Governance Arrangements and the Strategic Role of a City Strategic Plan

This contribution investigates the factors that characterize the strategic attribution of a city strategic plan, as a way to improve both the design and the evaluation analyses of this instrument. Starting from the need to address the sustainability problems with innovation and non-incremental decisions, the main proposals regard the capacity to introduce new (sustainability) problems in the planning agenda and to develop new governance arrangements, able to include different actors representing the multi-level characteristics of the contemporary challenges. Moreover, these attributes claim also for the development of public sectors capacities and organizational modernization, to overcomes the burdens and the silos culture of the traditional public structures.