Trame urbane/Urban Plots » politiche

La Integracion territorial en las politicas de la Union Europea

editore — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 09:05:36 +0000

International Forum on the Social Science, Policy Nexus (IFSP), Unesco-Most, 20-24 Feb., MERCOSUR, Montevideo (UR), 2005.

El articulo analiza el process de integracion territorial de la Union Europea. En la aventura europea han sido generalmente los exitos indirectos a revelarse como los mas productivos; y su incidencia se revela aun mayormente en las politicas territoriales. Hoy en dia son evidentes las dificultades resultante del crecimiento de los conflictos y del debate ideologico sobre el gobierno del planeta. La Union Europea – aun con sus mil contradicciones- es un experimento ‘regional’ que va en la direccion de un gobierno mundial de la economia y del medio ambiente, es asimismo un experiemento limitado y atacado. Es una negociacion politica en marcha, a veces dinamica, a veces estatica, en la cual se elaboran nuevas politicas inovativas con concepciones de nuevas escalas.

Esta perspectiva hace particularmente interesante la vision territorial del experimento europeo, dado que el territorio no esta en el centro de quien sostiene la integracion de los mercados o la prioridad de la cohesion social. Sin embargo el territorio es un area en aumento de policy, politicas y una fuente creciente de mobilidad para los recursos que nutres el proyecto europeo.

politiquas urbanas, integracion territorial, Union Europea

Il coinvolgimento degli abitanti nei processi decisionali

editore — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:27:14 +0000

“Il coinvolgimento degli abitanti nei processi decisionali”, in Progettazione Urbanistica, di P. Colarossi e A. P. Latini, Il sole 24ore, Roma, 2008.

Coinvolgimento

Il tema del coinvolgimento può essere articolato in più modi. Anzi la varietà dei metodi è una delle caratteristiche che maggiormente colpiscono in questo ambito. La varietà di metodi corrisponde però a una varietà di problemi e finalità, a seconda se i fini sia sostanzialmente pragmatici, se l’ambizione sia invece di riformulazione politica del processo decisionale, o se ancora si intendano affrontare i complessi nodi teorici sottostanti. Nel seguito sono distinti quattro livelli secondo il tema prevalente nell’ordine di specificità rispetto all’attuazione delle azioni urbanistiche: rendere pubblico lo “sguardo” che produce le informazioni su cui si formano le decisioni, cioè comuinicare con un pubblico ideale; strutturare l’ascolto con attori concreti, valutare le alternative e definire i programmi mediando tra preferenze diverse; procedere alla realizzazione degli interventi e dunque (inter)agire. Comunicare, ascoltare, mediare, agire: riassumere in questi quattro capitoli le operazioni di coinvolgimento è in qualche misura un’operazione dettata dalle finalità pratiche e dai limiti di una presentazione sintetica quale la presente. Ma in parte corrisponde anche ad una gradazione di livelli progressivi di partecipazione che è bene discutere criticamente prima di procedere.

Secondo un’abitudine radicata, infatti, si assume che la partecipazione degli abitanti all’elaborazione delle decisioni urbanistiche avvenga per livelli progressivi: gli abitanti possono essere oggetto di semplici comunicazioni, possono partecipare a dibattiti esprimendo un’opinione, oppure prendono parte nei processi di consultazione che conducono alla formulazione di progetti, possono esprimere le proprie preferenze tra alternative già stabilite o talvolta collaborare alla formulazione delle alternative stesse. In una scala ideale, si va dunque dal coinvolgimento in forma passiva nel primo caso; ad un coinvolgimento pieno e attivo nell’ultimo, passando per numerosi stadi intermedi. Questa rappresentazione è stata icasticamente celebrata nella nota immagine della “scala” della partecipazione (Arnstein 1966). La distinzione di più gradini e livelli corrisponde a dimensioni anche intuitivamente diverse delle pratiche decisionali ma si presta anche a qualche equivoco. La principale difficoltà di questa trasposizione è che tende ad avvalorare l’idea che il massimo di partecipazione è sempre meglio degli altri gradi, mentre il minimo di partecipazione è sempre manipolativo. La scala analitica appare allora una “mappa” ideologica, con una progressione per gradi di “autenticità” da livelli bassi, prossimi alla pura manipolazione strumentale, a livelli maggiori di partecipazione, più autentici e fertili. In altre parole, l’idea rigida della scala struttura in modo gerarchico modalità (buone e meno buone) di partecipazione, ma assume che ciascuna sia linearmente confrontabile su un’unica scala di valore.

Invece, si può estendere l’idea di gradi diversi di partecipazione fino a considerare che livelli e modalità diverse corrispondano a diverse esigenze di coinvolgimento di una società che si fa sempre più complessa e frammentaria. In questo modo, si possono apprezzare più laicamente virtù e pregi delle diverse forme di concertazione in rapporto alla natura dei diversi processi decisionali, e inoltre diventa possibile riconsiderare anche i limiti della estensione generica delle responsabilità di decisione. A questo proposito, occorre ricordare sia la varietà delle decisioni che la conflittualità dei soggetti. Da un lato, il coinvolgimento di più interessi e soggetti in processi decisionali complessi porta ad una complessificazione delle decisioni in generale, e di conseguenza anche delle eventuali forme di partecipazione. E’ esperienza diffusa in Italia, ma corrisponde ad una tendenza generale, l’inconcludenza delle grandi decisioni e la costante frizioni di interessi e remore nella arena pubblica, di cui sono sintomi i rifiuti locali di decisioni prese altrove (nel caso dell’alta velocità o delle localizzazioni di centrali energetiche, per esempio); l’allungamento dei tempi dovuto alle continue revisioni delle decisioni; l’insicurezza e la resistenza al nuovo o al diverso (dal rifiuto iniziale delle aree pedonali fino alle ribellioni contro i campi zingari).

Rispetto alla versione “virtuosa” della partecipazione –l’approccio democratico che restituisce la parola agli esclusi- l’esame delle situazioni decisionali evidenzia non rare condizioni nelle quali l’impasse deriva proprio da veti reciproci posti dal coinvolgimento delle parti. In queste situazioni appare non sempre opportuno “coinvolgere” nello stesso modo attori, interessi, soggetti di diverso titolo e competenza; e, per converso, non sempre abitanti, interessi e attori avranno desiderio di “coinvolgersi” con la stessa intensità. In una società conflittuale e differenziata ciascuno si troverà a giocare contemporaneamente più di un ruolo, dato che il numero di decisioni collettive importanti è elevato, ed una generalizzazione della partecipazione a tutti i settori comporterebbe un sovraccarico insopportabile per gli individui, e raramente un beneficio per la collettività. Inoltre, la possibilità generica di partecipare a decisioni senza corrispondere i costi (come sovente capita nei conflitti ambientali o localizzativi, così come evidenziato dalla ampia letteratura sulla sindrome nimby: “non nel mio giardino”) si presta a esiti non ottimali e a ulteriori manipolazioni.

In altre parole, il coinvolgimento dipende dal livello ma anche dalla responsabilità del soggetto da coinvolgere e da questa definizione –cliente, utilizzatore, attore a pieno titolo- dipende in definitiva il modello di partecipazione che verrà adottato. Le conseguenze di questo modo di procedere influenzano sia le politiche che le descrizioni dello spazio fisico. Politiche o progetti sono diversi a seconda se possono essere calibrati sul profilo di una moltitudine di clienti legati da un mero rapporto funzionale, da utilizzatori motivati da strategie personali o da attori sociali che investono l’iniziativa o il luogo di una elaborazione personale. Va subito ammesso che la tradizione della pianificazione tende –sia pur con le dovute eccezioni- ad intendere il destinatario delle politiche come un soggetto passivo di decisioni prese altrove. In questo caso, il richiamo all’interesse generale è garantito dal richiamo generico ad una nozione –quella di comunità- che ha il pregio di indicare insieme il gruppo sociale e il luogo in cui si insedia. In realtà, questa nozione non sempre consente di intendere in modo soddisfacente i luoghi da un lato, e gli utilizzatori dall’altro, e inoltre comporta una dipendenza tra i due termini eccessivamente forte: inoltre, stabilisce un retroterra ideologico che influenza fortemente le riflessioni sulla partecipazione. E’ chiaro che gruppo sociale e luogo si influenzano a vicenda: ma forse il riferimento estensivo e massiccio alla comunità porta ad un’eccessiva corrispondenza tra luoghi e attori. L’alternativa consisterebbe nell’evidenziare che le pratiche sociali sono gli elementi attivi di costruzione della realtà sociale e di definizione dell’involucro dello spazio, piuttosto che la loro conseguenza.

L’esempio più noto è l’antropologia dei luoghi di Augé che riprende da de Certeau la convinzione che l’abitante e le pratiche dell’abitare stiano al centro della vita quotidiana: ma l’abitante “ri-fabbrica [la città] per il suo uso proprio, eludendo i vincoli dell’apparato urbano: impone all’ordine esterno della città la sua legge di consumatore dello spazio”. E rovesciando una prospettiva tanto comune quanto erronea: “Il quartiere è dunque, nel senso forte del termine, un oggetto di consumo di cui l’’usager’ si appropria sotto il segno della privatizzazione dello spazio pubblico” (de Certeau 1980). Abbiamo così teso allo spasimo il riferimento al soggetto fino a rovesciare paradossalmente la prospettiva inizialmente delineata. La partecipazione è opera collettiva che pone al centro l’abitante. La nozione di abitante (Tosi A. 1994) implica un ruolo attivo da attore delle pratiche decisionali, e circoscrive così un problema teorico comune alle due prospettive del piano e dell’azione, di cui parleremo tra poco. L’abitante costruisce collettivamente il senso dell’azione pubblica, ma al tempo stesso paradossalmente agisce per rendere privato l’uso dello spazio. La privatizzazione è condizione perché l’abitante rimodelli lo spazio sulle proprie pratiche. Le pratiche sociali di uso dello spazio con tutte le loro multiplicità e contraddittorietà sono lo spunto sul quale costruire un’immagine dello spazio coerente con una società di flussi e di identità multiple. Mantenere la ricchezza di questa apparente contraddizione è la condizione per un approccio contemporaneo non banale alla questione di come ricondurre pratiche sociali multiple e conflittuali ad un processo di decisione che è anche occasione di stabilire il senso proprio dei luoghi e dello spazio.

In altre parole, la partecipazione era vista come una critica all’ineguale ripartizione del potere, critica controversa perché in alcuni casi inefficace e velleitaria se non addirittura distorcente (Mollet). In questa prospettiva la partecipazione era un principio antagonista al piano e alla sue forme, un modo per conseguire due finalità: attribuire autenticità a processi deliberativi alienati, rinforzare l’autonomia politica di decisori deboli. Il fine della due stagioni della partecipazione –quella organicista degli anni cinquanta, e quella conflittuale degli anni settanta – era di autenticare procedure astratte con la linfa vitale dei mondi di vita espropriati dal controllo sull’ambiente.

La prima stagione della partecipazione aveva un carattere fortemente paternalista, la seconda piuttosto un carattere conflittuale. Nonostante il rapido declino dell’interesse per il tema registrato da allora, questi episodi hanno consentito di aggiornare le esperienze italiane con riflessioni provenienti da altri paesi (Crosta 1990) con sistemi politici più orientati ad una rappresentazione pluralista degli interessi.

Una luce diversa sul rapporto con i destinatari degli interventi nasce dalla rimodulazione delle relazioni tra piano e decisione, da un lato; e tra azione e gestione dall’altro. Se si elidono le priorità logiche e le gerarchie concettuali, piano e azione appaiono più concretamente come due dimensioni che interferiscono fortemente l’una con l’altra: nell’action planning per esempio la selezione degli obiettivi e la definizione delle modalità operative interagiscono nella costruzione del progetto. In questo contesto la partecipazione degli abitanti può forse perdere l’aura palingenetica ma acquista una funzionalità nuova. Anzi, non è difficile riconoscere in questo contesto nuovo sia l’ambiguità strutturale dei meccanismi di partecipazione, sia la capacità di creare energie e risorse estendendo i confini dell’arena politica.

Si ricorderà peraltro che una certa quota di “coinvolgimento” è garantita per legge, almeno nel caso dei provvedimenti maggiori, sotto forma della pubblicizzazione degli strumenti e con l’istituto delle osservazioni: istituzione quest’ultima che garantisce i diritti dei proprietari fondiari, ma che risulta spesso l’occasione di un confronto anche da parte di altri soggetti sui modi in cui gli strumenti interpretano e conformano l’interesse generale. Il fine di queste procedure è istituzionale: uno strumento è legittimo, infatti, se ha acquisito i pareri istituzionali e se ha consentito l’espressione degli interessi legittimi. Poiché gli interessi diffusi non sono sempre noti e, comunque, non sempre sono note e facile da stimare le implicazioni delle operazioni urbanistiche, sono necessarie delle fasi di consultazione. In altri ordinamenti giuridici anche queste sono istituzionalizzate (ad es., le public inquiries); da noi tendono a gravare principalmente sulla fase tradizionalmente detta di analisi.

D’altra parte, da più parte è stato sottolineato come il coinvolgimento dei destinatari e dei potenziali interlocutori (quindi di utenti-abitanti, ma anche di operatori-promotori) diventi una condizione di successo delle operazioni urbanistiche. Si parla allora del contributo alla efficacia del piano per la capacità di anticipare e guidare la soluzione dei conflitti. Infatti, sempre più spesso il sistema decisionale nelle società complesse appare zavorrato da procedure sovrapposte e imbrigliato dai veti incrociati prodotti da autorità, o poteri reali, che presidiano interessi legittimi ma confliggenti (ad es. sindaci e sovrintendenti).

In tale situazione si dice che il processo decisionale ha assunto una natura disgiunta e incrementale: disgiunta, perché le decisioni vengono prese in sedi diverse con processi autonomi, ed esplicano solo localmente e al momento dell’attuazione effetti cumulati e densi di implicazioni; incrementale, perché raramente il sistema politico dispone delle risorse di autorità necessarie a imporre trasformazioni strutturali di rilievo, ed opera quindi al margine con piccole modificazioni (incrementali, appunto). La risorsa che può essere messa in gioco per superare l’impasse della politica è il consenso: inoltre, il requisito dell’integrazione delle politiche infatti è raramente osservato, e casomai può essere anticipato proprio in sede di coinvolgimento locale.

In generale, si può considerare che più recenti provvedimenti normativi consentono ampi varchi alla negoziazione dei contenuti programmatici degli strumenti e all’intervento di operatori privati nella realizzazione di opere pubbliche (p.es., i programmi di riqualificazione), generalizzando così l’apertura del perimetro delle decisioni pubbliche che aveva caratterizzato la pianificazione urbanistica degli anni Novanta, con il ricorso a strumenti di partecipazione nella progettazione (laboratori, indagini ecc.) o con il potenziamento della fase di consultazione preliminare (per esempio, con la pratica di diffondere “piani preliminari” o schemi direttori prima della decisione di piano).

Nelle pagine che seguono i suggerimenti per strutturare iniziative di partecipazione sono distinti su livelli diversi,di crescente complessità, che dipendono dal prevalere dell’aspetto conoscitivo o operativo e dal grado di interattività della procedura. I primi due livelli riguardano in generale tutti i processi decisionali; mentre i successivi affrontano questioni non solo specifiche al dominio urbanistico, ma tendenzialmente cruciali nel modo di operare tipico di questa fase.

Si tratti dello scambio informativo nel quale avviene il “rilievo” dei bisogni e delle pratiche sociali, talvolta definito come la fase dell’ascolto; della consultazione e concertazione estesa alla platea dei decisori pubblici e privati in occasione di progetti o di operazioni complesse e intersettoriali, anche ai fini di valutarne gli esiti e la portata; della costruzione di scenari condivisi, e in generale dell’elaborazione di alternative strategiche; e infine dell’elaborazione congiunta di tecnici e utenti non professionali di progetti, più sovente micro-progetti, di trasformazione urbana che può giungere idealmente fino alla co-gestione di interventi complessi, attraverso il ricorso sistematico alle risorse locali in particolare nei casi delle azioni sociali (contratti di quartiere, programmi Urban) o dei programmi di sviluppo.

