Milan strides toward world city status with gleaming new Olympic stadium, hundreds of new housing units, over 9 million tourists per year

The legacy of the Milan Cortina Winter Games is both physical, in new facilities and infrastructure, and intangible, burnishing Milan’s global image. It’s the second major event to leave a lasting mark on the city, after the Expo 2015 world’s fair brought new investment, tourists and talent.

“Milan is more and more creating a distinctive brand able to attract an international audience,’’ said Dino Ruta, who is heading up a Bocconi University study on the Olympics’ economic impact for the International Olympic Committee, expected later this year.

Tangible impact

The physical legacy of the Milan Cortina Olympics is relatively slight, by design. The Games were spread out over seven city, valley and mountain venues hundreds of kilometers apart to leverage existing facilities, saving on new construction.

Milan inherits the brand new Santgiulia arena, which hosted Olympic hockey and will be used for concerts, exhibition and sporting events, while the athletes’ Olympic Village will be turned into housing for 1,700 students, badly needed in a city with 10 universities and an affordable housing crisis.

Preliminary data gathered for the Bocconi study shows that about 4 billion euros ($4.7 billion) were invested in the Games, including for new and upgraded sports facilities, transportation investments on roads, metro accessibility, railways and ski lifts, energy costs and the administration of the Games, Ruta said.

In Milan, the Games cost 735 million euros ($867 million) to host 90 indoor ice events and the opening ceremony at San Siro, while visitors were on course to spend around 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion), according to a Feb. 16 report by the Assolombarda business association. The Olympics are forecast to boost 2026 economic growth in Milan by 0.6 percentage points to 1.7%, accelerating industrial output in the entire region, the association said during the Games.

Two-decade transformation

Milan’s transformation from a provincial city known primarily as an industrial and business center began in the early 2000s, when a wave of redevelopment projects started reshaping its skyline.

The CityLife district emerged around three skyscrapers designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, Daniel Libeskind and Arata Isozaki, while the Porta Nuova development introduced the flagship UniCredit Tower, the city’s tallest building at 218 meters (715 feet), completed in 2012.

Much of this building boom coincided with Expo 2015, which drew 22 million visitors over six months and repositioned Milan as an international tourist destination. Tourism has grown steadily since, rising 6.5% to 9.6 million visitors in 2025, from just over 9 million a year earlier.

“Expo was not an isolated success,” said Fiorenza Lipparini, director general of Milano & Partners – YesMilano, the city’s promotion agency. “It marked a systematic shift.”

Beyond tourism, Expo triggered a 3 billion-euro investment to transform the former Expo site into MIND, a science and technology hub. Since then, the number of five-star hotels has tripled. Milan has added two subway lines and opened a dozen new museums, including Fondazione Prada, MUDEC and Pirelli HangarBicocca.

Yet the city’s rapid ascent has also fueled criticism. Housing activists argue that big events and luxury developments catering to wealthy tenants have driven up real estate prices, leaving many workers priced out. They call for policies to fill vacant public housing, create more subsized housing and incentivize private owners to make available 80,000 uninhabited residences.

“The model of development brought by big events like Expo 2015 and then the Olympics brings private interests that don’t trickle down to the people,” said Angelo Junior Avelli of the Social Forum dell’Abitare.

Post-Olympics

The Olympic Village has speeded up redevelopment in the southern Porta Romana railyard, next to one of Milan’s largest former industrial sites.

The 20-hectare (49-acre) project will deliver 100,000 square meters (more than 1 million square feet) of housing — about half social housing under city rules adopted in 2019 — along with parks and public space covering roughly half the site. After the Games, the athletes’ village will be converted into student housing.

The area sits across from Fondazione Prada, one of the first projects to catalyze the regeneration of the former industrial Symbiosis district, emerging as a fashion hub with headquarters for Bottega Veneta and Moncler. A new headquarters for Diesel-owner OTB is also under construction nearby.

“Major events can open the interest of the world to the city,” said Luca Mangia, general manager of COIMA, the developer behind the Porta Romana and Porta Nuova projects. “We saw that with Expo 2015 and we hope it will happen again with the Olympic Games.”

“In this case, the Games allowed us to accelerate construction of the Olympic Village and move forward more quickly with regeneration of the area,” Mangia said.

Sporting legacy

Italy’s record 30 medals is also expected to reignite interest in winter sports, the way Jannik Sinner’s success on the court has promoted tennis, Ruta said. In addition, Olympic organizers are working with companies to encourage employees to get 30 minutes of physical activity each day, a carryover of the 2024 Paris Olympics.

“Athletes inspire everybody to be an everyday athlete,’’ said Ruta, with an economic impact translating to such things as ski tickets, equipment sales and hotels.

Already, Milan’s convention operator, which hosted two temporary skating venues, has announced that it would maintain a temporary ice rink while it studies a project to add a new permanent rink.

“The Olympics have reignited the enthusiasm and the passion for ice and all of its sports, an energy that we don’t want to lose,’’ Giovanni Bozzetti, president of the Foundation Fiera Milano, said in a social media post.