The Innovation of the Italian Planning System: Actors, Path Dependencies, Cultural Contradictions and a Missing Epilogue

Abstract

The paper aims at investigating the changes in the Italian planning system that took place in the last two decades. It is of interest because different directions of changes and combination of modes, tools and approaches have been developed and experimented. Such a plethora of changes however has been developed without a sound national reform capable to provide a legislative, disciplinary and cultural framework. At the same time, though, the condition of legislative immobility at the national level has characterized an unexpected experimenting ground for different actors and approaches at different administrative levels. In order to present its arguments, the paper combines an institutionalist approach with a strategic-relational perspective as starting point for the identification of the main interpretative categories for the processes of change. The modernization of the planning system can be investigated through its actors and the achieved innovations, its institutional path dependencies, as well as its cultural planning divergences. As a concluding consideration, we wonder if in occasion of the challenges that the ongoing socio-economic and institutional crisis has brought, the accumulated planning cultural capital can be the base ground for a new possible reforming season that would put order to a rich but scattered situation.

Notes

1. As an example, in 1967, on the emotion of the drama caused by Firenze's flood and Agrigento's earthquake, the so-called “Legge ponte” (“Bridge Law” no. 765/1967) was adopted, which speeded up the Plan elaboration process, but most of all limited the building capacity of areas without planning rules and instruments, and introduced parametrical limits to constructions (among which, the “urbanistic standards”). However, it did not happen without an Italian trick: the postponement of 1 year of its full efficiency, which determined a peak of submissions of building permissions, while, within a couple of years, the legitimacy of zoning areas for public interests was weakened by juridical verdicts.

2. Authors’ translation of the original expression “tranquillità del diritto”.

3. Dipartimento per il Coordinamento dello sviluppo del Territorio.

4. On the basis of this law and of the experience of Milan's master document, a broad debate began on the necessity of opening the planning system to forms of self-organization in the spirit of an active liberalism (Moroni, 2007), through a strict definition of the public authority's competences and the liberalization of land uses, which become a subject for negotiation with the public administration.