On June 11, 2026, at Locanda alla Mano in the heart of Parco Sempione, Regg3 brought a simple yet radical question into the public sphere: what does it mean to regenerate Milan?
With RIGENER-A-MI, Regg3’s first public event, this question became a shared journey through data, dialogue and participation. It was not a traditional conference, but a gathering designed to examine two crucial urban challenges, access to housing and biodiversity, through a common lens: the need for impact.
The choice of location was not accidental. Locanda alla Mano is a social project created to foster work, autonomy and relationships through food service. It is an open space in the heart of Milan, where inclusion, everyday life and the city truly come together. Speaking here about biodiversity, housing and the urban future was not only a contextual choice, but an integral part of the meaning of the evening.
The event took place during Milano Green Week and was made possible thanks to its partners: the Comune di Milano, Milano Cambia Aria, Locanda alla Mano, Repower and Green Media Lab.
A New Way to Read Value
The evening opened with Anna Favella and a poetic reading, which introduced the event’s guiding thread: recognizing that the environment and society are not external resources to the economy, but the very conditions that make value possible.
From there, Gigio Moratti brought the conversation to the heart of Regg3’s vision: rethinking the economy as a system that must measure itself against limits, balances and social and environmental needs. To do this, new interpretative tools are needed, tools capable of making visible the value generated, consumed or regenerated within territories. This is a kind of value that traditional economics often struggles to recognize.
It is from this perspective that Regg3 measures the demand for impact through three elements: a threshold, meaning the objective to be reached; a context value, which describes the current situation; and a gap, the distance between the two. The greater the gap, the greater the need, and therefore the greater the space to generate impact.
The City Asking for Impact
The first panel, “The City Asking for Impact,” featured Marco Giachetti, President of Fondazione IRCCS Ca’ Granda, and Elena Grandi, Councillor for the Environment and Green Areas of the Municipality of Milan.
With Marco Giachetti, the issue of housing was addressed through the case of Milan’s Policlinico hospital. To finance the hospital’s new wing, Ca’ Granda chose to enhance the value of part of its extensive real estate assets, allocating a share to a social housing project. The central point of his remarks was the concept of “giving back to Milanese citizens”: using properties rooted in a collective history not only to generate resources, but also to restore housing, accessibility and public value to a city that is becoming increasingly exclusive.
With Elena Grandi, the focus shifted to urban green areas as infrastructure for resilience. On the one hand, she emphasized the issue of access to parks in Milan, recalling the presence of large green areas also in the suburbs, from Famagosta to Parco delle Cave, despite some management challenges. On the other hand, she highlighted the need to adapt the city to climate change, citing as an example a depaving project carried out by the Municipality of Milan (Comune di Milano, 2026).
From Demand to Response
The second part of the evening, “The Impact Response,” turned reflection into data, maps and concrete cases. Moderated by Jenny Salazar and Consiglia Ippolito, the session involved the audience through a live questionnaire and a shared reading of Regg3’s maps.
On the topic of housing affordability, Regg3 applied a target threshold of 95% to the Municipality of Milan, understood as the share of the population for whom housing costs should be economically sustainable. The analysis currently shows a context value of 59.9% of Milanese taxpayers, thus highlighting a gap of 35.1% compared with the target. The figure measures potential access to the housing market at current costs, relating incomes to the cost of housing. The comparison with the national level highlights how much stronger housing pressure is in Milan than in the average Italian context. At national level, affordability stands at 86% against the same 95% target threshold, with a gap of 9%.
The map of Milan showed that this gap is not uniform, but varies across municipalities, postal codes and neighborhoods. In postal code 20121, which also includes the Parco Sempione area, the context value is 44.8% compared with the 95% target, with a distance from the objective of 50.2%. Here too, the audience’s contribution was central: through the QR code and interactive questionnaire, participants were able to connect their own perception of housing with territorial data, sharing their responses.
The second focus was dedicated to biodiversity, interpreted through the risk of extinction of the species observed in the territory. The ideal threshold is 100, meaning a scenario in which all observed species are out of danger. Milan today stands at 84.9, with a gap of 15.1 points compared with the target; at national level, the distance from the objective is wider, reaching 41.48 points.
Here too, the data does not simply measure how much nature is present, but rather the risk profile of the observed and assessed species. In the area of Municipio 1, which includes Parco Sempione, the gap falls to 11.9 points, with 181 species observed.
Possible Responses
Starting from these data, Achille Lanzarini, Director General of Fondazione Patrimonio Ca’ Granda, brought the perspective of those who manage a significant patrimony and can direct it toward concrete responses to housing needs. The issue is not only to enhance the value of buildings and land, but to understand how patrimony can become a lever for regeneration, responding to the needs of the territory and generating value with social purposes.
In dialogue with Jenny and Consiglia, Christian Russo of Floresta presented the Oasi Ca’ Granda project: the largest agritourism project in the city of Milan, with four farmsteads, a four-hectare park dedicated to plant and animal repopulation, and an agricultural area for orchards, rice and experimental species.
His remarks reminded the audience that “to regenerate also means to return and remake.” The artificial and protected islets of the Oasi are an example of this: created at the center of the lake and wetland area to protect local biodiversity, they are living infrastructures capable of improving the city’s environmental quality and resilience.
Regeneration Means Creating Connections
After the final Q&A, the evening closed with a networking moment and a live concert by Trio Bolla, which brought the discussion back into an informal and convivial dimension, among music and dancing.
The value of RIGENER-A-MI lay in bringing together dimensions that are often discussed separately: housing and biodiversity, data and participation, public policies and private initiative, urban fragilities and possible responses.
For Regg3, the event represented a first public step: bringing out of reports and technical meetings the questions that guide its research. Because measuring impact does not only mean producing indicators. It means making needs legible and building the conditions to act.
