15 Years Of Strategic Planning in Italian Cities: Which Influences on Ordinary Spatial Planning and Planning Styles?

Almost fifteen years have passed since the first experiments of spatial planning have been launched in Italy; almost 70 since when the national planning law has been adopted, defining goals, objectives, forms of spatial planning. The last 30 years have been characterised by a large debate about the limits of the idea and interpretation of spatial planning provided by a law, which though considered old and to be changed already a few years after approval, is still ruling the field. Nevertheless since the middle of the 1990’s some strong innovations have been introduced. Among them the regionalisation of legislative power and competences in the field and the introduction of new planning tools aiming at coping with the debated limits and pitfalls of fifty years of spatial planning. An important role in this debate has been played by experimentations of strategic planning, developed in the form of voluntary processes cby some local administrations, with the help of different experts. After the first contraposition between statutory planning and strategic planning, which characterised the first period, strategic and statutory planning have essentially coexisted. The aim of this paper is to provide a reflection upon the effects of this coexistence and figure out to what extent and if strategic planning has informed somehow, directly and indirectly, statutory planning, introducing innovations in planning styles, as it aimed to, at least, at the beginning. The paper will reconstruct, through cases and literature, the results of this coexistence, looking in particular for elements able to produce a general reform which it still expected by many planners and scholars of planning in Italy, and that in the last government agenda has recently turned to be a task to be accomplished. On the background the challenges related to the ‘smart cities’ perspective and the economic crisis, but also the new debate on metropolitan governance, which could play a role in relaunching the debate.