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Abstract
Strategic urban and regional planning, which emerged in Europe in the 1980s, has become an instrument to establish sustainable development of previously successful industrial areas today affected by the crisis caused mostly by the globalisation of the 1990s. Strategic urban planning concerns organisational land use which in turn regulates resource protection, sustainable development, regeneration and infrastructural investments and multilevel governance. Careful planning is imperative to reach goals such as enhancing local competitiveness and life quality. These dimensions represent the two focal points of the majority of city planning strategies. Their implementation depends not only on planning effectiveness, but also on the organisation and the management of the implementation process by the planning agency or the equivalent local promoter. This paper looks at the experience of Italian cities, in order to derive implications for theory and for future planning processes. More specifically, it analyses the extent to which Italian cities follow similar or divergent paths at the stage of the design process; the Italian case study is then compared with the guidelines proposed by the planning literature and with other European cities.
Notes
The term ‘governance’ is one of the most widely used in the recent public management and urban studies literature. For a review and critique of such variety of meanings, see Frederickson Citation(2005).
The shift from a government to a governance approach described here is part of a wider change which has taken place over the past 30 years and which has been the focus of much theoretical and empirical literature. See for instance Osborne Citation(2006) and Bovaird and Loeffler Citation(2009) on the evolution from ‘public administration’ to ‘new public management’ to ‘(new) public governance’.
The leader can also be a private entity, such as a business association or a group of private institutions. However, this tends to be more common in the North American rather than the European tradition (Fera, Citation2005).
As it will be explained later in the text, this is especially true in Italy, where strategic urban planning is not mandated by law and is undertaken exclusively thanks to the initiative of the local administration.
The empirical literature on Italian experiences includes, for instance, the following contriibutions: Pugliese and Spaziante Citation(2003); Cavenago Citation(2004); Fedeli and Gastaldi Citation(2004); Borelli Citation(2005); Martinelli Citation(2005).
Questionnaires were submitted and data were gathered during the first half of the year 2006.
The authors are aware that direct involvement may cause the risk of a biased perspective. On the other hand, it is also a way to avoid conventional rhetoric and to observe actual practices of action and interaction which substantiate strategic planning.
This explains why a number of questions on implementation remained unanswered in Carbonia's case, as they were not relevant.