The role of trust and social Regulation in the Integrated Programmes

editore — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:22:04 +0000

Bonds of trust, The experience of Urban-Italia Bagheria

Bagheria, novembre 2008

Urban regeneration programmes are not common in Italy; in general, Italian urban policies do not offer a wide spectrum of such experiences. Only in the last twenty years has there been an attempt to turn around the dilapidation of poor neighbourhoods, on one hand; and social exclusion, on the other. These two issues do not always coincide, and the historic limit of Italy’s model of intervention is the superimposition (with poor dialogue) of initiatives of urban renewal and social support. Besides, the assessments are still partial, and outcomes have been weakened because the initiatives were discontinuous.

The limits of urban policies, like the policies for the local economic development in regions of the South, have been pinpointed since the beginning. The problems of the city emanate from traditional Italian dualism. One should note that the cities of Southern Italy are the poorest, with the highest rates of unemployment, and the most fragile economies in Italy. In other words, the State and the trust in institutions and collective actions are weaker, due by the way to the distorting presence of organized crime.

In these conditions, the establishment of programmes of urban regeneration is more than difficult. Therefore, it is worthwhile to question whether the same requirements and models apply, as those adopted by the other programmes to urban regeneration.

Therefore, the questions raised by the experience of Bagheria are both general and specific, but they have to be faced before moving on to the discussion of the case-study:

the first question concerns the nature of the local programme and integrated actions, and asks if they can locally challenge general problems;
the second question concerns the compatibility between sophisticated models of intervention expected for an urban regeneration programme, and the presence of distorted private interests, capable of guaranteeing ‘omertà’ – an agreement of silence – or even support, in a context where the legitimacy of collective action is weak;
finally, the third question concerns the implementation of the integrated model to building renewal and social actions as requested by the Urban experience (and precedent programmes from different countries).

To address the first question, we must remember that the assumption of the local urban regeneration programmes, such as those for economic development, is to mobilize social capital.

This expectation is common to all the programmes aimed at promoting endogenous development, such as those aimed at the local economy sustained by Structural Funds.

In order to promote the social and physical regeneration of the city, the programmes aim to mobilize local participants and resources, and a beneficial circulation of the ‘implicit knowledge’ of the depositories. This activation allows ‘dormant’ local resources to be made available, and to create the cultural and social preconditions necessary to begin long-term development projects. In other words, it relies on the conviction that social regulations are unavoidable and decisive preconditions for development, next to and before material factors, the level of public investments, etc. By now, this conviction is commonly accepted as far as the economic development of national economies is concerned; even more so, when it is applied in deprived neighbourhoods, or areas of social and economic disadvantage. Therefore, insufficient or bad social regulations affect the process of economic development, and become a major reason to work on social development. In other words, trust, a certain degree of order, the stability of expectations, and the certainty of rules, are components of social regulations as much as the legal system, infrastructure, credit, enterprises, etc.

Without negating this fundamental assumption, the process of implementing such programmes has shown some limits. The social processes that impinge upon the social capital are fragile and demanding. To get them started, urban policies have to guarantee a resolute and uninterrupted approach that is rare. In other words, all too often programmes happen in a crowded context of competing and diverse initiatives, not all of them fostering the activation of social capital. Often in fact, spending programmes spark the interests of entrepreneurial networks at the margins of legality, which have the capacity to pressure the political system and civil opinions. Likewise, also in this case one can affirm that bad money drives out good.

The first problem, therefore, would be to eliminate the bad money or, even better, the unfair competition among public initiatives aimed at different targets. The second, more pernicious, regards all mobilization initiatives, and questions the process of the internal generation of social capital. And here lies the problem. Where the economy is weak, and illegal circuits are strong, ‘social capital’ is limited to service dominant positions, and is captured by limited circuits. This perverse form of social capital is embarrassing: it rewards a limited group, and excludes everyone on the outside; it aims to reward egoistic behaviour, and does not represent collective interests.

According to available historic reconstructions, Southern Italy’s history has been afflicted with a scarcity of universal and public social capital, while it has been characterized by an excess of particular capital, belonging to a small group opposed to the collective, which takes ownership of closed networks. A consequent issue would then be to promote the first and liberate the second, but this involves large political and cultural transformations, which a local programme probably cannot affect.

The response to the second question is connected to the first one. It is difficult to evaluate social capital in areas strongly penetrated by mafia organizations, because of the competition of criminal networks. Besides, the presence of criminal organizations erodes the standard supply of trust, which causes in turn disincentive for any virtuous behaviour, complying either with market or institutional rules. Often, these behaviours self-replicate and multiply, creating room for further deviant developments.

As a consequence, the absence of a specific assessment of urban policies (and of their various social, economic, and territorial outcomes) appears alarming connected with the control of the territory exercised by criminal organizations; as if it were not necessary to take specific precautions in promoting initiatives in areas marked by illegal economics. While, instead, the relevance of the real estate market and land-use is tantamount in mafia’s investments; as well as the delicate position of land-use developments in sparkling the interests of crime organizations either for ‘logistic’ purposes, or for money laundering.

A consequence of this observation is that reinforcing legality is a prerequisite of all actions of urban regeneration and development. However, legality is not consistent only with the introduction of normal, fair, and efficient rules, but also in the founding of simple and robust social regulation. Legality is a social practice, above and before a contract. It is constructed in the context made by social actors variously oriented, such as local decision makers, local policeman, civil servants and political parties, social actors and cultural or religious associations. In this broad sense, one can understand the already mentioned focus on the activation of social capital; both questions require a long term commitment to support local regeneration programmes (and not vice versa, as it happens now).

Finally, the answer for the third question is more general. The requirements of the integrated programmes have not been fully complied with in the implementation process in Italy (and presumably elsewhere). Rather, most of the programmes have often recorded many difficulties in integrating the initiatives. Integration does not mean only the concomitant realization of buildings, infrastructure and service operations, albeit desirable, nor only the balancing of various operations in a common strategic framework, a more difficult, yet preliminary requirement. These are all necessary, but not sufficient conditions, as they translate primarily in a model of inter-sector combination, nuanced according to various aims (functional, operative, partnership).

Another definition, perhaps closer to the original, intent of the integrated programme as a generative action, capable of producing new initiatives as well as accepting old ones; and as an action open to innovative actors (therefore, not only to the establishment), influenced by processes of participation and inclusion. Such initiatives have a double burden: they have to be implemented within constraints and deadlines dictated by exogenous, and non negotiable logics; at the same time, they have to connect such logics into a shared vision. Such a complex model insists on the dynamic control of the interdependencies between initiatives and subjects. Both models are highly demanding, more on the technical side the first case, more on the political the second one. Understandably, such requirements are not easily met by the implemented programmes.

In summary, the answers provided to the three questions cited before, suggest a possible critical contribution to regeneration programmes. Debating them would not only be timely, but necessary, in Italy as well as in Europe. In particular, a comparison is required between programme realization and results; and vice versa, the new issues of this historical moment should be addressed¹). However, it is necessary to pay a greater attention to the specific problems of the cities of Southern Italy.

From this point of view, the outcomes of this study – the first on Urban-Italia, and the first to investigate issues of development and legality in urban areas – offer a good starting point.

Some further comments can clarify the meaning to be drawn from this case-study. Urban Bagheria (as all the Urban Italia programmes) resembles the model implied by the Urban model less than expected; more precisely, it cannot pretend to be (only) an integrated programme. Comparing the Bagheria programme with the European Urban model, some differences strike one as obvious: the weight of infrastructure is predominant; the focus on economic and spatial development is limited; the initiatives fostering social cohesion are scarce, especially from a financial point of view.

But the problem is more general. The Italian ‘translation’ of the European Urban programme impinged upon building and infrastructure projects, rather than economic and social projects. One can doubt that this is the intended consequence of a political decision, rather than the interference of the Ministry for Infrastructure being the responsible of the programme; or the inexperience of the municipalities in managing initiatives that were not addressing building development. This element is certainly relevant, although not comforting.

Apart from these considerations, this report offers a deeper interpretation. The Urban programme of Bagheria was aimed at reconstructing elements of trust, and because of this it has privileged feasible yet incisive initiatives. About these, some features need to be remembered:

the programme operated on the performances of the Public Administration (its transparency, and efficiency);
it invested some exemplary dimensions, crucial to the local context, of the relationship between the public officers and citizens (land control, building subsidies etc.);
it contributed to the repossession of public space, and parts of the cultural heritage (such as the Villas), not only for their economic value, but because they constitute symbolic moments in a bond of trust;
finally, it contributed to the establishment and reinforcement of a few networks of conviviality and cultural exchange.

If accepted, this reconstruction may contribute to a wider evaluation of the outcomes of the programme.

The report illustrated the pragmatic meaning assumed by the programme, manifested in some significant outcomes among obvious and deep difficulties. Urban Bagheria demonstrates, in a case of relatively modest dimensions, the basic necessity to reconcile contradictory intentions: to favour visible works, but to commit to resolve grave problems; to address emerging problems, but to explore also those that are kept hidden; to restore transparency, and to simultaneously guarantee speed and efficiency of public investment; to give dignity to public officers contribution, while daily unraveling political quarrels…

In general, local public actions clash with ordinary issues of administrative work. In their relative simplicity, they seem semi-insurmountable when they have to be dealt with in urgent conditions, political weakness, and media exposure. Activities such as handling bids, propagating directives, organizing audits and surveillance, are all preliminary operations to programmes such as Urban, that these programmes obviously cannot control, and rarely influence. Their efficiency is not a specific problem, but it becomes a crucial factor within time constraints and efficiency of the entire programme.

The second remark, a bit more significant, indicates that European urban regeneration programmes, of which Urban Bagheria is also a part, are difficult to interpret unless their hybrid nature is recognised. Such hybridization is the result of the ‘neo-liberal inflection’ of the welfare state, which leads to relatively new local consequences. In other words, it would be useless to compare the programme with a full scale long-term public investment, as those implemented in post-war times, or to the de-regulative actions adopted in the ‘90s, when every initiative was apparently left to market forces.

Therefore, these programmes show the gradual mix of the two models, with some unpredictable combinations: the state maintains an important entrepreneurial role, and the public intervention builds the institutional foundations of the market; yet, public actions recognize the market, while searching to bend it to collective interests to counterbalance its narrow economic focus; from the social point of view, in short, providing opportunities for individuals has become a higher priority than fostering aggregated development.

There are two principal conclusions to this study.

The first is that the lack of effectiveness of the integrated programmes, as well as of other local regeneration initiatives, depends greatly on aggregated national conditions, and has to be dealt with at that level.

The second is that through these special programmes, exemplary ordinary investments have been realised, a little paradox that invites a reverse look. Upon the small bit of capital offered by these realisations, it may be possible to build some strategic local programme: it will be possible to intervene on the urban environment for the reduction of energy consumption and of pollution; for the improvement of the public transportation system. Il may also facilitate the social integration of immigrants, the extension of civil rights, the supply of social housing, for the development of cultural assets, resources, and tourist attractions, the improvement of labour capacities and, vice versa, the offer of advanced professional services. All these elements are largely influenced by the leadership put in motion by Urban, and if well adjusted, can contribute to the development and the competitive turn of the country.

Notes

1. The working Group activated thank to the collaboration between the Department of Urban studies, and the Urban Programme of Bagheria, has already produced some studies beside this report. See by M. Cremaschi, ed., Tracce di quartiere, il legame sociale nelle città che cambia, Milan, Angeli, 2008; “Limiti e prospettive dell’azione locale” (“Limits and Perspectives of Local Actions”), Territorio, 46, 2008, with contributions by Donzelot, De Leonardis, Tosi and Bricocoli; “Legalità debole, criminalità e periferie” (“Weak Legality, Criminality and the urban outskirts”), a section from a further issue of Territorio, with other contributions by Peraldi, Bagaglini, Sales.

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Urban policy in Italy: not so absent, after all

editore — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:42:16 +0000

“Politica urbana: un’assenza solo parziale, Urbanistica, 130, 2006, pp.12-19

Takling urban policy in Europe, a first warning should regard the link between city and development, along with the discourse which has evolved around the theory of urban competitiveness. This condition is crucial, but not easy to bring about. Changes that involve the cities, especially in the South, take place within an “urban hierarchy” which in Europe has remained stable since the eighteenth century, with very few exceptions.

Instead, the basic idea behind the policies is that the cities promote an accelerated and sudden development, of the kind that occurred in Los Angeles at the beginning of the twentieth century, when it became the capital of world cinema, or in the Silicon Valley around the end of the same century, when the computer industry gave rise to the new, mind-blowing technological agglomeration of the area.

The hope is that the technological production chain (cinema, computer, automation…) will couple with the agglomerative factors of the city (abundance of personnel, concentration of graduates, incentives for innovation….) and beget benefits for the entire surrounding region. It’s a daring bet; there have been extraordinary payoffs, but they have been rare.

The competitiveness aspect is fundamental for the cities, but has different meanings: on the one hand the cities are properly in competition in attracting foreign investments, which are rare and difficult to capture; on the other hand they have to offer conditions of efficiency to businesses so that they can be competitive. Well-administered cities produce more “intelligent” territories in relation to the challenge of globalisation. In this respect, competition, cohesion and sustainability are less at odds with one another than they might appear.

Scientific literature on this matter encompasses a vast and consolidated debate. From the 1970s on the cities of North America and Europe have gone through crises and transformations. The enormous loss of jobs in traditionally industrial cities led to a desperate search for recipes for economic development.

From the very start, the question of what exactly makes a city, or a territorial area, competitive appears very cloudy. The definitions derive from an extensive and well known literature, based on four theoretical cornerstones (Porter and Krugman, Storper and Kresl).

What we are interested in here is to provide a frame of the possible approaches – albeit schematic – , and the Italian urban and regional policies within such a scheme . Consequently, figure 1 illustrates four approaches (key characteristics and potential economic models) to territorial competitiveness. The horizontal axis shows the actions that promote competitiveness respectively in terms of expanded efficiency of the territorial system, or quality of life on the left, and of efficiency in the business environment, that is the comparative advantage of the enterprises, on the right.

The vertical axis shows a knowledge based economy (attracting leading businesses) on one side; and a diversified and “tertiary based” economy,developing from the status quo, on the other edge..

There are some important issues when economic theories are applied to urban and territorial policies. Assuming that the territories do compete with each other, the competition takes place in a different way from that of the companies. Individual factors (connectivity, capacity, quality of life, innovation) seem to matter differently in the theoretical approaches. Things change again when the scale considered goes from between national to regional, or even urban, because the mix of factors and the governance change as well.

Instead, in political rhetoric there is an almost universal tendency to claim that there is no contradiction between competitiveness and cohesion, governance and in certain cases sustainability. The result, within the academic sphere and in political discourses, is a sort of optimistic, yet somewhat upsetting, “New Conventional Wisdom” (Gordon and Buck, 2004), that easily conciliates discordant objectives. All this said, stating that urban policies are often “highly differentiated” (Cicciotti 2003) is not an irrelevant observation: on closer inspection, it means heterogeneous (and relatively predictable) on the one hand, and markedly context dependent on the other.

Instead, the European Commission appears to be convinced that certain politically crucial outcomes – growth, innovation and consensus – are specific to urban environments, and that urban initiatives can exert appreciable multiplying effects (albeit in the long term). This opinion is apparently shared by certain Member States (Odpm 2004; the “poles of competence” in Germany, the creation of “poles of territorial competitiveness” by DATAR, partially taken up by our own MIITT: 2005). From these references, and in particular from the work of the British government, we can identify five objectives’ families or “structural” actions, plus one rather particular final one. These are less general and more hybrid objectives than those defined by the theories on competitiveness, and are instead closer to practice.

