Urban Welfare in Italy: From Urban Standards to Urban Facilities

Abstract

This chapter summarises the evolution of urban welfare planning in Italy through the timeline from the postwar period to today. In the Sixties, after several catastrophic events, Italian public opinion became dramatically aware of the degradation of the soil, the issues of city growth, and the absence of land-use plans for governing cities. Discussions over the construction of urban welfare become particularly intense in those years. The Italian government found it necessary to introduce an appropriate norm, the standard urbanistico, aimed at guaranteeing that cities would be provided with minimal levels of urban welfare monitored by city governments. In the late 1990s, urban welfare policies began to be characterised by a number of experiments in various land-use plans that tried to deal with technical and political problems related to urban facilities. Hence a new urban welfare approach emerged that shifted its focus from quantitative criteria to functional criteria. Therefore there were new goals for urban facilities: quality, liveability, and performance-based efficiency. Correspondingly, Italian regional planning laws demonstrated three main tendencies for urban facility planning: (i) the shift from a quantitative approach to urban facilities (compliance to legally defined minimums) to a qualitative one based on performance in meeting the new and diversified needs of cities; (ii) the shift from a general plan to a thematic one focused specifically on urban facilities; and (iii) the shift from planning to management, where traditional urban facility planning is supported by efficient management and shared administration.