Policies, Plans and Projects - Governing the City-region of Milan (original) (raw)
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2008
In the last fifteen years Italy has witnessed the proliferation of forms of public intervention in the field of urban planning and policymaking. Partaking in the European Union fostered structural institutional and economic changes (e.g. subsidiarity, concurrence) and more specifically the use of alternative and sometimes innovative urban policy tools. The traditional planning perspective generally assumes that new forms of intervention are techniques which better pursue a more or less broad set of goals, including urban regeneration, environmental sustainability, local economic development, social cohesion and others. This paper argues that Italian urban and regional studies have increasingly adopted perspectives and methods which are typical of public policy analysis, but that they have failed in coming to terms with the intertwined technical and political dimensions of the urban policy tool issue. In fact, a policy tool approach is proposed to focus on the multiple instruments used by governments to structure public action: regulation, government corporations and government sponsored enterprises, grants, public-private contracts, tax expenditures and others. Critically drawing on the existing international body of literature, this article envisions a theoretical and interpretative framework aimed at using the policy tool as analytical unit for reconsidering urban planning in Italy and abroad. It is argued that, at this stage, it is possible to pose specific technical and political questions about governing spatial transformations of cities and regions through policy instruments and that the policy tool perspective in this way can give innovative impulse to further research in urban planning and to policy making.
CIDADES, Comunidades e territórios
The canonical planning and historiographical perspectives concerning the Italian cities in the second postwar period describe their complex modernization and expansion process mainly due to linear sequences of planning acts and policies. The public housing estates, their models, strategies, and agents are the consolidated interpretative categories to address the Italian boom. The paper aims to question this understanding of the role played by the public powers facing the planning agreements as underexplored tools of Italian planning. Their original interpretation in connection with the postwar Italian planning legislation and the tools of the City and Detailed Plans opens to a nuanced history in the relationship between the public and private sectors, and the practices in the central and expansion areas of the postwar cities. In the Italian legislative context, planning agreements are long-standing arrangements between the public administration and public or private actors, aiming at organizing and disciplining expertise and goods for planning purposes. Mainly interpreted as technical measures to overcome the City Plans constraints in the expansion areas, they rather reflect a stratified experience of punctual negotiation throughout the city, offering a privileged lens to observe tools and practices, professional and administrative networks, demands for social emancipation and renewal of planning processes, at the centre of a complex system of actors, habits, disciplinary and critical positions, leading to a reinterpretation of cultural and professional backgrounds and of social and negotiation processes, which is crucial for a complex reading of the postwar Italian cities. In the second postwar period, the city of Milan offers a significant framework to observe the use and critical understanding of this tool, being at the core of the disciplinary debate and professional expectations of the 1950s and 60s. The meaningful case study of Piazza della Repubblica tower, one of the best-known postwar projects by the architect Giovanni Muzio, is provided.
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The present booklet reports discussions and reflections with Professor Alessandro Balducci on the potential contributions of planners to challenges posed by current processes of regional urbanization (in terms of governance, inhabitants’ quality of life, economic growth, environmental processes for public agendas). Authors reflect on their personal experiences, exploring the practicalities and the societal and physical impacts of their research and work. As an alumnus of the Politecnico di Milano, an Italian planner, a DAStU-PoliMI researcher, an AESOP Young Academic, and a member of the Società Italiana degli Urbanisti, I have long known the importance of Professor Balducci’s work in planning studies, but I had never directly worked with him until this book. I am in a similar position as the reader, seeking to discover more about an important figure of the planning field, to understand the reasons and key ideas that influenced his practice. In his recent work – especially on the need for innovation in the transformation of current cities (PRIN 2005-2007) and on sustainability, habitability, and governability in emerging urban forms (PRIN 2010-2011) – Professor Balducci has defined original approaches and terminology for working on contemporary cities, focusing particularly on the Italian context and, especially, on Milan Urban Region. During three long interviews, I had the chance to discuss these issues with Professor Balducci, and to situate them within current disciplinary discourse, with reference to his publications. In these dialogues, he shares memories, experiences, and anecdotes that allow the reader to appreciate how his role as both a planner (scholar, practitioner and policy maker) and an inhabitant allowed him to practice the city in many different ways. Yet the focus of the book is not biographic or self-referential. These dialogues explore the richness of Balducci’s experience to first help readers understand his area of focus, and then explore how he contributed in the comprehension and transformation of a specific territory. His example shows how planners interact with territorial needs and re-framing disciplinary knowledge, contributed to future developments of places. The Milan Urban Region (MUR) is used here as a case study to explore characteristics of post-metropolitan territories and a local declination of regional dynamics of urbanization, their socio-economic, regulatory, institutional, and governance impacts. According to Mela (2005, pp. 8-9), to understand contemporary processes of urbanization, one must focus on the phenomenology of practices, their complex spatial and temporal geographies, their interrelatedness and continuous dynamics, their unpredictability, but also the routine character into which they are channeled, due also to the technology and organizational forms that make the ordinary functioning of the city possible.
