S Nov 2015
SPECIAL

The New Face of Italian Cities

Discovering the company that valorizes areas and facilities no longer needed for rail transport and puts them on the real estate market.

It’s hard even to imagine an area of nearly five million square metres of railway land and buildings no longer needed for transport. But this is the extent of the holdings that FS Sistemi Urbani, a company 100% controlled by its parent company, Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, is making available to the market for urban transformation and real estate development projects. These assets are extremely valuable, also because, in the majority of cases, they are centrally located in big and medium-sized cities – including Milan, Turin, Rome and Naples, to cite just a few – and their valorization, due to the size of the interventions, also impacts the future development of the cities themselves. FS Sistemi Urbani thus plays a vital role in the urban reorganization of major Italian cities and at the same time represents an important resource for the FSI Group in economic terms.

But FS Sistemi Urbani doesn’t limit itself just to this important role: through its subsidiary Metropark it is also engaged in the building and management of car parks and other transport-related activities, not just those involving railways. We talked about them with Sistemi Urbani’s CEO, Ing. Carlo De Vito, who welcomed us in his office on the top floor of the FSI Group’s building in Piazza della Croce Rossa in Rome. The windows of the offices afford a unique panorama over the whole capital, nearly a 360-degree view thanks to the height of the building and its location at the city’s highest point. An almost symbolic position for someone who deals with areas that can be completely taken in only from a bird’s-eye view and uses satellite maps of the territory as an everyday tool.

by Franco Tanel

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