The first family of objectives concerns actions that bring advantages to the system efficiency, focusing mainly on connectivity (infrastructures and tangible and intangible networks). Almost all the regions undertake such actions, with the intermodal and transnational activity being more relevant in Liguria and in the Adriatic regions (where the ports part of the cities). The diffusion of ICT and networks should sustain connectivity. So should the creation of city networks and other informal networks, while effectively the connection with markets and city networks is pursued through Fairs and territorial marketing rather than stable systems of relations.

As regards the second family of actions, the key to innovation lies in the human capital, and more specifically in a skilled workforce, and to a certain degree in the ability to interlink the demand and supply of skills, that is the knowledge transfer between universities, research, enterprises and institutions. At the moment, however, what prevails is training directed at the enterprises. Only in a few cases university centres present within the territory are supported, in an attempt to integrate these into the productive fabric. In the case of Sardinia, significant attention is focused on the training of human resources within local government and institutions, especially in the health sector.

The third family concerns innovation, which is stimulated – both in the institutions and in the enterprises – principally through incentives for the purchase of new equipment or the application of new technologies, followed by actions for the spread of IT. Proper innovation (new products, new technologies) is in certain cases stimulated through the direct funding of studies and research, and more often by attempting to stimulate the knowledge transfer between the universities (research centres) and the entrepreneurial fabric.

The fourth element of this list, the quality of life, emerges from the combination of factors related to environment, culture and housing. The southern regions have concentrated significant resources on the urban environment and on social policies, while in Objective 2 (partly because of restrictions on boundary definition) actions on the environment prevail.

Finally, the last and most elusive element is the strategic capacity to mobilise and implement long-term development strategies, frequently pursued in a fairly unsystematic manner. Effectively, there are very few investments for permanent structures on the territory in comparison to the temporary actions, for example for the duration of the tenders for access to funding, while structural transformations and competitiveness demand time.

The analysis of the theoretical literature on the one hand and the initiatives and policies on the other hand have affinities but no distinct correspondences. Certain options are more frequent in the policies, and others only vaguely translated into measures.

The analysis of the regional programming documents confirms this layout. In this analisys we felt it was appropriate to distinguish more clearly the role of the infrastructures, which are preponderant in more than one case.

Almost all the documents take up the Community directives, sometimes changing the investment amount percentages. The programming documents of the southern regions had a greater thematic scope, extended to the Centre-North in the 2000-2006 programming. The promotion of enterprises and development (integrated in the urban policies) is present throughout the South and the islands. The actions of urban regeneration reflect both the local requirements and the presence and interaction with other initiatives (Urban and funding linked to major events). The spatial target, that is the limitation of the actions to specific portions of the urban territory, is in some cases imposed by the programmes themselves, and in others reflects regional policy choices. The territorialisation of the urban initiatives is weak in half of the regional documents.

The investigation of the four regions (Piedmont, Veneto, Tuscany and Lazio) has further amplified the impression of a local framework of the urban cities which is at once complex and fragmented. In these four cases the urban models, composition and performance are not comparable, making a shared orientation framework fairly unlikely; even within the regions, the distinctive features of its urban network are not fully considered (in this regard, the recognition of Rome as capital that emerges on the part of Lazio is an exception).

Some sort of urban focus still emerges, effectively even more than what regulations or policy guidelines suggested, yet more often than not lacking a clear strategic framework. Again, it is not pure coincidence that these very regions are experimenting metropolitan master plans, with no particular connection to the SDP (to give just one example: the master plan of Turin only partially exploits the suburban policies, one of the most fertile intersections of Community programmes with local initiatives)

Over the last decade Italy has experienced the proliferation of numerous initiatives focused on the city and territory (the subject of a growing body of literature: see INU 2006).

A certain urban dimension in development policies is present in Italy, albeit in an implicit manner and frequently entrusted to local initiatives. Cities already appear to be doing without national and regional policies; but it is by no means to their absolute benefit, or to that of the regions or the State. Isolated development policies (at times even innovative) risk being occasional or redundant. Suffice it to say that Rome and Milan compete on airports, trade fairs and Olympics. This phenomenon regards capitals and the major cities, which also have the capacity to finance their investments. They sometimes even influence their Region, and are gaining statutes of increasing independence. Other cities and municipalities, non necessarily of modest status but with fewer resources, are less affected.

On the other hand, there are no particularly strong precedents of innovative urban programmes within regional or national programming. The Urban initiatives were successful, until they were transformed from ambitious social programmes into more traditional projects for urban regeneration. The principle of territorialisation of the ITP (Integrated Territorial Projects) or ILDP (Integrated Local Development Projects) was innovative, but it did not specifically concern the cities, and even then the programmes did not necessarily have a distinctive and innovative character. These programmes mobilised significant resources, both public and private, with clearly visible effects upon the territory.

In comparison to the last decade, not only do we have to admit that there has been an urban policy, but above all that certain concomitant elements have changed. The various programmes can be traced to three different families.

The first, more oriented towards housing and construction, albeit revised by the integrated approach, reveals a limited specific characterisation, except for the instrumental ends of regeneration, and a limited social orientation.

The second favours the district and integrated area actions, combining variously the Community and other inspirations, with a fair capacity for learning.

The third, with a clearly stated territorial background albeit of diverse origins and clearly more problematical (ITP and IDLP, implementation methods for the Community Support Framework 2000-2006 and the National Operational Plan 2000-06, urban Framework Programme Agreements), reveals vaster ambitions and an orientation towards capacity building and social inclusion.

A different approach, along with a more complete and complex strategic vision of the cities, emerges when observing the actions proposed at urban scale within complex programmes, and comparing them with the competitiveness factors. .

Looking back to figure 1, four different development scenarios can fit into the theorethical and action framework defined.

The main scenario, glorified by the rhetoric of the urban renaissance, is at the lower left corner . The policies of urban redevelopment, with the visible consequences in terms of gentrification, are almost universal. Basically, the core of urban initiatives meets the arch that represents policies in real estate development.

Nevertheless,some differentiation is peeking through. The initiatives that diverge from the above are not rare, especially in tertiary diversification (the promotion of new peripheral centralities). If accompanied by an increase in the efficiency of the entrepreneurial system, this entails a scenario with few changes in the urban fabric that may still attract investments.

In another direction, the combination of actions on the urban fabric and on the new economies leads more easily to a festivalisation of the cities, understood as sites for the “consumption” of culture, knowledge exchange and major events.

The last of the scenarios, linked to the perspective of knowledge cities, fosters a vision of technological development and advanced economies. These initiatives are still rare, especially if we move from words to action. But they are increasing in number and we can expect a significant growth in this sector.

In conclusion, we can say that the debate on competitiveness is very fertile, but tends to overrate theoretical aspects (for example the centrality of the site or the enterprise, or the tertiarisation in relation to the transition to a knowledge economy). In theory, given the institutional differences, the cities sustain the real estate market and the improvement of the physical context, while the regional and super-regional policies provide incentives to enterprise and target knowledge.

Instead, possibly not surprisingly, the policies implemented by the regions and cities are much more mixed than we would normally expect. The range is much wider, and some of the large cities are more active in enterprise and innovation policies than the small regions, and vice-versa. Cities and regions’ commitments cover multiple arenas, partly because of the legacy of the past, in the South; and partly for matters of consensus. There is no a single pure policy model; we rather ascertain various significant recurrences, summarised by the coloured area in the graph.

In the end, policies for urban regeneration, technological development or“festivalisation” (the new economy of the city of tourism and cultural innovation) are not alternative to each other. Rather, they generate one another. In such a set-up, promoting a policy scenario means reconstructing the evolution from one approach to another.

Despite the fact that many interventions within the cities were carried out through these programmes, it could be objected that the sum of the initiatives does not represent a unified policy (and here appraisals such as those laid out in the pages that follow dealing with four regions of the Centre-North prove useful). The same objection could also be valid for Urban, as for other programmes. However, it is important to emphasise that cities feature a major concentration of resources, projects and interventions; consequently, the urban dimension of development policies should be made more systematic on this basis, given the numerous examples and the accumulation of investments in quantitative terms.

It is, nevertheless, necessary to reflect seriously on the impact of an integrated vision of such initiatives. In this case too, the research points up the aspects which have had success and the deficiencies of the combinations of initiatives in the cities and in the regions examined, from which we can draw useful lessons for the policies to come.

In short, this study addresses the problems of integration between urban policies and innovation, modestly attempting to provide an answer. As always, the best indications are to be found not so much in ideological passwords, but in reflections that go beyond the everyday rhetoric, tackle the problem starting from a basis of critical knowledge, and define shared strategies.

The spatial logic of European actions

editore — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:35:37 +0000

Urban and Spatial European Policies: LEVELS OF TERRITORIAL GOVERNMENT, EURA Conference in Turin, 18-20 April 2002

The area based initiatives have become a common feature of urban policies in many countries of Europe; even more, the European Commission has located local actions and integrated programmes at the top of the framework of spatial policies.

The model of local action has sensible empirical reasons: it is an innovative model, which tries to overcome the weaknesses of sectoral public actions (Gaudin 1993). A few common features may possibly be detected: a) all the programmes are locally bound actions increasingly concerned with the local development and employment issues; b) they foster a “vision” of spatial development for the whole area, the idea of “territory” implying community, environment and the local heritage as well; c) intended initially as a group of detached measures, some have progressed toward compound social and economic features; d) dealing with the implementation process seems to trigger an embryo co-operation between local authorities and recently powerful regions.

The implementation of urban actions across Europe has pinpointed a number of policy assumptions:

issues concentrated in distressed areas are all related and have to be tackled together in order to have a chance of renewing an area thoroughly (OECD 1998);
operating on areas of limited extent guarantees greater visibility and more effective management in the implementation process (CEC 1995);
different subjects combine in the local partnership (the inhabitants themselves, the local authorities, the national government, the private sector, voluntary bodies, and the European Union); such mix deeply influences case-studies in different studies, and is affected by national framework (Geddes 1998; Cremaschi 2002a);
the “integrated” approach is meant as a technique able to trickle a cumulative process (Turok 1991);
the effective management of such programmes has caused the local political-decisional system to progress, that is it has enabled it to gain a certain knowledge which spurs the system of governance to tackle and resolve on a permanent basis other social issues and problem areas (Chanan 1992);
local actions excavate the ”capability deposit”, and allow the “local knowledge” to come to the surface, and the local network to experiment solutions which were not available or which did not appear available earlier.

Local action methodology has been recently extended to wider aims such as local development (De Rita and Bonomi 1998; Fundaçao 2001) and is now widely acknowledged as a fundamental tool of a new programming for a more sustainable development. The investments supported by the European Regional Fund in Italy are a good example (Gualini 2001): they also show that the identification of spatial concepts and the implementation of programmes influence each other, sometimes leading to a successful reconsidering of administrative boundaries and traditional spatial framework. According to the Community Support Framework for Italy, the “integrated projects” are a complex of inter-sectoral actions, nested in a coherent shared vision. Such actions require a unitary management and an adequate “critical weight” in term of financial investment (Bilancio 1999).

However, looking both at area initiatives and local development paves the way to a certain number of issues, as witnessed by the long establishment of the varied field of municipal strategies (Le Galès 1993). First of all, the sheer idea of a territorial basis of local action is questioned: on the contrary, this explains why the Urban initiatives stuck to a spatial concept such as the (rather French) idea of the “quartier”. As local development is concerned, not a single idea of a meaningful spatial concept can be ascertained, but rather a wide variety of territorial phenomenology (Cremaschi 2001).

It is for this reason that it seems worth questioning the “spatial logic” of the European integrated actions. Reconstructing the spatial logic means to address issues such as how local actions are influenced by the spatial organisation of societies; and, in contrast, how spatial images influence urban policies. These questions are worth further investigation. The reason is that a clear spatial approach has never been made explicit (CEC 1998c), and possibly is not among the priority of the European policy making (as witnessed by the complex history of the Spatial Perspective (Cremaschi 2002b; Faludi and Zonneveld eds. 1997).

This paper is based on a survey of different Italian development programmes (Rap100- Formez, 2001), and a comparison with different European urban policies (Cremaschi 2002a). The results are described elsewhere (Cremaschi 2001 and 2002b), while a few general remarks are presented here.

A first issue in the search of a spatial logic is the number of local actions, whose growing figure is somehow alarming (§1); a second issue is the vague and uncertain idea of what an adequate spatial concept should be, the spatial matching of territory and society being a hard theoretical issue (§2); a further issue is whether the model of integration fits in different spatial frameworks (§3); and finally, the last issue impinges upon the theoretical assumptions underlying the local action and the local development models (§4).

The inflation of urban actions

About 1,600 local actions have been running in Italy in less than five years, of different dimension and scope. Surveys show actions piling up within the same spatial units and administrative boundaries, promising a huge investment of public resources (about 78 billions €: Cremaschi M., 2000a, Censis 2001).

More precisely, two main strands seem in one way or another to have been brought together:

the agreements devised by “Patti territoriali” in the framework of the national “negotiated” programming fostering local development, later assumed by the EU as Pacts for employment. These partnerships operate at the crossroads between job creation, enterprise creation and local development. Development actions consist of more or less 300 programmes, by two thirds located in the Southern regions;
the mix of different functional actions fostered by programmes for the renewal of urban downgraded areas, yet often expanding to wider aims.

Subsequent “generations” of such programmes have in fact elaborated upon the same integrated approach, whose last offspring are the Sustainable Development Schemes (Prusst, Programmi di recupero urbano e sviluppo sostenibile del territorio: Lavori Pubblici 2000b) on the one hand, and the Local actions for spatial development (Pit, Programmi integrati territoriali: Cremaschi 2001), the “strategic vision” aimed to amalgamate locally the actions envisaged by the Community Support Framework, on the other.

Thus several programmes have fostered a variety of aims maintaining the same approach and moreover spreading actions over the same area. Probably because of these two reasons, the “family groups” were brought together and mingled.

Further steps may be represented by the spreading of Agendas, the environmental Agenda 21 or the Habitat agenda, inspired by international models fostered by the United Nations and by less formal international networks. The agendas seem consistent with these former integrated programmes for two main reasons: they focus on the consensus building side of the implementation of “shared” vision; and they imply a cultural effort to adequate or change the stakeholders’ orientations. Both are common issues of local actions (agendas have started to be institutionalised in some countries of Europe, for instance in Denmark).

The number of actions does matter. An inflated style of programming raises a double issue: an excess of technicalities in the targeting of areas; a lack of capacity by agencies to gradually adjust to areas and actions.

Elsewhere the new style of programming is becoming tricky due to either the number of single actions, or the small size of most of them. In France, the “politique de la ville” (Chaline 1997) alone accounts for more than 2.500 actions: it has progressively summed up 214 “contrats” with different cities and metropolitan areas plus Paris, all together addressing 1300 neighbourhoods and 750 municipalities. As a consequence, it may be impossible to make out the whole picture, and the resulting jigsaw seems in any case to lack the due “democratic accountability”(Sueur 1999).

In Germany (Toepel et al., 2000) national urban programmes stem from the municipal experimentation of local initiatives (Gualini 2000): the Soziale Stadt programme concerned 162 initiatives in 124 cities in 1999.

In the UK the number of local initiatives has not simplified the elaboration of unitary development strategies, but has made it harder (Social Exclusion Unit, 2000: 29), while the severed style of the management weighs as a “burden” on the local operators.

The inflating of local actions questions the adequateness and pertinence of area based initiatives. However, the logic of spatial effects is somehow vague while the excess of boundaries enhances a new technicality of spatial practices. The murky sediment of multi-layered programmes increases the gap between general policies and local actions.

Ad-hoc territories

Beyond number and variety, the spatial effects of single actions are highly differentiated. However the logic of spatial effects is sometimes vague.

