ATM | Milan Mobility Hub

I started from the present. Together with the team I ran scoping interviews with around 15 ATM stakeholders from different departments, both to map the as‑is car‑park estate and to agree on the boundaries of the project: the time horizon (2030-2035) and which assets were realistic to start work with.

The design approach we chose was strategic foresight, also called future thinking. Foresight builds probable scenarios out of current trends and weak signals, which is the opposite of extrapolating today's car park forward. It let us reason about a plausible Milan instead of the one the business would have liked to see.

The engine of all of this was desk research, and this is the part I am proudest of. Most of the evidence did not arrive as a tidy dataset. It had to be hunted. I read Milan's regulatory and planning documents (e.g. Piano di Governo del Territorio, the Air and Climate Plan, the cycling Biciplan), cross‑sector trend reports, and international best practices, then pulled figures off maps, charts, and zoning tables.

Each asset was then read on three levels.

• Physical reality: size, typology, and existing infrastructure, which set the limits of what a site can host.
• Neighbourhood: the services already available around it, and how the people living there were likely to evolve.
• Planned city interventions: the direction of Milan's own plans for that area over the medium term.

That reading is what decided the form each car park should take, so that every hub worked in synergy with its area and the services around it rather than against them.

Applying the same lens across the estate is also what made standardisation possible. Rather than design a bespoke answer for every site, we grouped the car parks into three macro archetypes, each with its own purpose and its own core set of functions. The archetypes stayed deliberately modular: a standard layer fixed what every hub of that family had to offer, a configurable layer left room to tailor the mix site by site. The last stretch of the work was the reconciliation, matching each existing car park to the archetype its physical and urban conditions could actually support, not the one that looked more attractive on paper.

The final step was roadmapping: turning the vision into a sequence ATM could act on, closing with three recommended pilot hubs.

The strategic logic came from changing what a car park is for. Its value does not sit in the cars it stores, it sits in what it gives people access to: transport options, everyday services, the neighbourhood around it. Read that way, the asset stops competing with a city that wants fewer cars and starts working with it.

From that shift came the Smart Hub: an urban landmark designed to generate a small circular economy across three dimensions: people, mobility and city services. People find everyday services in a place they already pass through, and mobility becomes shared and integrated instead of private and idle.

Three artefacts made the idea usable rather than aspirational. The first is a modular service offering, organised in five macro‑areas split between a standard layer and a configurable one, so a single concept can scale across very different sites. The second is the set of three hub archetypes, Flagship, Neighbourhood Hub and City Gate, each matched to the physical characteristics of the estate: small and underground, medium and surface‑level, large and multi‑level. The third is a declination toolkit, so ATM can keep assigning new functions to its assets as the city evolves and its own priorities shift.

Because location drives function, the same concept reads differently across the estate. The three archetypes make those differences explicit:

• Flagship, a shop window for a smarter Milan. Central, small, and underground, with occasional high‑value footfall. It carries the most visible service mix (shared and robotaxi mobility, custody and delivery, an info‑city point) and doubles as a civic showcase for the Smart Hub system and the city's transformation.
• Neighbourhood Hub, a service anchor for the local community. Medium‑sized and surface‑level, in residential areas marked for regeneration, with regular everyday use. Its offer leans local: micromobility and sharing, a health loop, retail, and delivery, so it blends into the neighbourhood and reinforces its identity.
• City Gate, a gateway that manages flows into the city. Large and multi‑level, at the urban edge where high‑traffic axes meet, used for business and long‑range trips. It is built around modal shift: sharing and pooling, logistics depot and fleet areas, nudging drivers to leave the car and continue by shared transport.