Urban typologies within contemporary Italian urbanization (original) (raw)

The Establishment of Metropolitan Cities in Italy: An Advance or a Setback for Italian Regionalism?

This paper aims to provide a brief assessment of the legal framework of the newly established metropolitan cities in the Italian domestic legal order. After an historical overview of previous attempts to set up metropolitan cities in Italy (1), it summarizes the main statutory provisions of the Delrio Law (No. 56/2014) through which metropolitan cities finally came into operation (2) and it provides an analysis of its implementation, thereby attempting to make clear whether increased institutional pluralism and differentiation in the local government system will strengthen or weaken Italian regionalism (3). The conclusion will argue that, while the enactment of local government reforms combined with the entering into force of a significant constitutional amendment will increasingly diminish the role of the Regions, metropolitan cities, due to their ambivalent nature, still lack any propulsive thrust and face the risk of being marginalized until a consistent legal framework for their proper funding is laid down (4).

The new urban issue: A journey into the Italian city and its sensitive areas

International Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, 2011

The transformation of the urban horizon shows a heterotropical fragmentation which is a transverse phenomenon. Some parts of the city are showing new combinations of functions and populations: these are simply juxtaposed, with neither contacts nor communications. While some places/populations are losing functions, suffering economic changes and weakening the sociability skills, some others are more widely connected elsewhere. Marginalisation processes may be found all over the city. Old suburbs and new critical areas can be mentioned as 'sensitive areas', far beyond their geographical position on the city map. The studies carried out indicate that sensitive areas in the city are very interesting points of view in order to observe and understand the social changes and trends of contemporary development processes.

The metropolitan question in Italy European horizons of urban integration

2019

Starting from the nineties of the twentieth century, in Italy, the first specific tools have been developed to guarantee territorial agreements, in order to deal with the issue of local autonomies and to set the metropolitan areas, by the law 142 of 1990. In 2014, the most recent ‘Delrio’ Reform tried to list the categories of the metropolitan cities in order to build links and balances between central and local authorities. An effort that has gone hand in hand with that made by the European Union in the field of urban development and which found the principles of a collaborative and integrated Community policy in the 201420 Cohesion Policy and in the 2016 EU Urban Agenda for the implementation of a transformed metropolitan area, including various urban frames, namely the most marginal ones.

“Worlding, worldly or ordinary? Repositioning Rome”, in Calafati, A., The Changing Italian Cities: Emerging Imbalances and Conflicts, GSSI Urban Studies-Working Papers, 2014, 6.

The paper questions the urban narrative of the divided and underdeveloped city that is usually applied to Rome. Rome has always been considered a backward metropolis, a divided and dependent city, suspended between the modern and industrial North and the (comparatively) rural and traditional South. Since it became the capital of Italy in 1870, the small population that used to live around the Pope’s court has been replaced by those attending to the needs of the civil servants in government jobs, since Rome has in fact a comparatively weak industrial base. However, the administration pushed for the growth of the city, creating the need for a very large inflow of poor immigrants from the Southern countryside. Besides being limited and empirically inadequate, this raises a crucial theoretical question: how can we describe and understand the change of cities in an age of global rescaling For instance, the two main narratives of globalization and competition, and the critique of the resulting social and spatial division, though opposed, share the same epistemological concern with generalization and explication. But the process of globalization confuses geographical scales, weaves together local and global dimensions, and erases physical and social boundaries. At the turn of modernity, the city is as solid as ever, though neoliberal developments tend to jeopardize all certainties. The same cannot be said of its representations, that are increasingly less coherent and productive, though encroaching on the imagery of the city and of cities’ policies. Thus, walking on water is somehow required in order to match new social forms and their narratives. Marc Augé calls ville-monde such new urban environments, as opposed to the global city, based upon heterogeneity and juxtaposition. Urban space is socially fragmented, and a strict social zoning articulates society and opportunities. Cities change in diverging directions. This calls for a theoretical repositioning, and a paradigmatic turn in urban studies, as claimed recently by a number of scholars from the Global South. A turn that seems able to capture also some of the distinctive features of cities from a more local, European South. The Changing Italian Cities: Emerging Imbalances and Conflicts GSSI Urban Studies - Working Papers 6 | 2014 edited by Antonio G. Calafati

The study of urban form in Italy

Urban Morphology, 2002

This paper demonstrates the strong relationship between urban morphology and urban design within the Italian traditions of architecture and urbanism. Attention is focused on the work of architects and urban planners during the twentieth century, the period in which urban morphology and urban design emerged in Italy. A common cultural background shared by all those contributing to the field is the concept of 'type' and the assertion of a close connection between urban morphology and building typology. In contrast, different positions emerge in the interpretation of what the contemporary city should be, and this has, in turn, had an influence on the analysis of urban form. For this reason the typological debate in Italy has always had a strong ideological component. Instead of a common attempt at mutual understanding, urban morphology has been strongly characterized by a systematic, reciprocal misunderstanding among its followers. This paper attempts to define the multiplicity of cultural positions within the field according to the particular design and planning goals of those positions, in the conviction that the complexity of the current urban phenomenon can no longer be confronted from a single point of view.