Often the combined result of different “territorial concepts” is unclear. Integrated programmes -such as the Urban Initiative- have combined several territorial concepts: the functional zoning of areas (in order to delimit areas eligible for financial support and to determine the application of territorialized policies): the improvement of basic infrastructures, facilities and public services; the development of synergies to establish functional interdependencies among policies; the differentiation of policies, measures and technical assistance on the basis of specific territorial criteria (CEC 1998b). Even more so when local development, or wider programmes, are at stake.

The Italian agreements for local development (Rap-Formez 2001) impinge upon different territorial images.

Research has shown (tab. 1) that spatial concepts and policy styles are closely linked. However, combined outcomes occurred sometimes that are coherent with the decision process implemented:

some regions have referred to homogeneous territorial areas, such as those often described in the framework of regional planning; the decision if often hierarchical, yet is sometimes corrected by a mild reference to economic processes;
other regions refer to the local economic systems, more ambitious local identities which ideally coincide with an employment basin and a development process, defining ad hoc areas incrementally resulting sometimes from a negotiated selection, sometimes from a top-down decision;
finally, some regions have designed project-areas, as opposed to the natural ones, combining factual indicators, administrative criteria and local “visions” derived from a wide negotiation with local stakeholders and policy-makers, thus mediating between the “hardware” of different localities and the “software” of articulated processes.

Tab. 1

Spatial concepts and policy styles

	Basilicata	Campania, Puglia	Calabria
Territorial images	Homogeneous territorial areas	Local economic systems	Project-areas
Spatial concepts	Natural areas defined through coherent sets of data	Mixed reference to economic and territorial features	“Voluntarist” areas mediating different inputs
Policy style	Paternalistic	Corporatist	Negotiated
Decision-process	Top-down	Mixed, top-down	Bottom-up

However, it can be easily recognised that:

often, localities involved are highly heterogeneous (both for geographical features and for development perspective);
not surprisingly, territorial images differ; among the images, those resulting from a “voluntarist projection”, being presumably more interesting then than those mirroring geographical features only;
the matching of localities and images is the outcome of a sense-making process among stakeholders, as well as of an opportunistic stance of the local decision-makers (Cersosimo 2000);
and finally, the construction of areas depends on the regional policy framework (Cremaschi 2001b).

Beyond a reasonable amount the following features tend to be problematic and to hide any coherent spatial effect: number, territorial heterogeneity, variety of styles. However, it is seems interesting to ascertain whether they affect also the model of local action too.

Integration models

A further question is whether integrated programmes follow a unitary model. This is to question one of the most important features of the new urban actions, and precisely the core idea of the integration of measures. One can conclude that integration is not only a tantalising concept, but also quite a multifaceted one, which addresses the rather complicating issue of matching spatial concepts and spatial policies.

Notwithstanding the Commission support for an extensive idea of integration, “…integrated approaches are still relatively few” (CEC 1998b). The idea of integration is however a “plural” one, not easily identifiable.

It must be noted that, on one hand, programmes seldom went further than a shallow blend of functional measures, and did not overcome what may be called the functional limit of integration. So far, the Italian experience enacted a weaker version of integration. Integration has been often meant as a sheer mix or balance of different measures, sometimes with disappointing outcomes (Tosi in Lavori Pubblici 2000): building, infrastructure, some social benefits and services to employment. However, different interpretations of the integration concept can be ascertained in territorial practices (Padovani 1999; Cremaschi 2002a; Donolo 2001).

On the other hand, it should be reminded that pursuing integration is not a recent one. There is no doubt that development projects of the ‘50s for instance were mainly a one-sector, one-actor mix of actions. International agencies insisted on concentrating on a single activity providing supposedly beneficial one-sided shocks to the entire economy.

However, a more integrated approach did sometimes crop up in the framework of the national economic development programme for the South; for instance, some integrated actions tried out after World War II targeted housing, health and education, strongly influenced by a peculiar mixture of Italian historicism and US regionalism. As geographical patterns are formed by history, the matching up of society and the environment moulded the whole territory. In turn, such ideology maintained that its structural features offered a basis for a comprehensive strategy of spatial development.

A second strand may be traced back to the 70s, to the growing awareness that regional spatial frameworks were affecting the outcome of the economic measures taken for the development of the South. To replace the budgetary style of programming, a complex of incentives and local agreement procedures were devised, tools to be generalised later in the 90s. However, those first attempts did not overcome the functional limit already shown. Since then, a turn in strategy fostered a more negotiated approach and a strengthened effectiveness.

It is worth remembering the definition provided by the European Commission, in the context of a review of the territorial implications of EU policies:

“More ambitious than the simple acknowledgement of functional interactions and the development of the synergies which can result, certain Community activities try to develop integrated and multisectoral approaches with a strong territorial dimension… (These initiatives) – based on the principles of participation and partnership – are aiming at the joint identification of a common strategic vision of development through effective co-ordination and co-operation between all the actors involved … and by taking into consideration both the natural, economic, social and territorial potential of an area and its hinterlands as well as the limits of its carrying capacity… (CEC 1998b: Italics added).

In the Commission language, the integrated approach is one among “a plurality of territorial concepts” of a very different nature, and among such concept it is an intriguing one, not easily matching EU aims and options. More precisely, the integrated approach may be distinguished from policies presenting direct impacts (such as the delimitation of areas eligible for support, the improvement of basic infrastructures, the differentiation on the basis of specific territorial criteria, etc.) which implement the basic functions of the Regional Policy.

The integrated approach instead is a concept linking three rather difficult presumptions: an underlying strategic vision, an agreed action plan, and a commitment to sustainability.

There are quite obvious differences with the outcomes of previous less integrated programmes like those discussed so far: the integration model enacted by most of the initiatives reviewed is limited to “ the simple acknowledgement of functional interactions”. Even the ambitious Development Plan of the South (Bilancio 1999) is aimed to concentrate the financial resources on a limited number of measures and areas; and the regeneration programmes implemented so far have privileged the financial integration and rather the cross-linkage of private developments with social aims and public actor (Dicoter 2000).

However, the functional interaction is basically a technical combination, and does not imply –at least to a significant extent – a joint conceptualisation.

Networks or communities?

The final remark concerns the model of development fostered by the programmes.

Again, certain vagueness and redundancy have been found in most of the strategic statements, at least at an initial stage. Due to the competition requirements, an agreement between the strategic vision and the action plan is not always guaranteed. It is worth remembering that territorial policy lacks a strong background in Italy, apart from a few examples such as the land reclamation and some early Fifties programme in the framework of post-war effort to develop the Southern regions. And it is also worth remembering that the municipal level is the stronger tier of territorial government, as elsewhere in Europe, while the integrated spatial development is weak either at a regional or at a national level. However, this is a changing feature of the planning system in most European countries (Cremaschi 2002c), and even in Italy a form of structure plan is now provided by the provincial governments (Lavori Pubblici 2000)

Even more important, action plans have varied quite a lot in the implementation process, being strongly influenced by the empirical conditions of the assembling (Avarello 2001). This is a coercive condition in the most deprived situations: due to a potential unlimited requirement of infrastructure, employment initiatives, public service etc., no one action plan can possibly satisfy local needs entirely. Consequently, the implementation game continuously offers endless reasons to rework the initial statements. It is these reasons that multi-layered political processes – such those characterising southern Italy- are eager to spoil.

And finally, the image of the territory implied by the vision of the economic development is rather weak. Other integrated programmes have cared more about the matching of the spatial representation, and of the model of action. As local development is concerned, the first is often ritual and not relevant, as experienced so far by the Community Framework. Consequently the “agreed” vision tends to be weak, and the territorial criteria less coherent. The local development programme lacks an identification of the social core of the spatial unit, as effective as the idea of neighbourhood in the urban policy. Decades ago the idea of community could have played such a role, an idea is sometimes advocated by influent thinkers of the autonomy of “local societies” (Magnaghi 2000, De Rita e Bonomi 1998).

Actually, both the neighbourhood and the community ideas hide similar conceptual and political “traps” (Bagnasco 1999), against which territorial and urban policies are not likely to have been inoculated yet. One of the original characters of the integrated programmes is rather the peculiar link between general issues –such as social exclusion or economic development- and the local action. From this point of view the idea of a “locality” is like of that a cosmopolitan network which exploits the “hidden resources” of the locality, joining local and global knowledge (Hannerz in Perulli 2000, p. 46).

Community however is not the only source of stimulus for local development initiatives. Recently, the idea of local society as a complex web of relations has been re-introduced even in the core of economic science. In the spirit of the integrated programmes, as described in the last paragraph, it is maintained that territorial criteria influence economic development and social equitableness. Even more so, the economic relevance of localities is acknowledged by regional policies inspired by the (mainly Krugman’s) theory of global competition (for the Italian case, see a review in: Barca and Pellegrini 2000).

It is quite clear that the integrated action for local development impinge upon a shared theoretical hypothesis (already included in manuals: Musu e Cazzavillan 1997): “localities” rest upon a hidden potential. The local project resorts to social capital in order to exploit such unmobile and often unknown resources.

On the other hand, the survey of local development practices offers far more mixed results. Local actions have sometimes led to unintelligible outcomes, an issue that questions the adequacy of local actions to match policy aims. It is an important question, yet one that cannot be met purely on theoretical grounds.

Eventually, the ideal-type of spatial concept underlying the local development initiative is characterised by three features: the spatial voluntarism, the idea of spoiling the sediment of “hidden resources”, in a strategic framework mixed up with collusive and opportunistic attitudes.

Conclusions

A few common features of most European actions have been detected in the survey of the earlier attempts of Southern Italian programmes. In practice, the survey has shown several weaknesses, those included the number and variety of local actions, a highly nuanced model of integration; a weak theoretical basis. The spreading and success of actions in front of an apparent unsymmetry between the rationale and the action-plan of the programmes is particularly striking.

However, some issues seem more general as shown by the comparison with foreign examples. The European integrated actions -when addressing the issue of local development- need an adequate conceptualisation both of the local society and of the development model. Other integrated programmes –for instance, in the field of urban policy – have cared more about matching the representation and the model of action (Turok 1991), the ideas of “quartiers” and of community acting somehow as paradigms.

In conclusion, the spatial logic of European actions seems an effect rather than a deliberation. It appears, however, blurred along the stratified boundaries of different programmes and justified on somehow fragile theoretical basis. Yet it results of increasing political importance, because of the spatial management of differences in an enlarged Europe (Cremaschi 2002b). A few broad issues question the expansion of area-based initiatives.

The first is the adequacy of a partnership and participatory model to enact a sustainable development process in less developed regions: such integrated programme for local development targets the most difficult aim, in the most difficult environment. This is a general issue that requires careful attention in the balance of policy initiatives, particularly at the European level and in the process of enlargement of the Union, a concern already expressed with regard to the urban policy area (Cremaschi 2002b).

A second major weakness is about the description of the territory. When the spatial concept of local society is ritual and not relevant, as possibly with the “local development agreements” (yet the new programming in Italy is far from reaching evaluable outcomes), the “agreed” vision tends to be weak, and the territorial criteria less coherent. It is worth to considering whether regional planning and economic analysis have been able to introduce yielding and productive territorial images.

A further issue arises from the superimposing of programmes. If new programmes join a number of others targeting the same area -or neighbouring areas- the issue arises of co-ordinating such actions. On the one hand, a spatial development framework is needed to direct local actions (an issue more and more at stake of the European planning reform: Cremaschi 2002b); on the other, an “agreed vision” is required in order to underpin the framework. As known, these double requirements are anything but easy to uphold. In particular, difficulties are apparent when and where local authorities are weak, which is likely to happen for instance in Southern regions.

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Urban actions and the making of a European spatial policy

editore — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:28:51 +0000

“Urban Actions And The Making Of A European Spatial Policy”, Urban Affairs Association 32nd Annual Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts, March 20-23, 2002

Europe has a geographical necessity, according to the French geographer Lévy (1997), because it has always compelled people and nations to continuously rework its social fabric, integrating differences in “larger” identities. Space is often played as a political ruse, a source of identity and a way to manage symbolic differences (^¹). Cities are central in the organization of space, but the urban policy and the spatial development framework is conceptualized in a variety of ways (van der Berg 1998, Cec 1998a).

The European Union has always acknowledged a central role to its urban structure, being one of the most urbanized regions of the world (80% of the total population, against 76% in the USA, as accounted by the EU: CEC 1991). In addition, recent data show a convergent trend both in the level of urbanization and in the rate of increase (UNCHS 2001).

A strong impetus towards innovating urban and regional policies has been witnessed in Europe during the last two decades, both at local and national level. This occurred in a distinctive political cycle, when Union members were looking for a transnational equilibrium among states while devolving powers to the regions.

More precisely, three main strands of actions seem to converge in a perspective framework not still defined entirely: the programmes for urban downgraded areas, the local development initiatives, and the spatial development strategy.

Thus, the paper emphasizes the apparent “family resemblance” of such a variety of programmes focusing on a few common features. The main hints for a move towards a convergent profile are the emphasis on partnerships, integration and strategic vision, which have consequently becoming part of an ambitious conceptual framework (CEC 1998d).

However, like in many other policy fields subject to the process of convergence, such policies have consolidated a common understanding of the issues at stakes. The common language draws primarily on a few ideas: community and partnerships, the focus on a broad concept of locality and territory, and the integration of measures.

On these fields, policies of the EU Commission aimed to produce sound results have been established during the last two decades, accompanying and sometimes re-interpreting national frameworks and local experiences (CEC 1998c). The more important is the European wide “Urban” initiative, a model initiative fostered by the CEC Commission for the urban regeneration in distressed neighbourhood (^²).

In conclusion, integrated local policies resulted in a vast field of experimentation bringing together previously separate sectors of public actions. Such integration goes well beyond the establishment of functional interdependencies among sector policies. Subsequent generations of programmes and actions in these fields have elaborated upon such assumptions fostering an incremental homogenisation of spatial practices in Europe and the parallel evolution of area-based initiatives for local development and for combating social exclusion.

This conclusion paves the way to a reflection on the governance style and strategies in such areas, evidence suggesting that area based initiatives have produced mixed results so far, and however that they are more effective when framed in a local (yet not too much) strategy. The final hypothesis suggests that different experimental policies are combined in a strategy of establishing direct links between the Commission and localities, such an incremental process being justified more by political reasons than by the material outcomes.

Area based programmes

The European Union is getting involved with urban issues since the 90s, when a strong impetus towards deepening the Union involvement with urban life has been witnessed, even beyond what formally held by the Union treaties.

Such change has brought together severed policy concerns in distant fields such as infrastructure, economic development, environment sustainability and social welfare. The process culminated in 1997-98 with two encouraging policy statements and an important conference in Vienna (CEC 1997, 1998d).

In 1998 in its Framework for action (CEC 1998d), the Commission has taken a step towards increasing the effectiveness of EU policies provided for by the Treaty by making them more “urban sensitive” and ensuring that they facilitate integrated urban development. The Framework aims at a better co-ordinated Community urban action and stresses –beyond “formal” policy aims as development, cohesion and sustainability (Atkinson 2001)- the contribution to good urban governance and local empowerment.

It is somewhat intriguing the coincidence of two decades of construction of common policies and of an enduring urban crisis, even beyond formal competence guaranteed in the Treaties or any evident success. Actually, confusion and ambiguity in the sheer idea of a European urban policy seem somewhat consistent with its popularity, as an actual “geographical necessity” accompanying the transnational construction of a common concern.

Two main consequences are: a) the direct contact of city governments and the European Commission, which steadily brought a growing number of people across Europe to be involved in continent wide programmes; b) the support to actions fostering the mitigation of economic change enhanced by the 1993 liberalisation of the common market.

The economic turn of the Eighties concentrated a large share of underpriviledged people in urban run-down areas. People living in such areas suffer from the overlapping outcomes of the processes of urban decline and of the social exclusion (CEC 1998d): high unemployment, low income, illiteracy, low skill levels, crime, poor housing conditions, a run-down urban fabric, and a lack of social amenities. Although very difficult to estimate in size, international comparisons agree that a substantial rate of western population live in distressed areas in every country, accounting for an average 10% of the population (OECD 1998).

