Davide Leone

The (controversial) role of the UNESCO WHL Management Plans in promoting sustainable tourism development

This paper investigates the relationship between tourism and planning in UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) sites. It concentrates on the relation between Management Plans (MPs) and other (local and regional) planning instruments and policies able to influence the promotion of sustainable and responsible development. This is explored through an examination of two important tourist locations in Sicily: Agrigento (the Valley of the Temples) and the Aeolian Islands, which have both been recognized as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO. The analysis of these case studies will point out the challenge of integrating different management and planning regimes. The paper shows how supranational policies often lose their efficacy in relation to regional and local planning systems. It underlines how the interrelation between the WHL MP and other (local and regional) plans is on the one hand necessary and on the other hand problematic, due to the difficult integration between planning instruments operating in the same area, but managed by different actors, with different time schedules, resources and legal effectiveness.

La pluralità dello spazio pubblico: una analisi ricognitiva nel centro storico di Palermo

The literature about modern and postmodern urban development, from Michel Foucault to Henri Lefebvre, has introduced a debate on the classic concept of openness/accessibility of public space, stressing aspects such as spatial exclusion, surveillance and social control, the matter of the “right to the city”. We face a progressive reduction or substitution of public space – privatized, fortified, commercialized – which the weakest and most marginal people are particularly affected from. Sometimes new forms of social production of space emerge, for instance through informal re-appropriation of “waste places”. The research work has focused on an area within the historic centre of Palermo, characterized by a return of medium-high social bands, relatively young, coming side by side of the autochthonous population, resident for generations, and of a substantial number of immigrants. Some behavioural maps have come out, in relation to the uses of space, both according to law and illegal, making arise the need for new strategies of accessibility to the historic city