Between Knowledge and Creative Economy the Milan Urban Region as a Spatial Interface

After some decades of intensive research focused on the relation between economic growth/society/territory (through dominant figures such as “one company town”, “new industrial space”, “industrial districts”, and then the “post-fordist” scenario), this issue has been recently neglected in urban and regional studies. For instance, under the blanket of a generic “post-industrial transition”, and assuming the existence of new “knowledge and creative urban economies”, from Florida (2002), up to Ygitcanlar and Inkinen (2019). The attention paid to the so-called “cognitive capitalism” (increasingly based on a sharing approach) is contributing to the interpretation of current urban change processes and projects, which are often boosted by multiscalar networks crossing cities and connecting them with other near and far places (Castells 1996; Taylor 2004). Accordingly, a new spatial lexicon defines urban phenomena that can refer to traditional compact cities and surrounding metropolitan areas, as well as to fragmented but networked contemporary urban dynamics, which extend to regional scale: a new phase of multiscalar regional urbanization (Soja 2011), from city regions (Scott 2001; Hall and Pain 2006) to post-metropolitan territories (Soja 2000; Balducci et al. 2017).