However, such features combine in different ways among the countries of Europe, reflecting the different mixture of the social “reworking” of geography, the outcomes being deeply influenced by the different involvement of the welfare state in the production of space. The distressed areas of Northern Europe are frequently large social housing estates, almost abandoned inner cities areas, and the early industrial and mining areas. In Southern Europe depopulated historic centres are more frequent. It is clear that different problems and opportunities have been addressed.

The sheer idea of distressed areas appears thus as a ‘thick description’ and reflects a combination of cultural and technical beliefs, and of heavily differentiated policy styles in different countries (Stewart 2001). Actually, the EU orientation towards an area-based policy reflects two distinctive policy attitudes: a mainly French concern with spatial units such as ‘quartiers’ or neighbourhoods, and an English elaboration on formalised partnership.

Not only is the geography of urban distress diverse, but also the perception of the gravity of the various problems differs. Usually, different stakes are presented as the result of a temporal sequence (OECD 1998: Wolman and Goldsmith 1992) and of an ‘explicit’ account of the policy treatment of the urban issue (Parkinson 1992).

This approach has been stressed by the policies set up by a number of member states in order to tackle the issue of distressed areas (CEC 1998, DETR 2000, Div 2000).

In France the “politique de la ville” (Chaline 1997; Gaudin 1993); in the UK city actions such those under the Single Regeneration Budget programme (Hambleton and Thomas eds. 1995) or evoked by the “Urban renaissance” report; in Italy national programmes such as “Contratti di quartiere” or “Programmi di riqualificazione urbana” (Lavori Pubblici 2000b).

However, such policies are consistently different in weight. The UK SRB spent 2.5 billions € in the three years 1999-2001 involving 750 areas.

France has been devoting a consistent share of the state budget to its complex of urban initiatives, increased in the last decade by double (approximately 5.3 billions €). The budget for the German Soziale Stadt programme is completely different (about 150 million €), more or less the same amount than in Italy.

This “spatially focused approach” maximises the impact of the interventions and reinforces the mutual benefits of the projects: the overall effects of each programme thus become more visible.

However, distressed areas do not coincide with poverty as such (CEPR 1999). An “interlocking mix” of different circumstances, sometimes “exacerbated by public policies” (OECD 1998), alters the pattern of development, and was soon addressed by a Community initative. The initiatives promoted by the Commission result from such experiences of the member states. Being unitary programmes at the European scale, the initiatives promoted by the European Commission have made it possible to compare expectations and outcomes from various cities in various countries.

The Urban Initiative

Among other initiatives (a presentation of the regional policy of the EU in Williams 1996), the Urban initiative may be regarded as a window to the main innovations of urban policies after years of experience. The programme was preceded by two different initiatives in the field of contrasting poverty and fostering social innovation: a) the Poverty programme was created in the wider content of the market unification of the EU countries, trying to conceptualise the intriguing features of the “new” poverty phenomena in post-industrialised Europe (Atkinson 2000), with the aim of fighting against social exclusion; b) Urban Pilot Projects (UPPs: a second series was adopted in 1996) since 1989 have been directed towards some wider priorities: the economic development of socially run-down areas, environmental measures with economic objectives, the restoration of historic centres and the exploitation of urban technological advantages…

Eventually, in 1994 the European Commission launched the Urban programme with a strong emphasis on the economic regeneration and social rehabilitation of cities and districts in crisis. The Urban programme’s ambition was twofold: on the one hand, to promote exemplary measures, whose effectiveness would stimulate the start-up of an endogenous growth process; on the other hand, to select difficult yet manageable situations that were beyond the scope of ordinary public action. As a consequence, actions had to be limited in size if not in scope: on average, each programme targeted less than 30,000 people.

The first Urban programme selected 118 mostly medium size cities in Europe (the minimum size was fixed at 100,000 inhabitants) targeting approximately 3.2 millions people. In 1994 about 0.9 billion € (0.78 billion $) were earmarked for the first round. The remaining funds were made available, by the State and local agencies (also by private parties, but to an extremely limited extent). On the whole, in Italy for instance, Urban programmes invested 330 million € in four years, that is including the State and local contributions as well as those of the Community, (approximately 20 thousand €, 17,4 thousands $, per city area). To provide a comparison, in 1994 the Clinton administration gave 3,5 billion $ for urban revitalisation in the Empowerment Zone Program, with 6 cities receiving 150 million $ in block plus 150 in tax abatement (Keating et al. 1996).

However the unitary programme is strongly differentiated in each country. In Italy, 50 % of financial resources are devoted to infrastructure, reflecting national policy orientations as far as urban policy is concerned, and only 18% to social services: in most cases, marginal attention has been paid to education, employment and social welfare (Cremaschi 2000a). In other Southern Europe countries similar attention has been paid to the physical improvement (Fundação 2001: Muñoz Sebastián 2000). More interestingly, even in the British regeneration programme Challenge community services count only for the 26% (apart from social housing: Cremaschi 2002).

In contrast, French Urban programmes have devoted 65% of their resources to employment initiatives, long-term learning, and local development (Quaternaire 2000, 15). In Urban, as well as in other more solid policies, two main strands seem to have been brought together: the partnership for local development, and the mixing of different functional actions fostered by programmes for the renewal of urban downgraded areas, yet often expanding to wider aims.

Action programmes were drawn up reflecting the specific problems of the neighbourhood: particular emphasis was on local participation at the project level, and the involvement of citizens in the design and implementation of specific projects, in order to create confidence in the scheme and build consensus.

Empirical research on the effectiveness of such policies has shown mixed results so far.

Even those not dealing with regeneration and urban social matters understand the importance of Urban programmes among the Community initiatives: the last one on the scene, it is the programme that (with Leader devoted to marginal rural areas development) has been first in achieving assessable results. It should cause no surprise, therefore, if attention should shift round to management difficulties, whether it is a case of distributing incentives, discriminating areas or actors, or selecting those to carry out the implementation.

At the start of 2000 the European Commission transmitted to Member States a communication relating to the second round of the Urban Programme, whose endorsement was firmly solicited by a transversal majority in the European Parliament, due to the importance and the visibility of the experiment carried out. This may be looked upon as an indicator of the political success of a programme which was due to be combined together with other initiatives in the initial phase of the reform of the Structural Funds. However, the second Urban initiative was halved in size. Two new features were added: smaller cities have been admitted to the competition, and innovative measures were sought after.

A common feature of urban policies was the targeting of a well-defined area in order to contrast urban deprivation. Such programmes present in fact a twin and unique feature: they assume a) a precise representation of the issues to be addressed, and b) a corresponding model of action.

The representation tells us a story of the fracture in social cohesion that occurred at the end of the 70s, due to the superimposing of the unemployment and immigration issues, social exclusion and spatial unevenness being the more apparent results (Turok 1991; CEC 1997).

The model of action combines structural and contingent features in a multidimensional framework intended to offset situations stemming from a variety of causal factors. It is a participatory model since it was conceived, designed and implemented in participation with the stakeholders. Partnership is chosen not only for reasons of effectiveness, but also to mobilise local resources, to involve users, and to identify collectively the causes of social exclusion.

The local approach to structural issues, the representation and the corresponding model of action, have been often questioned (Donzelot and Estèbe 1994, Beauregard 2000; Tosi in Lavori Pubblici 2000a). The point is rather whether local actions are adequate to confront with structural issues. Even if nobody claims a complete success from the area based initiatives (Stewart 2001), serious doubts have been advanced concerning the effective addressing of the process of “social disintegration” (Donzelot 1999), Urban policies may be defective having been misled by an optimistic diagnosis. Long-term social exclusion appears in this perspective bound to grow into a sub-cultural identity, one that local actions can not aim to redeem.

In conclusion, the effectiveness of local actions is yet to be confirmed, however a long term perspective seem at least pre-requisite, as partially disputed by the evaluations of the Urban Programme in different countries (Cedru 1998; Ekos 2000; Quaternaire 2000a; Toepel et al. 2000).

The Urban Initiative has pursued the integration of the measures at local scale, with some success, numerous uncertainties of method, and some strategic problems. At the same time, the Regions have been striving to promote integrated territorial programmes, here again partly in keeping with the recommendations from European Structural Funds. Thus, one of the differences in the implementation of the second round of Urban -compared with the first programme- is that the Regions have sought and found a role, albeit a modest one. Will area based urban policies continue to be stand on their own, or will the Regions fill the gap with a full regional development strategy?

A confrontation has already started between Urban, the instruments of the “new programming” (Gualini 2001), and the territorial reference frameworks.

Local development

Urban programmes are not the only experimentation of a continental wide policy. Actually, the beginning of the urban programmes largely stem from the involvement of local communities with local development initiatives.

As widely recognised, the local economic intervention is far from a clear concept (Pickvance 1990). Its origins lie in the 19^th century social reformers, municipal enterprise as well as the spreading of Keynesianism late in the Thirties. Attention to the local economic policy has constituted a growing concern for local state since the 60s.

The present spread of local programmes has bridged the economic development framework and area methodology. Many researchers have acknowledged the common roots of a variety of actions implemented in Europe during the last twenty years (Le Galès 1993; Cameron and Doling, 1995; Hambleton and Thomas 1995; Cremaschi 2002).

The interplay between urban policy and local development initiatives is particularly clear in a country like Italy, where urban issues are strongly influenced by regional conditions, and in general by the historical dualism of the Italian development process (De Rita and Bonomi 1998).

In contrast, local development policies have been rapidly growing even in more centralised state such as France (Pecqueur 1989; for a comprehensive view, CEC 1995 e 1997). The involvement of European Funds, previously almost entirely focused on agriculture, has been expanding since the mid-Seventies. In the same period consistent experimentations took place, exchanging cross-fertilisation of experiences over the oceans (Enterprises zones, development corporations…), being affected more by the political “culture” and innovativeness of the local young leaderships (Pickvance 1990) rather than by government orientations.

The implementation of EU initiatives is not the only novelty stemming from the reform of the Structural Funds at the end of the ‘80s. Although these represent the specific financial instruments of European structural policy, they can benefit of only a minority share of the resources available for each programming period. In the EU 1994-1999 programming cycle, action was carried out on the basis of priorities regarding both productive investments and infrastructural ones. Within the context of national measures for the new EU 2000-2006 programming cycle, that logic has been completely overturned.

The public intervention outlined mainly regards infrastructure, and is therefore linked more to the constitution of an adequate development context than to direct action substituting private enterprise, which occurred within the framework of non-routine intervention. Public investments play an essential role for the area’s development, no longer as a factor of demand, but as one of supply, able to bring about those discontinuities or threshold effects that make a “development leap forward” possible. The predominant vision is therefore one of a development process comprised of elements of imbalance and integration. Here, a concentration of efforts must be combined with a search for synergies both from the sectoral and financial point of view as well as from the economic programming action of the various government levels.

Recently, a review (CEC 2000, p. 13) stressed the interplay between different integrate territorial actions, and the convergence in methods of urban actions and local development initiatives.

The report enhances the common background: both policies are intentionally area-based, and both share a general concern for the growing gap between better-off and less developed regions. Social inclusion and local development are strictly linked in these areas, which are consistent in Southern Europe.

Convergence in method focuses upon the establishment of social network able to catalyse the “social capital”, a local partnerships for development. Such partnerships have been widely experienced with the “territorial pacts” (Cersosimo 2002) introduced in the context of the Italian “new economic programming” approach, and later promoted as a European experience.

The focus is the rediscovery of territorial elements as hubs of development action. The development model chosen for the southern area could be described as one of “compatible endogenous development.” Here compatibility is understood, on the one hand, within the macroeconomic framework of national convergence, attempting to meet the requisites of the Maastricht Treaty. On the other, it is understood in terms of attention to sustainability of the growth process, especially its environmental aspects.

The growth of virtuous development mechanisms in southern Italy is closely linked to the development of the area’s permanent resources (natural, cultural and human) and of its production potentials, which are beginning to emerge within local systems and in a number of urban areas. Only with the full development of these potentials can external mobile resources (savings, enterprise, and specialised labour) have access to the area with reasonable prospects of lasting success. The margin of the public operator’s intervention is precisely linked to this development work.

The spontaneous economic trends, in and of southern society itself, are not yet able to carry out the transformations necessary to trigger the growth process and therefore to direct the South of Italy along the positive path of growth towards which it seems to be heading.

A family portrait

Local actions in urban regeneration and local development show a few common features: a) all the programmes are locally bounded actions; b) they foster a “vision” of spatial development for the whole area, the idea of “territorio” implying community, environment and the local heritage as well; c) intended initially as a group of detached measures, some have progressed toward compound social and economic features; d) started as physical improvement actions, they have become increasingly concerned with the local development and employment issues; e) dealing with the implementation process seems to trigger an embryo co-operation between local authorities and recently powerful regions.

Such programmes have envisaged a variety of innovating actions so far, yet they are not necessarily new. Indeed, the aim of integrating spatial development policies dates back to post war times, standing out as a landmark in the public policy landscape of the mid-century. Such an evolutionary change has brought together severed traditions in distant fields such as infrastructure, economic development, environment and social welfare. The real questions are thus: how close have they come, what is the “recipe” of such integration, and what is the quality?

It must be admitted that programmes seldom went further than a shallow blend of functional measures, and did not overcome what may be called the functional limit of integration. In Italy, development projects of the ‘50s were mainly a one-sector, one-actor mix of actions. Mainstream economics and international agencies, however, insisted on concentrating on a single activity providing supposedly beneficial one-sided shocks to the entire economy.

However, a more integrated approach did sometimes crop up in the framework of the national economic development programme for the South; for instance, some integrated actions tried out after World War II targeted on housing, health and education, strongly influenced by a peculiar mixture of Italian historicism and US regionalism. As geographical patterns are formed by history, the matching up between society and environment moulded the whole territory. In turn, such ideology maintained that its structural features offered a basis for a comprehensive strategy of spatial development.

A second strand may be traced back to the 70s, to the growing awareness that regional spatial frameworks were affecting the outcome of the economic measures taken for the development of the South. To replace the budgetary style of programming, a complex set of incentives and local agreement procedures were devised, tools to be generalised later in the 90s. However, those first attempts did not overcome the functional limit already shown. Since then, a turn in strategy fostered a more negotiated approach and a strengthened effectiveness.

The chance to be effective is actually spread over the great variety of initiatives encompassed by any single programme: an exceedingly high variety -as it has sometimes been remarked- justified however by a peculiar process of “generating projects”. However, a plurality of projects does not necessarily vie against the single vision behind the programme. On the contrary, dualism is a common feature of such programmes: a rigid envisioning level selects priorities and partnership; a flexible design level allows projects to be nurtured and the shortcomings occurring in the implementation process to be countered.

Such federalist and resilient programmes may well be differentiated by contents and purposes even if quite similar in their financial resources and procedures. Actually, similar schemes are operating for urban renewal, improvement of the infrastructure network, preservation of the environment, local and sustainable development, etc.

The acknowledged mix has a double function: coping with local features as well as dealing with operational weaknesses. Beyond the variety of functions, however, also the spatial effects of the programmes are highly differentiated. As in other public policies, spatial effects depend on a variety of “territorial concepts”, which organise the correspondence of methods and aims.

Integrated programmes such as the Urban Initiative combine several territorial concepts: the zoning of areas by functions, in order to delimit areas eligible for financial support and to determine the application of territorialized policies: the improvement of basic infrastructures, facilities and public services; the development of synergies to establish functional interdependencies among policies; the differentiation of policies, measures and technical assistance on the basis of specific territorial criteria.

A practice of flexible integration, and not a completely different model, is instead emerging from the number and variety of cases (Cremaschi 2001). Initially intended as a group of detached measures, some have progressed toward experimenting a mixed framework of social and economic features. Programmes deal with the unintended consequences of the expected traps in the implementation process. Parternships seem to trigger an embryo co-operation between local authorities, a differentiation of governance styles, and the dialogue among different institutional levels (such as recently empowered regions).