Valori e Valutazioni
This article illustrates the measures adopted by the Lombardy Region to plan peri-urban areas at the regional level. These territories typically have urban and rural characteristics and extend beyond municipal administrative boundaries. Their characteristics and extension prevent their precise delimitation and make it difficult to elaborate plans that can effectively regulate their development. These difficulties appear insurmountable for some municipalities that ignore these territories in their planning instruments or regulate only that part of the peri-urban territory within their administrative limits. Decisions at the regional level are relevant to overcome these difficulties. Planning at the municipal level transposes regional prescriptions. In contrast, jurisdiction at the regional level is supra-municipal and, therefore, potentially enables the reduction of the existing gap between governance and peri-urban patterns at the local level. The relevance of regional intervention ...
Practicing a Polycentric (Post) Metropolis: A dialogue about the Milan region
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Practicing a Polycentric (Post) Metropolis' is the eighth booklet published as part of the AESOP Young Academics 'Conversation in Planning Theory and Practice' project whose aim is learning through conversations across generations of planners. This booklet has been conceived as a reflection grounded on the practice of planning in the context of the Milan Urban Region. The dialogue merges the vivid experience of Alessandro Balducci (Politecnico di Milano) with the sharp questions of Mario Paris (Politecnico di Milano) discussing the phenomenology of post-metropolis and the governance of polycentric urbanized territories in Lombardy. The extensive interview that is discussed in this booklet - and the reflections built around it - give the reader many insights concerned with an open and plural planning approach in processes of regional urbanization. This booklet sets aside the task of defining contemporary cities and drawing on recent literature (Ch. 1), the cultural contex...
EJSD, 2019
As in other European countries, over recent decades the question of metropolitan government has captured political and academic attention in Italy too. The debate has been recently fuelled by a national reform introduced to create 14 metropolitan authorities to provide for new government solutions in the territories of the larger urban areas. Based on literature and empirical observation, this paper presents a critical view of that process by examining the following questions: How do metropolitan areas relate to broader Italian urban policy? How does the reform contribute to a reshaping of multi-level governance through national and local initiatives? And how does institutional reorganisation address territorial diversity? Based on the critical understanding of these issues presented in this paper, it is argued that several obstacles still need to be overcome before metropolitan government can be properly established and institutionally effective.
Planning Systems in Italy within the Context of New Processes of ‘Regionalization’
The purpose of the following paper is twofold. The rst part aims to make sense of some of the efforts and contradictions in building a planning system and reinforcing a general notion of planning in Italy within the context of new processes of 'regionalization'. In particular, it questions the terms in which the issue of local autonomies are being discussed under the current National Reform process. The second part explains in more detail how the territorial (planning) system s work in Italy, focusing on the changes in public administration and the new planning laws. Finally, it gives a dynamic example between levels and government institutions in a regional environment following the introduction of a new tier.
Malíková, L. Delaneuville, F., Giba, M. and Guérard, S. (2019) Metropolisation, Regionalisation and Rural Intermunicipal Cooperation - Métropolisation, régionalisation et intercommunalité rurale. Paris, Institut Universitaire Varenne, 2019
This paper is aimed at discussing the result of a change of attitude of municipalities belonging to the metropolitan area of Verona (Italy), which, in a spirit of voluntariness and grasping opportunities, set up a body focused on the governance of the “Area Vasta”. Following this process as consultants, we had the opportunity to appreciate the potential of this territorial arrangement, in which the variable geometry of actions and projects takes place according to contingent objectives and long-term strategies.