Principles and rules for spatial planning governance and government in Italy

Abstract

The paper argues for the need in Italy for a law reforming the planning system as a spatial government activity, which would provide the country with new principles and rules. Consistent with the approach of the Italian Constitution, it is necessary that from these new principles and (few) rules descend regional laws that allow for more effective operations in the respective local municipal systems and the vast metropolitan and regional area.

In Italy, we need a national law that is a frame of reference for regional laws aimed at innovating the order and contents of town planning by offering a repertoire of tools that can be used in the field of the relationship between general and particular interests and between public resources and private investments, as well as in the field of the real estate regime, by allowing decision-making and planning processes based on the cooperative dialogue of institutions, making plans more effective and flexible, favouring an operation consistent with the pursuit of shared objectives and values for the conservation, innovation, transformation and development of the territory and the city.

Furthermore, the paper intends to highlight that the overcoming of the current national town planning law 1150/42 as integrated by Law 765/67 must be oriented towards the definition of principles aimed at introducing at least some substantial innovative features:

- in the planning system and the practices connected to it, such as that of subsidiarity and cooperation between institutions and planning levels in place of the current vertical structure of the hierarchical and sub-ordinate system;

- in rethinking the nature and effectiveness of plan contents (structural and strategic, regulatory, operational);

- in addressing on a concrete and realistic basis issues such as those of the property regime and the environmental sustainability of territorial transformations;

- in redefining the framework of welfare endowments and services, starting from achieving essential levels of services concerning civil and social rights to be guaranteed throughout the national territory and the duties of private and public subjects.

The paper intends to emphasise that in Italy, after the reform of Title V of the Constitution in 2001, the overcoming of the current national spatial planning legislation requires a law of principles and a general method of planning, a law with constitutive characteristics to legislative action by the Regions, capable of enhancing the institutional autonomy and governmental autonomy of the regional and local territory, of valorising differences, of identifying those solutions that are suitable for the specificity and diversity of the territories.

The paper supports and relaunches planning as an activity of territorial government through a plan that can dictate rules not only for the performance of private initiative but also for public policy and concrete actions of the institution responsible for that plan;

it is necessary to move from a plan that exercises public authority (often only formal) to a plan that includes public-private and public-public negotiation transparently and helpfully for the general interest, making it possible to evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of such negotiations not only based on reaching some 'agreement' but of consistency with the 'structural' contents of the plan (constitutive and foundational) and the operational pursuit of the strategies made explicit.