Pietro Salini

PIETRO SALINI

Metropolitan networks are now the real beating heart of city life and development, not just infrastructure put at the service of urban mobility. Their tracks spread and intersect underground as if they were neural networks of an ideal brain that punctuates the times and ways millions of people move in the most sustainable way.

Subways, from simple places of connection, are becoming meeting places, places to experience and not just to transit, even with more and more sophisticated museum and art exhibits, which make them a kind of modern “agora” in increasingly advanced cities at the service of citizen.

Throughout the history of urban development, from the nineteenth century to today, this has been the subway: an accelerator of progress, a tool for rationalizing the complexity of urban development, a great support in coping with traffic congestion, the most widespread evil in our cities. Their contribution to innovation is at the service of all kinds of cities: from those with older origins, which equipped themselves with subway lines to support their rush toward a new way of living and getting around the city, to the more modern ones, which are built precisely around the routes of subway networks, in many cases responsible for lighting the fuse of urban development.

On this ideal journey among the metros that have changed the aspect of so many metropolitan cities around the world, it is inevitable to board trains that run on the networks built by Webuild Group, which has collected more than a 100-year history of excellence of engineering and construction companies that built some of the most iconic metros in the world. These are metros built in New York City, where our mark is visible on the subway that the cinema and collective imagination have transformed into a global icon; the ones in Australia, where we helped redesign the transportation systems of cities like Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth; those ones in the Arabian Peninsula, from Riyadh to Doha; and in so many other cities, from St. Petersburg to Lima, Naples to Rome, Copenhagen to Istanbul, Paris to Thessaloniki, and San Francisco.

Every day, hundreds of millions of people use the subway lines built by Webuild, and although few of them know in detail how complex the work behind each of these great works is, for the men and women who have worked on them for years it is incredibly satisfying to know that they have built infrastructure capable of immediately becoming part of the lives of millions of people and changing them, for the better.

This is what happened in Copenhagen where, from the day of its inauguration, Cityringen has become part of the citizens’ lives, as if it had always been there.

To succeed in this endeavor, we have put at the service of the cities all the experience of Italian companies in the supply chain that have worked with us around the world. Building a subway in the center of Milan, just forty inches or so away from the foundations of historical buildings, or in highly populated areas such as the towns of Île-de-France around Paris, or in Rome, right in the city center, is a challenge that can be won only with competence acquired thanks to many years of work. A challenge of ingeniousness but also of beauty, because their task is to make people’s lives easier, the cities more attractive, making the places around the stations flourish with interventions of urban regeneration, from the city center to the suburbs.

And there is no life nor progress without the comfort of beauty.
 

Pietro Salini
Chief Executive Officer of Webuild Group