The Government was concerned about the capability of southern Italian urban regions to implement the EC directives for developing an integrated framework of multi-dimensional policy development (Vinci, 2010). socio-economic programming, collaborative planning. In this way, it introduced a top-down push factor in typically voluntary traits in strategic planning efforts and initiated hybrid experiments combining different approaches to planning e.g. However, Sartorio does not dwell into the causality between strategic planning and tangible results.Īfter almost 10 years of strategic planning initiatives in northern Italy, the Italian Government decided to fund such attempts in southern Italy, through special funds for interventions in Mezzogiorno.
34–37) states that ‘Italian strategic plans … make a contribution to opening decision-making processes at the local level to a more interactive approach, slowly abandoning traditional, entirely politically and technically driven decision-making modes.’ She also states that since strategic plans do not have a legal status they are not subject to traditional political and bureaucratic interference and hence provide a ‘creative’ platform for redefining ‘local potential and new synergies, and for finding new local scales of analysis and action’. In her evaluation of strategic planning in Italy, Sartorio ( 2005, pp. Turin (Sartorio, 2005), Milan (Balducci, 2003) and a few small- and medium-size cities (Fedeli & Gastaldi, 2004 Bertuglia, Rota, & Staricco, 2004 Martinelli, 2005 Pugliese & Spaziante, 2003). It has taken place in few cities towards the end of the 1990s in northern Italy, e.g. This has, furthermore, challenged physical planning methods and processes particularly at the urban-regional level in order to incorporate new principles and approaches (Healey, Khakee, Motte, & Needham, 1997 Salet & Faludi, 2000 Albrechts, Healey, & Kunzmann, 2003 Healey, 2007).Ĭompared to the rest of Europe, Italy has witnessed a slow diffusion of strategic planning practice. Cities have tried to adapt strategic planning tools derived from managerial fields to the relational complexity of the urban realm (Gibelli, 1996 Bagnasco & Le Galès, 2000). In the last three decades, strategic planning has helped cities to find answers to new challenges like the competitiveness crisis of their territories, improve social cohesion, and face challenges posed by globalization and sustainable development.