The concern for the “spatial development”

The coming closer of EU member state economies affected the policies addressing local issues; in turn, this has changed the vision of spatial development of member states. The governance of change is more and more the result of co-operative efforts which go beyond institutional boundaries either at the local or at the global level. Tentative experiments of co-operation of a mixed frame of governance have been experienced during the last two decades. Two examples can be provided: a) the establishment of a common spatial development perspective for the whole continent, and b) the establishment of Commission initiative, such as Urban and Interreg, the latter being aimed to develop cooperation among the transborder territories of the Union.

The period around the ‘90s is in fact characterised by events, decisions and initiatives that profoundly modified the relation between Community policies and the European space. And a new dimension of governance has been progressively set up in front of the trans-national co-operation for local and spatial development.

The idea of constructing a vision of the European territory was not born recently nor within the European Community. The long preparation may somehow contrast with the slim conclusions (CEC 1998b). However, it suggests that a long span of time was required in order to allocate contrasting and sensitive policy options, and that the content of the European spatial policy has somehow changed over time.

It matured in the Council of Europe’s work over about 25 years. In 1964, the Council of Europe Assembly decided upon the foundation of the European Conference of Ministers Responsible for Territorial Development (Cemat) with the precise duty of examining a planning policy for European space. The “Draft European Scheme of Territorial Planning,” submitted in Strasbourg at Cemat ’88, supplied numerous materials and guidelines for the subsequent strategic documents of the European Commission.

The first Conference of Community Ministers for Territorial Planning and Regional Development met in Nantes in November 1989. The Conference was a success. The Member Countries declared their interest and readiness to make a common commitment to anticipating spatial transformations and to agreeing on joint policies among themselves and with the Commission.

On the one hand, the Turin Conference in 1990 reintroduced general themes (urban networks, transport and communications, border zones), and on the other proposed an in-depth study of the Mediterranean question as an issue for European planning and extra-Community relations. Turin was an important step in the course of the two proposals. The meeting achieved both the extension of the Interreg program to the regions of extra-Community borders (including the coasts) and the establishment of the observatory on the territorial effects of policies of EU interest.

Also at The Hague Conference in 1991, general issues were influenced by local emphasis. The European network system previously discussed seemed to exclude, or in any case, to ignore the “peripheries” of Europe, to draw attention to the efficiency and sustainability of the development of the central territories – the areas that today count for the future of the Community.

From 1992 on, the Conferences have been more “oriented” by the preparatory work of the Committee which followed the results of the seven trans-regional studies and of the three trans-national studies launched by Europe 2000 towards the new document Europe 2000+. The preparation of the Agenda was strongly affected by French seminal preparatory studies, which outlined some policy options following the French tradition of strong centralised planning. It was the Committee itself that matured the decision made at the Liège Conference in 1993 to construct the Esdp, whose first official version was presented at Noordwick in June 1997.

However, the Committee thought the Perspective had to provide a “guide” for integrated territorial planning strategies of the Member States. At the same time, it was to have been an instrument for the coordination of actions – already adopted or to be adopted – exercising a spatial impact within the framework of the Union’s different sectoral policies. Such ambitious aims were clearly conflictual with member states’ options. In particular, a clear and strong Eu’s Perspective would have had to inform the programming of the Structural Funds and the homogenisation of national planning frameworks, clearly an unlikely results given the level of regional differentiation.

Among the widely differentiated models of territorial planning in Europe, scrutinised by the CEC (CEC 1998b), the perspective assumed eventually a cautious position: to ensure spatial coordination, but from the members states up to the Commission (Faludi et al. 1997), a sort of an “incremental federalism”.

Actually, the perspective document impact is a modest one. Somebody even underlines indirect effects rather than direct outcomes, questioning whether the whole spatial planning has “much ado about nothing” (Kunzmann 1998). A few spatial concepts (the polycentric urban network and the urban-rural transition) are routinely addressed by recent policy statements (the Cohesion Report 2001), but links with sound policy orientations, and expected outcomes are somehow vague.

However, the Esdp establishes a background for the Commission that may bring to more credible policy orientations. This happens through an articulated effort: selecting transnational options, such as a few infrastructure corridors; establishing languages, reference practices, a common awareness and common concerns; indicating a shared time-table and schedule.

Whether the Esdp and the local initiative experiences meet, it is not an easy forecast.

On one hand, urban local policies have consistently innovated the tradition of spatial and economic planning. As planning aims have become more flexible, a number of questions have arisen concerning the integration of policies at all level. Planning and governance are thus not severed, but more and more the two sides of the same coin, one that has started to present a growing resemblance (Newman and Thornley, 1996).

On the other, the rhetoric of governance in the Esdp covers the vagueness of the construction of new spatial policies. It is somehow odd that the urban governance should be an aim, rather than an analytical tool. However, the “politics” of urban governance exemplifies a favourable attitude towards city development and the support to the increase of investment in urban areas.

Conclusions: making room for a European spatial policy

Integrated local policies have sprung up in a vast field of experimentation. Spatial development, local strategies, area based initiatives are bringing together previously separate sectors of public actions. The enactment of such a difficult practice of integration goes well beyond the establishment of functional interdependencies among sector policies (as already anticipated by early development policies in the 50s).

In this way, the CEC Commission is experimenting with a new model of action, which is crucial for local societies. Such actions are supported by the Commission in order to strengthen subsidiarity and enact direct ties with local governments.

The rationale of the Commission’s effort has to be found in the process of establishing a new style of governance, rather than from the direct outcomes of such actions. Such new style has been progressively focused during the Nineties.

In this period, the governance of European cities has been re-defined at the crossroad of two main processes: the devolution of power to localities and partnerships; the decentralisation of functions and activities in the process of globalisation. New styles of local governance are defined in opposition with the central government, and routinely idealised as a tier of power closer to citizens and local issues. Even if this is partly true, it is not an adequate reason to justify the spreading of such actions, even beyond tangible outcomes.

Thus, the making of a European spatial policy appears instrumental to wider aims, such an incremental process being justified more by political reasons than by the material outcomes. Three main reasons may address further reflections on this subject.

On one side, different experimental policies are combined in a strategy of establishing direct links between the Commission and localities. As anticipated by Lévy, the geography (and politics) of local actions is trying to overcome historical backgrounds, mirrored in Europe by different administrative systems. Some countries are more centralised, while others depend upon a federal or a regional system. The general tendency is towards an increased decentralisation of policies it is often acknowledged even beyond legal bindings by the Union treaties. This effort has been increased in the last quarter of the 20th century in almost all the member states of the European Union. As suggested by Padoa-Schioppa (2001), the globalisation process is more advanced in Europe because of the “economic federalism” of the four-tier system of government (community, nations, regions and municipalities). It is worth noting that Italy is privileged having being a ‘multi-governance system’ long before the Union. A convergence process is recognisable even in the field of planning and in the ‘style’ of managing the regeneration of cities and regions (Newmann and Thornley 1996, Faludi and Zonneveld 1997).

On the other side, local agents are well positioned in order to deal with the globalisation effects, and cities appear central actors in the managing of such changes. Even more so when devolution sometimes combines effectively with the “deconcentration” process of functions and activities, which has occurred in the pattern of urbanisation.

Finally, the European policy making is structurally limited by the agreement of member states. The chance of a “positive integration” of markets (Tinbergen’s system of regulation) is strongly affected by the lack of a majority rule. The institutional framework of the Union, however, allows for a dynamic confrontation among states and for bilateral negotiations with the Union. Such a complex web of negotiation seems to lead to a better result when “negative integration” issues are at stake (Scharpf 1997), the latter consisting of the removal of barriers in the Tinbergen scheme. The Commission may reach better results than any single member state being able to compensate gains and losses on other negotiation tables. Spatial policies have been successful until they have addressed negative or experimental integration issues, such as urban solidarity, pilot projects, local developments; and have failed, or have been less effective, when addressing more substantial options such as comprehensive strategy for coordinating transnational infrastructure.

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* Dipsa (Planning and Architecture Department), Third University of Rome, via della Madonna dei Monti 40, 00184 Roma, ph. +39-06488871248, fx. +39-06488871249, m.cremaschi@uniroma3.it.

1 As often reminded, the conclusion of the 16^th century religious wars was the geographic option: “cuius regio, eius religio”.

2 The paper is partly based on several case studies of urban policies from different European Countries (as different as Italy, Portugal, Germany, United Kingdom and France). Information has been gathered through interviews with policy makers and through an extensive examination of public documents (current literature and country evaluation reports) in a research carried out with the support of the Italian Department of the Spatial Development: Cremaschi 2001 and 2002.

Making space and escape attempts: the housing practices in post-industrial cities

editore — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:51:37 +0000

International Housing Conference, Housing in Southern Europe, a separate path?, Madrid, 2-4 dec. 1998

Social practices are open to a twin analytical understanding, according to the double meaning of social links to which they contribute: either they are an expression of the different forms of sociability, and thus they can be presented as the manifestation of cultural identities, sometimes then as the residual evidence of pre-modern world; or they are indicators of the integration, or at the opposite of the deterioration, of social links, therefore playing a far deeper structural role.

These are just analytical distinctions, since cultural identity is part of the process of social integration, while being both linked in a circular way. A systematic consideration of housing practices led to underline a few significant features, which will later bee commented on with reference to some examples:

housing practices can be interpreted only by referring to the extended image of the networks in which they are developed. Family and kinship networks are particularly important, and researchers have shown that this is equally true even in modern and advanced society; however, local or community linkages influence practices as well, where different networks of sociability (^¹) frequently overlap and mix up with market and professional relations. This image sheds a light on a highly complex web of inter-relationship which are particularly manifest and have been made apparent in informal processes and smaller communities; yet, it is not exclusively dependent on size and proximity, and can actually be traced down even in more complex living systems;
exchanges of resources and symbolic exchanges play at least an equally important role, especially in the informal processes intended to home-ownership, where kinship and solidarity are directly involved; however, what does this account really undermine, is the well established image of the household as a individualistic consumer, a “rational” subject of economic choices, integrating different resources in a optimised budget, and maximising individual benefits from a range of interchangeable alternatives.
housing practices, as part of a non-formal world of exchanges (as those what are usually intended to with reference to the reciprocity domain), have been maintained to be residual in the oversimplified view of the modernisation process; yet the transition to a post industrial society, enhance the possibility to take in account plural configurations of housing rationalities, some of them having been made clear by informal processes. However, at the stand is not only the willingness to recognise equal rights to social practices compared to formal and market processes. More ambitiously it has been stated that ”space practices plot against the determining conditions of social life” (de Certeau 1980), at the very moment that “urban rationality” fails to ensure the threefold promise to unify spare urban and social fabrics in a strategic, abstract and universal body. Thus, practices are not embedded in space, but create their own reference space.

In this paper I limit myself to suggest that late housing practices can be examined from two points of view, while presenting in the next paragraphs some empirical supports with reference to the last years. The first point of view highlights the steady increase of dwelling consumption; and stresses the tendency to “make space” at home for a larger set of relationship, many related with family networks. The second highlights the progressive overlapping of issues concerning the dwelling with issues concerning the surroundings and pinpoints –somehow contradictorily- the “escape attempts” from the same configuration towards an “outer” space, sometimes just a dreamed one, where a different balance is aimed between the dwelling of the family and the frame of social relations.

1. Tenures

Home-ownership rate is high since years (68% in 1997, about 13 million households) and, even quite different among different areas, for instance in cities and in North, tend to homogenise. Ownership is highly correlated with income, which are commonly studied by proxies such as jobs and education. No surprise that the better off tend to be owners at a rate higher than the average (in 1991 19.1% of the entrepreneurs and the professionals rented their homes; the same rate was 15% in 1996).

However, it is interesting to say that ownership rate does not ever show a clear-cut class difference. Even if blue-collar workers are twice as likely to be in the rented sector than entrepreneurs (30.7, almost the same than five years before: 1991, 32,1), they are quite well represented among the owners as well. In fact, owners among blue collars are now 69.3%, with a significant increase compared to the post war period. Still, in 1971 and 1978 industrial blue collar workers were likely to be owner at a rate respectively of 42 and 44%.

The rented stock was more than half of the total after World War II: since then it has been halved, and it is steadily decreasing now, even if at a lower pace. In fact, the rate of rented dwellings has sharply declined during the last quarter of this century and, in particular, during the Eighties. Its size is estimated approximately at 23% of the housing stock, i.e. more or less 4.8 million dwellings. Renting is higher in metropolitan areas (60% in metropolitan cores; 66.7% in metropolitan belts), especially in southern ones.

However, the decline of the rented sector has benefited not only ownership but even alternative forms of tenure, mainly not for profit ones, which now accounts for almost 10% (more than 2 millions households) of the total stock. Such tenure forms were considered residual, but they have recovered since the collapse of renting occurred (life-tenancy 2.2; rent-free 5.8; other 0.9). It is interesting to pinpoint that people in such forms of tenure are rather poor (72% is below the average income: Cnel 1996).

Tab. 1 Rented dwellings in metropolitan areas per macro-regions

Metropolitan areas Total

Core belts

North West 36.5 34.0 26.8

North East 37.9 13.5 19.4

Centre 35.3 15.1 23.7

South 46.7 30.1 22.7

Islands 44.0 21.3 21.9

(Istat 1996)

Tab. 2 Rented sector

Private Building Social

Rental Society rental

North 68.3 8.1 23.6

Centre 59.1 9.7 31.2

South 71.5 3.4 25.1

Cities with > 50.000 inhab. 60.2 8.6 31.2

Other municipalities 75.2 5.2 19.6

Total 67.6 6.9 25.5

Source: Istat, Household Consumption 1995

Tab. 3 Dwelling stock in the Milan area according to tenure

1981 1991

owner-occupied 44,3 62,3

subsidised dw. with right of redemption 2.4 -

private rental 30,3 17,6

building society rental 7,5 5,6

social rental 8,2 8,2

rent-free, life-tenancy, etc. - 2,5

other 7,1 3,8

Total 100,0 00,0

Source: Elaboration on Instat, Censimento 1991e 1981

Rent is negatively correlated with income: the rent paid by the three lower deciles on the income ladder is about 25-35% of the total earnings, against a 10-13% in the three upper deciles (Cnel 1997). Rent is even higher in big cities: in Milan, rent is close to one third of income for at least one out four of the households in the rented sector (Pim 1998).

General cost for a dwelling (average rent or mortgage plus heating) is over 31% of the monthly household budget (^²), a rate that reaches its peak for the older single households (>65: 45.5%), that usually live in the inner cities. Dwelling cost is more affordable for the extended families (more than three children: 26.3%) living in the outskirts of metropolitan areas. Moreover, it has been shown that average income of tenant household has diminished from 83% to 79% compared to the owners’ income in the first half of the 90s (Cnel 1997).

And finally, social rented sector is traditionally limited in Italy, even compared to Italian standards. According an estimation based on the income threshold, about 2.7 million households were entitled to a social dwelling, while social rented stock amount to 1.1 million approximately (Aniacap 1993).

The crux in the change in tenure –increase of home-ownership, reduction in the private rental sector- is the tendency toward a rigid market structure, one that seemingly contrasts with the more flexible demand that has grown in the last years. Ownership used in fact to be a far more rigid status than renting, because of higher cost of transactions, taxes, etc. Forcing people to the purchase of a dwelling influences the localisation patterns as well, since it tends to lower the appeal of the urban condition.

2. Mobility

In the 2^nd post war era residential mobility coincided for a long time with migratory movements. At the end of the 70s, however, a dramatic rise in market rent level accompanied by a shortage in most of the metropolitan areas exerted a strong pressure onto households to move. That period coincided in fact with a considerable effort paid mostly by blue- collar families in order to purchase a flat; and a systematic decline in the rented sector, in particular in the percentage of dwellings let by private owner. In fact, the overwhelming privately rented sector still accounts for two thirds of all the rental stock. However, it has been considerably reduced since the war, and mostly in big cities; for instance, in the Milan area it has diminished from 30% of the total dwelling stock to 18% between 1981 and 1991.

