New Italian Perspectives on Urban Planning: A Policy Tool Approach

In the last fifteen years Italy has witnessed the proliferation of forms of public intervention in the field of urban planning and policymaking. Partaking in the European Union fostered structural institutional and economic changes (e.g. subsidiarity, concurrence) and more specifically the use of alternative and sometimes innovative urban policy tools. The traditional planning perspective generally assumes that new forms of intervention are techniques which better pursue a more or less broad set of goals, including urban regeneration, environmental sustainability, local economic development, social cohesion and others. This paper argues that Italian urban and regional studies have increasingly adopted perspectives and methods which are typical of public policy analysis, but that they have failed in coming to terms with the intertwined technical and political dimensions of the urban policy tool issue. In fact, a policy tool approach is proposed to focus on the multiple instruments used by governments to structure public action: regulation, government corporations and government sponsored enterprises, grants, public-private contracts, tax expenditures and others. Critically drawing on the existing international body of literature, this article envisions a theoretical and interpretative framework aimed at using the policy tool as analytical unit for reconsidering urban planning in Italy and abroad. It is argued that, at this stage, it is possible to pose specific technical and political questions about governing spatial transformations of cities and regions through policy instruments and that the policy tool perspective in this way can give innovative impulse to further research in urban planning and to policy making. ________________________________________________________________________________ A previous version of this paper was discussed with Pier Luigi Crosta, Luigi Mazza, Pier Carlo Palermo and Lester Salamon, whom I want to thank. I also would like to acknowledge Jill D. Friedman for her precious linguistic advice. As usual, the author is responsible for the contents of the paper.