Organising Strategic Spatial Planning: Experiences from Italian Cities

Strategic urban and regional planning, which emerged in Europe in the 1980s, has become an instrument to establish sustainable development of previously successful industrial areas today affected by the crisis caused mostly by the globalisation of the 1990s. Strategic urban planning concerns organisational land use which in turn regulates resource protection, sustainable development, regeneration and infrastructural investments and multilevel governance. Careful planning is imperative to reach goals such as enhancing local competitiveness and life quality. These dimensions represent the two focal points of the majority of city planning strategies. Their implementation depends not only on planning effectiveness, but also on the organisation and the management of the implementation process by the planning agency or the equivalent local promoter. This paper looks at the experience of Italian cities, in order to derive implications for theory and for future planning processes. More specifically, it analyses the extent to which Italian cities follow similar or divergent paths at the stage of the design process; the Italian case study is then compared with the guidelines proposed by the planning literature and with other European cities.