A part from this phenomena, residential mobility is usually meant as limited in Italy and however highly dependent from institutional and transactional constraints. Residential mobility in big cities has been estimated at the end of the 80s between 4,6% and 6,6% per year (Bellicini 1988). However, the number of purchase have increased since 1985 by about 20%, yet fluctuating around 500 thousands notwithstanding the strong increase in the households number and in the estimates of the “potential” demand (Censis 1997). The number of lease is instead on the increase (+57%), but it should be reminded the widespread habit of informal and often illegal forms of leasing in the rental sector (Cnel 1997). However, in the 90s the reduction of in costs both of dwellings and mortgages has likely stimulated an increase of mobility.

The last Istat Survey (Istat 1998) estimated that about 900.000 householders in 1996 have moved (4.4%) with a slight increase compared to the previous years: since 1993, 3.9-4,0% of householders moved per year (i.e. 812.000 householders). However, the trend is steady on the increase: the same source estimated that approximately 3% of the overall householders changed homes per year between 1984-88 (Istat 1993). In 1996 householders in the Northern regions and the metropolitan belts were at the origin of a large share of residential movements. Householders in the core of metropolitan areas –which are older and among the better off- were instead less eager to move than the average, even if their mobility appears to be on the increase (1993: 2.7, 1996: 3.7).

Reasons to move are mainly two: de-cohabitation (roughly for one third: getting married or equivalent 27.2%; living alone 6.5%; living with other people 2.7%); and becoming a owner (14.5%), both however slightly declining. Other reasons are getting a larger dwelling (10.3%) (^³) and a better accommodation or environment (9%).

The Survey also asked whether people have just considered the option to move in the previous 12 months: the share of a desired move was higher than the actual mobility, about 7.7%, but a decreasing one (it was 8.0% in 1993).

Intentions to move have different justifications than actual decisions: the answers were mainly the search for better living (25.4%) or a larger dwelling (23.7), while de-cohabitation was expected by a narrower group (roughly for one fourth: getting married or equivalent 11.2%; living alone 7.6%; living with other people 4.2%). Answers like getting closer to the job (8.3) or becoming a owner (9.0) have declining shares compared to 1993.

In the long term, intentions to move seem to have changed even more. Expectations to move in a two-year term were significantly high (20%) in 1978, when a severe shortage occurred in urban areas while prices went up causing the worst “housing crisis” since decades. Twenty years ago, however, weddings was the single most answered item (24%), followed by getting closer to jobs (19%), the purchase of a home (14%), and finally the search for a better accommodation (13%).

3. Satisfaction

The area of subjective dissatisfaction with dwelling has consistently reduced, as is possible to show comparing answers given to the Household Consumption survey in different years.

Besides, a national Censis Survey (a private research body) reported in 1997 that dissatisfaction was limited to the 10,8% of the total (while it accounted for a larger share in metropolitan areas: 12,7%). In 1993, the regional Social Survey in the Milan region of Lombardy showed that less than 6% of the answers were negative. The only issue that does not clearly improve is the affordability of rent. Notwithstanding a small variance, findings are quite clearly converging, at least with reference to judgements concerning the dwelling.

That is not the same with dissatisfaction with the surrounding urban environment (19%; 21,3% in big cities: Censis 1997). In fact, a term that frequently crops up in reference to the outskirts environment is “disagio urbano” or ”disagio diffuso” (a term which has not immediate equivalent in English, maybe “widespread housing stress” or “urban environment stress”), that can be equated with the entire area of poor quality housing.

Urban stress derives from different and somehow vague ingredients (Cremaschi 1994b). Traffic congestion is now perceived as a problem by 74% of urban dwellers, as well as poor public transportation (38% of workers spend more than hour in their daily journey to job), crime (63% of urban dwellers has the feeling of being at risk), poor social life, etc. However widespread, urban stress affects more peripheral areas and the urban poors, which are more likely to concentrate there.

However, it is worth stressing that dissatisfaction with dwelling is always less underlined that dissatisfaction with single items, such as heating or dimension which have been not adequate for a large share of the population until few years ago. One reason is possibly the historical housing need and the severe uncertainty about the future that sweeten the present condition.

tab. 4 Causes of Dissatisfaction with dwelling

1978* 1993 1996

Dimension 33 15 14

Inadequacies 25 8 6

Distance from relatives n.a. 19 17

Costs/affordability n.a. 53 54

% of rent higher than 20% of total earnings 27 - 39

* In 1978 questions were not strictly equivalent

Source: Consumption Survey

tab. 5 Causes of Dissatisfaction with neighbourhood

1978* 1993 1996

public transport 40 31 28

crimes 26^⁴ 31 29

traffic 34 48 49

* In 1978 questions were not strictly equivalent

+ Estimation on Istat, Survey on Consumption;

tab. 6 Dissatisfaction: 1997, Censis Survey

Small medium large total

Centres cities cities

dwelling 7.7 9.1 12.7 10.8

surroundings 16.0 14.7 21.3 19.0

Tab. 7 Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction in 1977 National Survey

People satisfied: dissatisfied:

highly enough rather very

dwelling 16 59 19 6

heating 17 42 27 14

large fair small very small

dimension 7 60 19 14

People satisfied: dissatisfied:

highly enough rather very

neighbourhood 18 62 16 4

building quality 28 39 25 8

streets and pavements 26 43 21 10

public transport 15 45 23 17

tab. 8 Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction: 1993, Milan, Irer Survey

highly enough rather very

satisfied satisfied dissatisfied dissatisfied

Dwelling 47,4 47,1 4,8 0,7

I feel well It happened I will leave

Surroundings (“dwelling environment) 63,3 30,8 5,9

Tab. 9 Dissatisfaction with dwelling and neighbourhood per type of family in the Milan area

Dwelling Surroundings

Occupied Single 2,4 16,2

Workers with partner unemployed 10,0 15,0

One parent Household 7.7 12,5

Double income with children 8.3 8,8

Retired old single 12.5 -

Double income 6.5 6,3

Retired with children - 5,6

Other 4.4 3,2

Total 5.5 5,9

Fonte: Regione Lombardia, Irer: Social Survey 1993

4. Making space: living around a dwelling

The “state of the art” living in Italy tends to be in a flat in a multi-dwelling building (54%). However, single-family house (30%) and two-family house (13.7%) account for a large share of total dwellings. Apparently, the overwhelming preference has been expressed for medium size, multi-dwelling buildings, that are in fact the most widespread urban dwelling typology. In fact, as far as the economic trends promoted urban growth, the desire for a single house was a sort of “wishful thinking”.

Eventual preference for one model or another are highly structured both by structural conditions and economic preference. We should quote at least that historically urban elite have led the country; that most of small urban cities are quite liveable and vibrant; and that building promoters have been ever-practising the art of multi-storey building, with a seemingly rigid brick and stone technology which actually allowed a great flexibility and adaptability. For instance, in Lombardy (the region around Milan characterised by a highly industrialised and a highly urbanised environment) more than 76% of the dwelling stock (Irer 1996) is in multi-dwelling buildings, 40% of them in the top tallest class, while single family or semi-detached houses are rather infrequent (24%). Of course multi-dwelling buildings are mostly in the metropolitan area (more than 90%), whereas single family or semi detached houses are more frequent respectively in small villages or in the metropolitan suburbs (^⁵).

However, a growing dissatisfaction with high-rise accommodations is commonly detected. Even the scant housing research devoted to this subject has easily highlighted the fact that the majority of those interviewed preferred anything but high-rise, for reasons like: inadequacy of space, lacking amenities, social isolation, etc. (Censis 1983). The problem of satisfaction or of dissatisfaction seems to be linked to the maintenance of buildings and to technological and social problems rather than to the high rise itself. In particular, high rise estates as part of metropolitan peripheral belts are deeply concerned in the process of downgrading of the environmental quality: nuisance, pollution, traffic congestion, etc. A polarisation process is then taking place, differentiating a few number of “problem areas” from the less dramatic but nevertheless unsatisfactory condition of peripheral estates.

Where strong informal production took place (see the survey for the municipality of Rome: Censis 1989), the preference for the “case di borgata” (i. e. the informal neighbourhood dwelling unit, not necessarily a single family detached house) was clearly declared by 57% of the respondents, the preference being required and expressed, in this case, towards a specific urban environment rather to a dwelling typology.

A survey has tried to compare present and desired dwelling conditions, showing that satisfaction with high-rise was relatively low, and the most desired accommodation was in a small building with 4 or less flats (Censis 1983). Also surveys on the image of the “dream house” reported that some youngsters’ desire was a house with a garden but (… ) located in the middle of the town”. The more realistic ambition of most of the interviewed was a flat “…with a view” (that could be easily imagined either on a beautiful landscape or on the roofs of the historical central district) in a multi-dwelling building in the same neighbourhood where they were used to living (Gazzola, 1990).

Another example can be the double belonging to different world, an experience allowed by second houses. Italy’s 5.2 millions of non-occupied dwellings (^⁶) (as much as 5 times the amount registered in 1961) testify that a huge effort has been spent by household in order to duplicate their own model of living. Actually, almost half of the unoccupied stock is utilised as holiday houses or for tourism and summer rent; a further 20% is actually occupied, even if in a non permanent way, by people studying or working in other cities than their usual abode.

That is to invalidate the usual explanation that socio-cultural traditions explain the difference in the dwelling habits, uses and modes of consumption among countries. It has been stated that “the preference for one’s own house can be seen as expressing a more individualistic lifestyle… leading people to separate themselves from their kin as well as from their neighbourhood” (Höllinger and Haller, 1990). However, the same argument could be sustained for high-rise buildings and metropolitan living, depending in part from groups life-styles and in part from the balance between distance, transportation and communication technologies. And in fact, different ways of living seem rather to mix up in distinct urban and non-urban frames. For instance, findings show that actually daily contacts with relatives are easier for single house dwellers (32%) than for the inhabitants of high rise housing (13%). However, dwellers in high rise accommodation live closer to friends (30%) than single-house dwellers (21%), showing (at least) a different distance factor in the two situations (Cremaschi 1997).

tab. 10 Dwellings per type of building

building type N. of buildings N. of dwellings % of dwellings

Total Houses 9.768,730 11,501,384 45.9

Single-family house 7,578,575 7,578,575 30.3

two-family house 1,732,655 3,465,309 13.7

Rural houses 457,500 457,500 1.8

Total Multi-dwelling 1,830,000 13,527,138 54.1

Total 11,598,730 25,028,522 100.0

source: estimation on Istat, 1991

5. Escape attempts: living elsewhere and changing home

As we have said, the point is that dissatisfaction with a dwelling typology is expressed as dissatisfaction with the urban condition. The preference, if any, for a single family house is than actually mixed up with a later negative evaluation of some features of the urban living, basically depending on environmental issues such as traffic or pollution. The choice of a dwelling model tends to enlarge towards the expression of a preference for an entire built environment, or even the refusal of cities tout-court: somehow, is a choice expressed by “foot”, moving outside the metropolitan areas.

This process tends to drain away the more affluent population from towns, often middle aged people. As a consequence, multi-storey buildings largely dominate the townscape; while countryside is often scattered with long arrays of houses.

The recent shift in urban trends, and the metropolitan decline of the ‘80s, has contributed to the sharp change in the forms of housing provision. Thus, a growing number of families have moved outside the metropolitan areas in search of better housing conditions, often promoting and financing their own houses directly; non-urban settlements accounted for 50% of overall housing completions during the 80s, against a rate of 20% in metropolitan areas. Images such as the “widespread city” and the “urbanised countryside” have in fact been introduced in order to describe new social links and a new configuration pattern in some highly industrialised and highly urbanised regions (for instance, in the central and north-eastern regions).

Such images try to conceptualise the difference between the new scattered landscape in the north-eastern regions; the old urban industrial landscape of north-western regions; and the rural and tourist Southern regions. Regional differences are in fact very sharp in Italy: for instance, the rate of single family houses is 30% and the rate of urbanisation is close to 34% in the North-East; is 17% the former and 46% the latter in North West; while single houses accounts up to 40% in the basically rural South. The rate of single double family houses varies as well from 7,7% in cities to 40% in non urban municipalities. High rise distribution highlights an even more polarised view: five main cities (Rome, Milan, Turin, Naples and Palermo) show a rate of high-rise buildings over 30%, mostly in Rome and Milan (where is worth to note that high rise housing built before World War II is respectively 19% and 23%).

Padovani reported for the Milan metropolitan area “a situation of high housing mobility within the metropolitan area” (Padovani 1995), whilst mobility had a dominant regional pattern in the previous decades. This pattern already existed in the 1970s, and was confirmed during the 1980s. It is then possible to state that: “the metropolitan area is attracting population from the more remote regions of the South of Italy and from abroad, and is exporting population to areas close by, especially towards the communes within adjacent provinces” (ibidem). More precisely, the migrants who had moved to Milan after World War II were nearing the retirement age around the 80s; a considerable percentage went back “to the areas they had left some thirty years earlier”. Later, such outflows rapidly came to an end, while intra-metropolitan area movements started to increase. The growth characterised movements either from or towards the core, and even movements within the belt. These latter are considered to be interesting developments within the process of extension of Milan metropolitan area; however, similar trends are recognisable in the Roman areas as well (Cremaschi 1990).

In conclusion, tackling housing practices in perspective, a clear-cut distinction should be made between early and mature modernisation (when industry and city grew-up together and new communities were created in the surroundings of major cities), and post-industrial cities. Contemporary housing renews the variety of “dwelling rationalities” against and over the simplified opposition between individualism and collectivism embodied by the “modernist” architecture (stigmatised as narrower and more single minded than the “modern project” of housing: Tosi 1994a and 1995).

Post-industrial societies bring industry and towns to separate, while concerns with the working and the living become more and more independent. As a consequence, wide ranges of settlements, neither urban nor rural, are introduced. City and neighbourhood -as the spatial equivalent of society and community- tend to be useless concepts, as the standard model for urban and housing policies has changed. They have been substituted by a wider concern with the framing of large “scattered semi urban environment” (Coppo and Cremaschi 1994).

The structural change in metropolitan development trends led to a major shift in housing policy guidelines: the effacement of the neighbourhood concern that was the dominating problem during the fifties and sixties. Neighbourhood and community policies have long since been neglected, but originally they were intended as a programme to promote urban solidarity. A concern with the “locale” dimension in cities had not re-appeared until very recently. And issues related to community problems have begun to be perceived as a consequence of the fall in urban quality, and of the financial crisis of public housing.

A concern with local issues is growing in Italy too. For many years Italian housing policies were characterised by a marked degree of ambiguousness: the major example is the misleading overlap between support for the building industry and social solidarity, which has brought about an incongruent and haphazard social distribution of the benefits and disadvantages, together with many oversights at macro-economic level with regard to redistribution.

Furthermore, the redefinition of the relationship between inner city and suburbs seems give rise to a new element in the discussion: decentralisation entails considering public intervention in a more advanced configuration than in the one represented by the state model. It is reasonable to think that a change is required in the forms of intervention and in the technical tools themselves: one crucial issue is the establishment of new rules of coexistence and convenience for both public and private operators; another point of equal vital importance is the construction of new local agencies able to respond to different reasoning processes.

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1 In the North-Eastern regions, one of the fast-growing area in Europe, relatives, co-workers, friends, and neighbours variously contributed to the family effort (Tosi 1995).

2 According to the annual Household Consumption National Survey (Istat has made available data for the 1996 issue in 1998).

3 The wedding rate has severely declined since the Seventies when it was 7.5‰ (404.464) to 5.3‰ in 1993, and to 4.7‰ in 1997 (272.049).

