Strategic Spatial Planning: A Historical Review of Approaches, its Recent Revival, and an Overview of the State of the Art in Italy

The last century left us with various definitions and interpretations of strategic spatial planning. What seems clear today is that strategic planning could be considered a set of concepts, procedures and tools (Albrechts 2004), usefully adaptable to fit the current planning needs of modern states and local societies in Europe. At the beginning of the 1990s, many experiences from all over the continent caught the interest of theorists and practitioners and started a long debate on the revival of strategic spatial planning (Salet and Faludi, eds., 2000). If we look at the practices though, it is evident that the approaches and goals are diverse and inevitably strongly related to specific local contexts. During the last decade, a particularly significant one for Italy due to the many social and institutional changes, several metropolitan areas and city-regions have been experimenting with strategic plans. These plans are aimed at encouraging local actors to get together and develop shared visions for the future. Even if a few common features are recognizable in all these plans, each of these tools is context-specific and develops particular procedures aimed at specific goals. An evaluation of this fruitful endeavour is not yet unequivocally possible, but the creative potential of these informal tools is already evident in the discovery of new actors and forms of local action, the development of local governance at variable geometries and in fostering local endogenous seeds of development.