of this scene, Andrea could hardly hide his pride and raised his eyebrows. "Because their discussions dragged on endlessly, and they had no intention at all of passing a bill to make the farm an agricultural park and prohibit developers from putting up buildings."

The developer was no pushover either. Ligresti preferred to forgo rent and issued an eviction order demanding that all the more than twenty farming households move out. "Once the idle farmhouses collapse and the fields fall into ruin, and once people dump garbage illegally and public safety problems arise, the developer will have an excuse to say he wants to redevelop this land overrun with disorder." Association chairman Renato Aquilani explained, "At that point, he would have even more ample reason to change the land-use designation of the farmland and launch large-scale construction."

Police came to the farm many times to drive the farmers out, but they were always instead driven away by crowds of people. Residents brought in one after another, and the association was full of talent: architects, geologists, teachers, writers, and even priests joined in. Everyone contributed their expertise and pooled ideas, drawing up blueprints and drafting bills to turn the farm into a park. In a letter written to the park, an elderly man recalled those days: "Everyone was united and gritted their teeth. We did not wait for higher authorities, did not rely on subsidies, did not wait for a ribbon-cutting. The result was that we lived better and were happier."

After more than a decade of struggle by this bottom-up grassroots movement, the small shrimp defeated the big shark. The developer Ligresti went bankrupt, the property rights were transferred to the city government, and the promise of an agricultural park was fulfilled. Andrea's farm became a fortress against the encroachment of urbanization, continuing its pastoral dream, and the neighboring residents also preserved a patch of green.