Discrezionalità e transazioniProspettive critiche sulle politiche urbane

Over the last decade the planning debate has been mainly concerned with an ideal shift towards more strategic, actor-based views over the design of urban policies, away from a comprehensive view of land-use regulation. At the heart of this trend there is the recurring and yet debatable term of "public private partnership" (PPP). Urban change is mainly dependent on the assembly of land, building rights and other types of resources, and several are the organizations which contend the entitlement over them. Cooperation is thus sought as a factor of paramount importance to overcome such barriers. In particular practitioners and scholars alike are used to assuming that cooperation between government organizations and private sector business can be achieved and considered as an actual tool for the implementation of urban policies. Despite the growing attention in partnerships which is also mirrored by the recent spread of proposals for new planning tools and policy reforms, there is a substantial lack of empirical evidence as well as consensus about what PPPs should deliver. Rather than a government/governance struggle, or a worldwide shift in public management, PPPs can be mainly referred to a set of experiments which cannot be easily related to a unique model. PPPs are mostly framed into a political and social exchange and the interest they draw can be synthesized into one question: how are the patterns of relations between public and private organizations changing? which advantages are these changes to offer? In order to address this issue, this work tries to combine some emerging views in the planning debate with the last developments in a composite set of research fields. By assuming a local government perspective, this work mainly focuses on the issues of public private cooperation in urban regeneration projects. In particular it provides a framework for analyzing how local governments try to overcome the issues and tasks of inter-organizational coordination aimed at the design and operation of major urban redevelopment projects. On this premises this work brings a critical overview about the opportunities open to urban policy making, as well as the limits applied to public private cooperation. With such main purpose this work develops along a three-fold pathway. Firstly partnership rhetorics in urban regeneration projects are reviewed and two key issues of analytical concern are drawn up: on the one hand public administrations sometime face the need of structuring "unstructured" processes of decision, because of the unique features of urban affairs. On the other hand, it is observed the need to understand the actual conditions which can legitimate an open-ended approach on the part of local government. At this regard, an extensive literature review (bridging the seemingly separated fields of public administration, organization and regional studies) sheds light on the public/private distinction and seven alternate PPP concepts which are likely to be applied in the domain of urban regeneration. Upon this reconstruction of meanings, an original framework for analysis is proposed in order to assess the actual impacts and uses of PPP in Italian urban regeneration experiences. Through an extensive survey of selected flagship projects promoted by five major Italian municipalities (Milan, Genoa, Trento, Ravenna and Parma), this work highlights a number of alternate situations where public-private negotiation is subjected to significant revisions, and to a renewed interpretation by local politics and civil servants. In particular, the organizational arrangements being promoted by single local governments and their private counterparts are described in detail, as a way to highlight the connection between project management and the agenda of the organizations concerned, as well as a measure of the project’s consistency with public goals. A comparison among these cases reveals how public private cooperation in urban development fails the promises about improved efficiency and cost reduction in service delivery and financing. In addition, the process innovations PPPs are usually referred to represent do not live up the expectations of adding value to projects or enriching the contents of urban regeneration initiatives. Basically PPPs in urban policies emerge as unaccountable processes of decision, holding the sole benefit of unlocking otherwise unavailable urban land to real estate development, and triggering the formation of new, specialized organizational units or constituencies. It is shown how the actual dimensions of public control to the contents of projects are limited in numbers and they range from land assembly techniques, to pre-contact schemes, and public incentives to those processes of land transfer which favor development oriented owners. Furthermore, the task of building a dedicated leadership in action programs is actually unable to overcome any separation of responsibilities and tasks among organizations or even within them. However they may change, the transaction schemes with the private are unable to solve an actual paradox of an integrated approach in urban policies. As a conclusion this work gives a new turn and proposes an alternative research perspective. PPPs point out the need to revive land use policies, in terms of a progressive movement from networks towards hierarchies. By acknowledging the emerging and exclusively contingent character of cooperation, as well as its main purpose of managing the “exceptions” in public problems, it can be recognized a set of new, emerging situations, which do not clearly match with the actual competencies of public and private organizations. Though it is concluded that tighter boundaries for simplified public-private transactions must be set, new advanced research may reveal how to configure anew the formal competencies and areas of specialization which will qualify future public management in urban transformations.