A park inside the Fiat steelworks

After losing its status as capital in 1865, Turin became one of Europe’s great industrial cities. Along the Dora Riparia, in the area planners would later call Spina 3, stood the Fiat Ferriere steelworks, the Michelin tyre plant, the metal construction works of the Società Nazionale Officine Savigliano and the Dora goods station. The factories ran until the 1990s. After they closed, according to the archivist Diego Robotti, more than a quarter of the city’s land lay unused for years.

The 1995 master plan already marked a “green lung” on the site. In spring 2004 the city launched an open international competition, which drew seven entries. The winning group brought together the engineering firm STS, the landscape architect Peter Latz, designer of the Duisburg-Nord post-industrial park in the Ruhr, Studio Pession for industrial archaeology, the lighting designer Gerd Pfarré and the artist Ugo Marano. In autumn 2007 the park joined the works for the 150th anniversary of Italian unification: the state funded three lots, the city the other two.

Work began in summer 2008. In spring 2011 the Vitali, Ingest and Valdocco lots, named after the former Ferriere sites, opened to the public; the Mortara lot followed in spring 2012. The design keeps what the factories left behind. In the Vitali lot, the steel pillars, painted red, and part of the roof of the “strippaggio” shed shelter a covered square. Michelin’s cooling tower and the steelworks’ power plant have been preserved. A raised walkway runs along the right bank for nearly a kilometre.

The park covers 37 hectares according to Latz + Partner; with the other green spaces of Spina 3, the city counts 456,000 m². The Dora, partly covered by a concrete slab, has regained an accessible bank, linked to the “Torino Città d’Acque” programme and to a cycle path along the river. Under the shed people skate and play, and the Kappa FuTurFestival of electronic music sets up its stages there.

The project won the International Architecture Award in 2012 and second prize at the European Garden Award in 2017. The conversion is still unfinished. On 9 July 2026 the council of the city’s 5th district unanimously questioned the mayor: a residents’ committee had found in public documents that groundwater near a new housing project next to the park was contaminated with hexavalent chromium, and a municipal decision of March 2026 appears to ban building on adjacent lots until the clean-up is complete.

For a team, the park is open, free and easy to explore on foot. From the walkway, Robotti writes, you see a “valley” ringed by residential towers and the crown of the Alps. In the south-west, in a 1940s Michelin building, the MAcA, Museo A come Ambiente, described as Europe’s first museum devoted to the environment, offers group visits by appointment.