PLANS FOR CHANGE

Marcello Capucci, URBIT

Many Italian cities are currently engaged in making new urban plans or undertaking a thorough revision of existing ones, as they seek to address a range of increasingly pressing and serious challenges. The climate crisis calls for a fundamental rethink of the relationship between cities, land, water and heat. The housing crisis has made access to housing a concern affecting ever-wider segments of the population, including groups previously considered largely unaffected. Urban regeneration, which has been the subject of debate for some time, is still awaiting the tools needed to make it a reality, rather than leaving it as a goal that reamins on paper.

All this is taking place within a national regulatory framework that is outdated and no longer fit for purpose. The main reference framework is still based on Urban Planning Law No. 1150 of 17 August 1942 and Ministerial Decree No. 1444 of 2 April 1968 on urban planning standards. Regional legislation has partly, but unevenly, made up for this delay, and municipal plans are often left to serve as testing grounds for innovation. Any effort to introduce new approaches must contend with an administrative and legal framework that frequently fails to provide adequate support.

Municipal urban plans can often set out widely shared and significant long-term strategies and objectives, but they do not always succeed in translating them into action. This may be due to factors beyond the plan’s control, or to the plan’s own limited capacity to turn its ambitions into a sequence of actionable steps. Yet climate resilience, the response to housing needs and the ability to deliver genuine urban regeneration have become so urgent that the need for plans with a strong operational dimension is now clear: plans rooted in their local context, capable of driving change at a small scale and managing processes, as well as setting out visions and objectives.

The conference will bring together experiences from Falconara Marittima, Varese, Parma, Turin and Rome, focusing on plans that have recently been approved or are currently being developed. The aim is not simply to present the structure of each plan, but above all to compare them through three cross-cutting themes that lie at the heart of the challenges facing today’s cities, albeit at very different scales:

• Climate crisis: translating adaptation and mitigation into regulations, performance requirements and interventions;
• Urban regeneration: the mechanisms and incentives that make the transformation of existing urban areas feasible and economically viable;
• Housing: the tools through which urban plans can help generate an affordable housing supply.

Each city will be asked to highlight the most tangible aspects of its plan: the mechanisms, regulations and projects considered most effective in triggering concrete action and producing real-world outcomes. We will ask participants to report on any initial results already achieved or, alternatively, to explain what outcomes the local authority expects the plan to deliver and on what terms. In particular, we are interested in the scale of the anticipated impacts and the extent to which they can be assessed and measured: which indicators are used to evaluate the plan’s effectiveness, whether ex ante assessments have been carried out, and whether systems are in place for monitoring and ex post evaluation.

Across all three themes, each city will also be asked to identify the innovative features of its plan and explain how it seeks to function as a flexible, adaptive instrument, particularly in relation to the issues outlined above. How can a plan respond to changing climatic conditions, housing needs and market dynamics without requiring a formal amendment every time? The key shift is from an approach based solely on regulatory compliance to one that assesses consistency with the objectives and strategies set out in the plan, while maintaining a constant focus on implementation and on the ability to translate strategies into effective delivery mechanisms.

The program of the event is in development.