Milan

The Metropolitan City of Milan consists of 134 municipalities that form a deeply urbanized area with rich infrastructure; it can be configured as a single urban area of 1,575 sq. km increasingly extended and integrated. The heart of the metropolitan area is represented by the City of Milano which is administratively divided into nine districts; each one of them has a local council, elected at the same time as the mayor and the city council.

Thanks to the presence of a dynamic interaction between the industrial and tertiary sectors, the province of Milan is the centre of excellence for business services. Milan is one of the EU's and the world's major financial and business centres, with the Milan metropolitan area having a 2004 GDP of €241.2 billion, which means that it has Europe's 4th highest GDP.

There is a steady workforce in the city of Milan due to the presence of new graduates from the five major universities located in the city. In the province, there are 1.6 million individuals employed, and about twenty five percent of that population are recorded as self-employed. The unemployment rate in Milan is recorded to be less than half of the national average, at about 4.6% in 2001.

The city of Milan is a center of innovation that fosters projects, initiatives and policies in order to improve the quality of life of its citizens through new integrated solutions.

The economic crisis is leading people to find new ways to improve their condition, seeking collaborative and sustainable solutions that can guarantee a satisfactory quality of life: a new “culture of living” both private and public spaces is emerging.