Politics and planning: land take between the EU soil strategy and local policymaking in Lombardy

ABSTRACT

While the democratic theory of party government contends the importance of accountable decisionmakers’ preferences for policy outputs, the post-politics thesis argues that political differences have become irrelevant after the triumph of neo-liberalism. This paper questions whether politics makes any difference in land-use policy, with specific regard to land take, focusing on attitudes and choices of local elected officers (LEOs) in Italy’s largest region, where legislation on the land take was introduced in 2014. Most LEOs favour limiting land consumption and do not expand developable land. However, such attitude appears to somehow vary according to LEOs’ political leanings, being less common for right-wing administrators. Furthermore, this does not contradict the established pro-development paradigm, as shown by land consumption rates. Typically, under the influence of special interests, local land-use decisions can undermine large-scale strategies aimed at sustainability, such as the European Union’s Soil Strategy.

KEYWORDS:

• Land take
• EU soil strategy
• land-use planning
• policy preferences
• local elected officers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 a senior researcher of Éupolis Lombardia, the regional government research institute; the former chairman of the environmentalist lobby Legambiente; a Milan Polytechnic University lecturer; the coordinators of the planning department of Lombardy’s association of municipalities; four mayors and aldermen.

2 Meyerson and Banfield (1955) underlined how Chicago aldermen tended to support public housing in the abstract, but to oppose to its location in their own electoral districts, thus representing residents’ wishes.

3 According to Swyngedouw (2009, 613), ‘social and ecological problems caused by modernity/capitalism’ are claimed to be ‘external side-effects’ that only need to be tackled through technical solutions, and certainly not by challenging the very foundations of the capitalist socio-political system.

4 As in the UK, where Labour allegedly only places more emphasis on the ‘social dimension of sustainability’ (Murdoch and Abram 2017, 30).

5 Edwards’ index (1963) detects the presence, direction (attraction/repulsion) and intensity of a statistical association between mode pairs of dichotomic variables. It has a value ranging from 0 (maximum repulsion between modes) to 1 (maximum attraction), where the 0.5 value indicates statistical independence between modes. To assess the existence and strength of the association, all variables have been treated as dichotomic by taking into consideration one only of their modes at a time, grouping all other cases in another mode.

6 Between 2000 and 2018, 78% of land take in the EU-28 affected agricultural areas. EEA Indicator Assessment ‘Land take in Europe’, https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/land-take-3/assessment, retrieved 13 January 2022.

7 According to the 2011 census, unoccupied dwellings are 22,7% in Italy and 15,2% in Lombardy, against an average 15,8% in EU-28. 9,8% of all EU-28 dwellings and 7,9% in Italy were built after 2000 (Eurostat 2018).

8 In particular, ‘sustainable urbanization’ (target 11.3) and the restoration of ‘degraded land and soil’ (target 15.3).

9 One respondent in municipalities above 15000 inhabitants is left-wing, seven are centre-left, two right-wing and one non-partisan. Six respondents in municipalities under 5000 people are centre-left, five centre, three centre-right, three right and 19 non-partisan. The superimposition of the two variables (population and political leaning) can therefore be ruled out since administrations of different political orientation are present in both demographic clusters.

10 Whose full competence in planning their territory has been repeatedly upheld by the Constitutional Court.

11 According to the former president of Legambiente, nationwide ecologist associations are not capable of monitoring all plans to make themselves heard and, unless local volunteers take the initiative, anti-development protests are staged in relatively few cases. In fact, it is particularly in small municipalities that sustainability strategies, set at a larger scale, risk being undermined.

12 To define this concept, which so far is not legally binding for planning authorities, the European Commission (2016, 6) hints that ‘sealing agricultural land and open spaces should be avoided as far as possible’ and ‘building on land that has already been sealed’ should be preferred, for example on redeveloping ‘land previously used as an industrial site (…). However, new houses still need to be built and the 2050 goal does not aspire to reduce sealing of new land to zero. When land is taken, the aspiration is to ensure this is no more than is compensated for elsewhere’.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore [grant number D.1 2015].