Remembering Francesco Borella, founder of Parco Nord Milano

On ACER magazine n.5, Andreas Kipar heartfully remembers Francesco Borella (1937–2025), architect and urban planner, who passed away last June. First director and co-founder of Parco Nord Milano, Borella was a rigorous, pragmatic planner and an untiring civil servant who turned green space into a tool for social rebirth. In 2023 he received the Ambrogino d’oro for initiating an unprecedented process of urban transformation in Milan.

In the mid-1980s, when the city still bore the marks of industrial decline, Borella championed a simple yet revolutionary idea: bring Nature where it was absent, returning colour and life to forgotten places. Building on studies developed at the Centro Studi del Piano Intercomunale Milanese (PIM), he led Parco Nord’s growth to a 600-hectare laboratory of regeneration, stitching together abandoned factories, struggling farms and dense peripheries. Kipar recalls the common work on the 35 hectares of the former Breda furnace slag heap, the “montagnetta”, they reimagined as fertile ground for new trees.

A pupil of Giancarlo De Carlo, Borella conceived planning as a participatory and sustainable process that interweaves Nature and Architecture. His method combined long-term vision with institutional dialogue, involving actors such as Italia Nostra and the Corpo Forestale dello Stato, ensuring continuity beyond individual projects.

Andreas Kipar recalls meeting Borella in 1985 and a decades-long collaboration across Milan and the hinterland—from closing the city zoo to municipal green plans—guided by discipline, public interest and trust. “We were a bit like ‘partisans of the green’, convinced that Milan could change radically,” he notes. As Parco Nord celebrates its first 50 years anniversary, the several trees planted together continue to grow and benefit the most vulnerable—exactly as Borella wished.