Carlo Salone

Italy and European spatial policies: polycentrism, urban networks and local innovation practices1

This article presents the changes that are emerging in the Italian urban and territorial policies mainly through the discussion of the relationship between the principles of polycentricity and networking affirmed by the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) and, in general, by the European official documents on spatial planning, and the role of polycentrism and networking in Italian praxis. The article is organized as follow. The first section presents the general framework of the concept of polycentrism and its relevance for the European Union (EU) policies. The second, third and fourth sections briefly describe Italian territorial organization and spatial policies, and illustrate some operational examples of the application of the network model. The fifth section presents the empirical and political relevance of the concepts of network and polycentrism. Finally, in the conclusion, the use of the network proposed by the European official documents on spatial planning and the difference between different meanings of this concept are discussed (from field of interurban relations to local mechanisms of collective action).

Institutional Arrangements and Political Mobilization in the New Italian Regionalism: The Role of Spatial Policies in the Piedmont Region

The paper focuses on the resurgence of the regions as protagonists of the process of the state rescaling in many European countries. In the EU countries this process can be seen as a result of a mix of economic and institutional factors, which have been producing an increasing competition between the central governments and the regional authorities. The rise of the multi-level governance and of the so-called Euroregionalism has reinforced the role of the regional scale in the territorial development: on one hand, with new actors like agencies and organizations engaged in the economic development (FDI attraction, place marketing, innovation and learning), on the other hand by the resurgence of “old” actors, such as the regions, in many cases empowered by processes of institutional devolution. The literature has investigated this re-composition of the political space with regard to the “hollowing out” and the “rescaling” of the state. On the base of these theoretical underpinnings, we discuss some empirical evidence from the Italian experience, in order to show whether and how the regional structures are not only “spaces for policies”, but also “spaces for politics”. Over the last decade, the changes in legal framework, the external inputs from supranational levels of government—the European Commission—and the re-territorialization processes have introduced many elements of innovation in the role of the regions. By illustrating the case of the Piedmont Region, we try to demonstrate that the transition towards the region as an active space of politics can be mediated by the sphere of the policies, especially the spatial ones.

Governance as a 'social object': A 'realist' interpretation

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