Anna Maria Colavitti

Urban Planning in Italy: The Future of Urban General Plan and Governance

This article aims to highlight and, whenever possible, demonstrate that the urban general plan is still the instrument of the utmost importance to trigger and steer urban transformations. Within the current Italian context, the article examines the characteristics, contradictions, weaknesses and opportunities of urban planning set of rules and practices and tries to propose concrete answers to questions and issues strictly connected that affect the municipalitys urban planning: how to manage and govern a contemporary metropolis or city agglomeration, the concerns associated with overlapping jurisdictions and different rules for various hierarchical administrative levels, the costs of social and common services, the need to include in the urban plan the possible use of European Union Structural Funds, the real estate market affecting new development and urban regeneration programmes and investments. All these aspects should be included in a unifying and strong planning instrument, the urban plan, which could address and steer effectively the urban planning policies and their governance.

Controllare l’impossibile. Urbanistica e consumo di suolo nella sfida per la città futura

Le politiche europee, che prevedono l’azzeramento dei consumi di suolo entro il 2050, rendono necessaria una riflessione sulle esperienze messe in atto nei differenti contesti territoriali sui temi legati alla salvaguardia ambientale. Gli autori si concentrano in particolare sui vari meccanismi, prevalentemente di tipo market based, che utilizzano il trasferimento dei diritti edificatori per la tutela del suolo, mettendo in luce limiti ed opportunita rispetto ai tradizionali strumenti regolativi e vincolistici.

Towards an Integrated Assessment of the Cultural Ecosystem Services in the Policy-Making for Urban Ecosystems: Lessons from the Spatial and Economic Planning for Landscape and Cultural Heritage in Tuscany and Apulia (IT)

ABSTRACT Scientific literature points out the need for the heritage conservation disciplines to influence the research on the Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) in urban ecosystems. However, there are still some unclear points in this linkage that our study investigates through a comparative analysis of the integrated planning tools for the landscape and cultural heritage produced by Tuscany and Apulia, the most advanced Italian regions in this field. The paper encourages a debate on the techniques and indicators related to the cultural capital that the policy makers and researchers should consider when implementing the CES assessment for the urban ecosystem planning.

Building the Process of Knowledge

This chapter sets out the cultural references of a peculiar research approach, starting from the concept of memory in the Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome which shapes the concepts of environment and landscape. According to the imitation of the nature principles, mimesis, the canons of beauty have been established to lay down the foundations of the aesthetics of fine arts, to represent the form, the measure, and the harmony. These concepts are rediscovered in the Modern Renaissance to invent the Western landscape, i.e., the elaboration of the view, through which the landscape becomes exactly cultural space, and this way it opens itself to the outside offering a global picture where there is no single desire to be in the limelight, but everything is the main subject and has the leading role. It is in the nineteenth century with Camillo Sitte’s work that the city is finally seen as a complex cultural good. And the invention of the environment as object of planning surely comes from the Anglo-Saxon world. National Trust, Council for the protection of rural England, and Friends of the Earth are all names which evoke the main interest in opening a broad debate between man and nature.

Influencing Factors on Cultural Good and Heritage

This chapter focuses on influencing factors which are able to shape values. History and laws are impressive influencing factors. Prior to unification of Italy, the call to public utilitas of Cultural Good has always influenced political and juridical debate since the XVIII century first phase of making cultural heritage protection and conservation law. A reasoned historic normative excursus, from 1462 Pope Pius II’s Bull “Cum alman nostram Urbem” to current Cultural Heritage and Landscape Code, passes in review the historical and current Italian set of rules which represent the evolution of conservation and preservation principles in a country which is universally recognized as the hosting place of the 40% of the world cultural heritage.

The Instrumental Use of the Process of Knowledge

This chapter delves the concept of the multi-layered city. According to the stratigraphic method in archaeology, the city as complex cultural good is the result of the stratification of uses. The study of the context is of the utmost importance to urban planning and cultural heritage conservation. Building process of historic city and territory can be better investigated and understood through the use of topographic method. Based on historic topography, it helps to analyze the consequences of the juxtaposition of a monument in a territory. Urban planning should use archaeological knowledge and topographic method to interpret the marks of the urban transformation through the reading and the knowledge of city’s form and historic human presence that shape historic-morphological identity of places.

The New Interdisciplinary Frontiers

This chapter deals with a specific case study: the Framework Plan for Historical Centre Recovery of Cagliari. The multidisciplinary approach is applied to valorize the contribution of the fields of major interest in support of the development of the urban planning discipline: environmental history, urban sociology, historical-morphological analysis based on the archeology of the preexistences and on historical topography. All these disciplines somehow imply a decoding of their epistemological codes and of their technical instrumentation which can serve as an equipment of the cultural device useful for the analysis to carry out in the field of the territorial and urban planning.

Development of a Multidisciplinary Approach

This chapter argues that a multidisciplinary approach leads to a constructive comparison between the legacy of the historical-memorial processes immanent to the city and territory and the current visible forms of the landscape, which are the result of such processes. From silent to speaking territory which is seat of collective identity, starring role of the process of identification of a community, able to show its vocations and to direct its transformations. In such territory, there’s the city. From the Mediterranean sacred city inside the temenos or sacred enclosure, which differentiated what is interior (sacre) and external (heathen) to the enclosure, to the current city which is the result of historical stratification and must be open to the territory and its transformations. A multidisciplinary approach is a must be blueprint to new urban planning, the only one able to intercept contemporary complexity and to canalize it in the urban project.

The crisis of the landscape, the crisis of the norms for the landscape, the planning of the landscape between uncertainty and second thoughts. A few basic issues

Landscape planning is the result of a complex and coordinated effort. The interpretation of the idea of Landscape by the Urban Planning discipline is clearly facing some hardship. In Italy, the tools of the Landscape planning currently in effect (Landscape and Cultural Heritage Code  L.D.42/2004 and subsequent revisions) include a not flexible and straightforward series of rules.At present the landscape planning discipline is facing a rethinking of its models due to the inadequacy of its founding standpoints and of some ideologically manufactured claims based in turn on a specious conception of identity. This is proven by the fact that several regional plans are having a very hard time to apply basic rules and regulations to the practicality of the planning at a local level.In order to better explain the above mentioned points, we are going to present the case of the Sardinian Regional Landscape Plan (SRLP) in which several critical issues reveal themselves and converge as they stem from the uncertainly of the rules and are consequently accompanied by seriously negative outcomes.

Partnership building strategy in place branding as a tool to improve cultural heritage district’s design. The experience of UNESCO’s mining heritage district in Sardinia, Italy

Purpose – Literature on cultural districts has repeatedly pointed out the role of place branding as a tool to upgrade the image of urban environment as an indicator of meaning and significance. Throughout the case of UNESCO’s mining heritage district in Sardinia (Italy), the purpose of this paper is to investigate on the role that Place Branding Organizations (PBOs) has and/or may have in the construction of coherent images for landscape and cultural heritage in the design of “sustainable” cultural districts in connection with local authorities’ agenda. At this purpose, the authors propose an operative definition of “partnership building strategy” and a new analytic framework to evaluate PBO’s activity within place branding theory. Design/methodology/approach – Considering what recently expressed by UNESCO about the integration between spatial and cultural planning, the authors focus the research on cultural heritage districts protected by this organization. Starting from the definition of strategy propos...