4 In 1978 different questions were addressed for items related to crime, but no possible average could make sense. Answer for burglary, the higher among the three, has been taken in the text; dissatisfaction for vandalism (16%) and personal safety (13%) were considerably lower.

5 More than 36% of flats is less than 75 sq.m., and 37% is over the average size (compared to 74% in detached or semi detached houses). Almost all multi-dwelling accommodation are fully equipped, nearly 90% has a balcony and a liveable kitchen, 31% has a double living room. Heating is needed for a 10%; bathroom is inadequate for 4%; telephone lacks in 1,5%. However, the same figures are higher in the average (Irer 1996).

6 Presumably, a large number of dwellings was early abandoned in the South of Italy due to the strong migration stream towards the industrial North. However, censuses classified as non-occupied a bulk of different situations. Besides, foreigners living in Italy are not reported by the censuses. For instance, in the metropolitan areas of Milan, unoccupied dwellings are nearly 120 thousands (8%), four as much the number registered in 1961. Actually, one third is utilised even if on a temporary basis, another third is waiting to be sold or rented, one third is vacant.

Family strategies and housing practices in Italy

editore — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:38:01 +0000

International Housing Conference, Housing in Southern Europe, a separate path?, Madrid, 2-4 dec. 1998

Nobody seems to doubt that housing is a “mature” issue in Italy. Basic needs are satisfied, as in many other European Countries, a good level of housing provision has been attained, most common housing indicators are doing quite well. Actually, “a huge development of the housing stock (…has occurred…) in Italy since the end of the 2^nd World War” (Padovani 1996), one that has obviously changed not only the object, but also the meaning itself of current housing policies.

In fact, many have stressed that massive construction, while resolving mere housing deficit, has created new issues, in particular issues related to the new poverty configuration in western countries, as we see later on, and issues related to the quality of the built environment.

Even from a quantitative point of view, however – traditional policies such as the massive construction experienced in most countries in some “age gold” decades – did not solve housing needs entirely. As far as mass housing is concerned, discussions about convergence matters seem rather useless. Mass housing policy is in fact the local branch of the universal modernisation endeavour, a convergence process in itself.

In order to compare housing policies, is usually taken for granted that the post-war era is the reference period. “Economic and social policies in much of Europe (…) have been formulated and applied within a more stable political environment than hitherto, and conditioned to a greater or lesser extent by the parameters of western liberal democracy” (Balchin 1996). As a consequence, nobody can be surprised if a mixed but assimilable frame sprung out of a few policy choices operated since the War, like housebuilding on a massive scale, a large social rented sector, and (at least partially) the subsidies to home-ownership. All these choices were in fact backed by a general political consensus, which both left and right wing parties basically expressed in favour of the centrality of housing policies.

Actually, during such decades much of Europe experienced as well similar trends in demography, equally rapid changes in geographical hierarchy, and a common tendency towards economic growth (a coincidence, by the way, that is unlikely to happen again in the future). In a word, the “golden” post-war Decades (sic) were reasonably the most radical experiment across the Europe of a “modernist” model resulting from a queer combination of Keynesian public policies and a “Fordist” large enterprise economy.

As is quite clear, the experiment is over, at least since the ‘70s and thanks to a new wave of liberalism, with its legacy of privatisation, deregulation and decentralisation, whose equivalent changes in respect of housing policies are the sales of the public-owned stock, the retrenchment of welfare benefits towards limited social groups, the redirection of subsidies (direct or indirect, such as tax relief) towards dwelling consumption instead of investments (Ghekière 1991; Cremaschi 1994c).

To put it in other way, the post-war era is a profitable field for comparative research for the same reasons that make it a period of convergence for much of Europe: shortly, “the main shifts in housing development in Europe since 1945 follow a clear pattern” (Power 1993). As for the housing policies, and in order to address the question of the convergence among different countries, it is worth tackling the whole issue in a broader perspective, where different models of state and market regulations can be observed.

This caution is particularly needed for countries like Italy, where the modernisation process presented specific characters, such as deep regional economic inequality, massive waves of overseas migration from the poorest Southern regions around the century and towards the North-western regions in post-war years, the importance of sub-cultural networks in differing social identity.

1. A longer view

Modern housing policies span well over a century. First proposal and experimentation date back to the Enlightenment and first Machine Age. However, it is a common habit, as for comparative purposes, to look more carefully to some forty years, approximately since World War II onwards.

This is a sensible choice, since what lies at the very core of any comparative research is the presumption that every different situation can be depicted by a stable and limited set of variables.

With regard to the past century, we can observe at least three main phases of growth (^²), corresponding to different combinations of constraints and regulations and sometimes different regimes:

the early modernisation effort took place around the beginning of the century, coinciding with a liberal regime, and implied a considerable effort to overcome the structural and regulatory differences among former regional states unified in the new Italian state in 1861. Then, between 1881 and 1951, the population in Italy increased by 59% and households by 78%, however less than the increase occurred for available dwellings. Growth was a typical urban phenomenon, in the sense that occurred basically inside or around the XIX century boundaries of cities, rapidly saturating every plot of land available for residential use. Dwellings grew both because of the construction of new buildings and because of the reduction of the non-occupied sector; while the average size of the family was quite high, well above 4 components per households, and the share of single component families was very limited. It is worth stressing that even after the war, the share of the rented sector was quite high.
After the 2^nd war (not to consider the Fascist regime for the sake of simplicity) the country entered an age of prosperity, known as the “economic boom”. Between 1951 and 1971 population increased again by nearby 11% while households by 35%. Almost the entire demographic growth of the country concentrated in a few major metropolitan areas, which were invested by huge waves of migration (Coppo e Cremaschi 1994). In the meantime non-urban areas reduced their share of the pie (-11%), generating by the way a relevant phenomenon of abandon of dwellings. A severe shortage was than experienced (partially because of war destruction) notwithstanding a massive effort in construction that allowed the number of dwellings to double (a process that took place until the end of the 70s). Despite the fact that the main metropolitan areas collected 46% of all new residential construction (Coppo and Cremaschi 1994), the gap between households and dwellings has been widening for all the period spanning through the three post-war censuses. During the same years, a relevant share of all completions was diverted to non-primary uses; i.e. the number of vacancies steady grew. This was the result of different processes: basically, several middle class households built or bought their own summer houses; many dwellings were kept vacant (or informally rented) to avoid rent control; some houses were (slowly) built in view of the age of retirement in the village or region where people came from. However, the non-occupied sector witnessed a dramatic increase as a consequence of the abandon of rural areas and of the malfunctioning of urban markets; the unoccupied sector grew up to five time its size. And finally, households size begun to diminish while family structure started to change timidly;
The beginning of the final and present step can be tracked down to the de-industrialisation crisis of the end of 70s, which considerably changed the regional pattern of development, and notably witnessed the rise of the SME model in the so called Third Italy. Since then (and so far), population is steady, having substantially reached its peak in the mid 80s (later small increases are basically due to foreign immigration), while households grew by 32%. Also the rate of increase in dwelling completions reached its peak during the Seventies, and has been slowing down afterwards, as well as the vacancy rate, yet exceedingly redundant according to all estimates. The most important change that took place in this period was the dispersal of growth, which no longer concentrated in major urban areas, but affected mainly cities in the Centre and North Eastern regions which had not been previously interested by economic development. The share of large households on total families was considerably reduced, while single households (most of them old retired people) attained and overcame the rate of 20%, especially in urban areas such as Milan (32%) or Rome (nearby 40% in the central districts).

Tab.1 Housing indicators in Italy

1881 1931 1951 1961 1971 1981 1991 1997*

Population 29791 41043 47516 50471 52958 56557 56778 57563

Households 6620 9328 11814 13747 15981 18632 19909 21193

Dwellings 6873 9664 11411 14214 17434 21937 25028 26500

Occupied dw. 6136 9070 10756 13032 15302 17542 19736 21070

Non-occ. 737 594 655 1182 2132 4395 5291 5500

HH. Average size 4.5 4.4 4.0 3.7 3.4 3.0 2.8 2.7

% single 10.3 12.7 17.8 20.6 21.3

% hhs with >5 people 25,6 20.9 14.9 11.3 7.7

Source: on Istat, National Censuses

Note: The overall dwelling figures include second homes and vacant units.

* Estimates

2. Housing and models of modernity

According to these partitions, we can suggest some features of different models of housing policies. What is at the centre is the very nature of the issues addressed by policies implemented in the three stages we depicted: the long early modernisation years, the economic boom age, and the later age after the de-industrialisation years.

For the first 50 years, the housing system worked hard in order to provide new dwellings for a population, which was not only growing fast, but also substantially moving from the mountain hamlets to the coast towns, from towns to big cities and from South to North.

Basically, two features should be reminded of this period: the sharp polarisation between the industrial areas and the rest of Italy; and the role of municipalities and social reformers in inspiring local housing policies.

As for regional inequalities, quite surprising, the ratio between dwellings and population had been lower until World War II in the Centre-North regions, where the migrants in-flows were high; however, figures show that it has steadily improved since then. On the contrary, the availability of dwellings has been severely limited in the rural South for decades, which even a relative decrease shows for a long span, while joining the national trends in the last quarter of the century only. Actually, the age-long shortage has been recalled among the reasons that justify the sometimes exceeding provision of housing in the South, soon after as families’ income rose over the basic need level (Cremaschi 1994).

As for municipal involvement, a national scheme to support low-income housing provision –based on contributions established on wages and public bodies- was not established until the mid 30s, while not attaining its present form until the end of the Sixties.

It should be reminded, however, that the very idea of an ideal dwelling fitting to the poor –the so-called “casa popolare”- was developed at this time. Such elaboration can be hardly reduced to the practice of a minimum housing units for each household (McGuire 1981). In fact, the housing reform movement was not intended only to shelter people, but precisely to let them take abode in a physical place as well as in a social organisation.

Of course, “normalising” assumptions have largely determined the modern housing model, with its functional distinctions within the dwelling and between work-place and living-place; however “the diffusion over time of these models have been slow, and fraught with obstacle. The variance reminds us that modern models have never achieved a complete success” (Tosi 1995).

Albeit a patronising and somehow “disciplinary” ideal was implied, yet housing was intended as an initial step in a broader process, one which would finally end in a full citizenship. Dwelling, living and belonging (to a place, or a community) was firmly maintained as intertwined dimensions of the provision of housing. For instance, eminent urbanists of this period were extremely cautious about the economic rationality of modernist high-rise developments, and the social cost implied by the management of large and complex building. However, functional criticisms mixed confusedly with social prescriptions. Reasons like the following were reminded: a) the need for a high “urban background” of the dwellers of a building requiring technological devices for the circulation of people, the distribution of things, the disposal of waste etc.; b) the inadequacy from the point view of the visual control of children in outdoor space; c) the overall cost of the construction; d) a lower “social hygiene”, supposedly meaning the risk of social mix for moral habits; e) the complexity of the financial scheme involved in the financing of high-rise buildings (^³).

tab.2 Households and dwellings per censuses

Index (1881=100)

1881 1931 1951 1961 1971 1981 1991 1997*

Population 100 138 159 169 178 190 191 193

Households 100 141 178 208 241 281 301 320

Dwellings 100 141 166 207 254 319 364 387

Occupied dw. 100 148 175 212 249 286 322 343

Non-occ. Dw. 100 81 89 160 289 596 718 746

dw./hh.s 100 104 97 103 109 118 126 125

Source: Istat Censuses and Consumption Survey

+ Estimated

tab. 3 Rate of increase per year

% increase 1951/1881 1981/1951 1997/1981

Population 59 19 2

Households 78 58 14

Dwellings 66 92 21

Occupied dw. 75 63 20

Non-occ. Dw. -11 571 25

% House-sharing 2,8 5,9 0,6

average % increase per year

Population 0,8 0,6 0,1

Households 1,1 1,9 0,9

Dwellings 0,9 3,1 1,3

Occupied dw. 1,1 2,1 1,3

Non-occ. -0,2 19,0 1,6

Source: Instate Censuses and Estimates on the Consumption Survey

tab.3 Dwellings per thousands inhabitants

1881 1931 1951 1961 1971 1981 1991

Centro-North 199 229 243 297 348 401 449

South 285 248 235 256 295 364 427

Italy 231 235 240 282 329 388 441

tab.4 Non-occupied dwellings, % on total

1881 1931 1951 1961 1971 1981 1991

Centro-Nord 6,4 6,1 5,4 8,3 11,8 18,2 18,4

Meridione 16,0 6,2 6,4 8,4 13,1 23,7 26,1

Italy 10,7 6,1 5,7 8,3 12,2 20,0 21,1

tab.5 Housing indicators per macro- regions

Centre-North 1881 1931 1951 1961 1971 1981 1991

Population 18881 26525 30136 31750 34084 36504 36241

Households 3765 6063 7330 9425 11865 14639 16255

Occupied dw. 3524 5691 6935 8644 10460 11971 13256

Non-occ. 241 372 395 781 1405 2668 2999

South

Population 10910 14518 17380 18721 18874 20053 20537

Households 3108 3601 4081 4789 5569 7298 8772

Occupied dw. 2612 3379 3821 4388 4842 5571 6480

Non-occ. 496 222 260 401 727 1727 2292

The early modernisation built environment was not only the result of a national policy effort. Private developers and building companies on the one hand, and the public agencies on the other, were concerned with the provision of low-cost dwellings, almost entirely built in the new industrial cities. Although the common strategy was the production of high-density estates in comparatively cheaper peripheral lands, public and private developers operated according to different ratios, these latter being far eager in applying a normalising view on dwellings and urban developments, a view which would be a prime in the second post war era. In this second phase of the economic boom, mass-housing was at the core of some national programmes, which eventually came together in the Housing Act of 1968. For instance, the “housing for the working class” national post-war policy resulted in a massive construction of multi-dwelling social housing estates in outer and isolated locations. Private developments followed filling the gap, speculating than on lands provided with basic infrastructure and inclosed between the centre and the peripheral ring. During the crucial period of growth (since 1951 to 1964) the number of dwelling completions has been fast growing (Padovani, 1986). Public investment rate was very high in this first period, for Italian standards, although it diminished from 25% in 1951 to 6% in 1961 1965.

As for the last period, public policies re-organisation affected housing sector as well. Since the age of “mass-housing”, social housing continuously declined. In particular, the already limited share of 8% per year in at the beginning of the 80s felt to a scant 2% at the beginning of the 91s not to rise anymore. Public finance support diminished, while local authorities became more and more involved with the new configuration of housing needs and poverty issues. However, public supported housing construction did not completely disappear. While the number of social rented dwelling continues to diminish, a state supported housing programme concentrated on major urban areas, trying to contrast urban decline subsidising the provision of rented dwelling in urban areas. New estates were built not only for low-income people, but also for people unable to find an affordable rented flat or even a rented flat itself. Even then, however, a national policy aimed at supporting the private rented sector in metropolitan areas, leading to the construction of large residential enclaves in the outskirts of major cities. Although a great political tension about the scope and role of public intervention, the conclusion that government commitment to housing “showed little sign of decreasing” (Power 1993) seems tenable at least for the 80s.

A problem arises then about the real function of government intervention, whether “it is directed to sustain social housing (that seems more and more unlikely) or to sustain the market” (Seassaro 1994). The withdrawal from social housing has been at least compensated by the subsidising of private rented, middle class housing. And finally, construction in the 90s is becoming a more and more scattered activity: almost 70% of dwellings are built outside urban areas by now (Cresme 1993).

Besides, we can state that the dwelling model incorporated in mass-housing failed to solve the relationship between individuals and collectivity, amplifying the loss of a common “public space” (Cremaschi 1994a). The problem is the relationship between the spatial organisation of a dwelling system and its social content, that is often incorrectly attributed to the building form (see for instance Coleman 1985) while it heavily affects the organisation of social relations in space and time and even the economy of cities.

tab. 6 Dwellings per age of construction

total stock %

before 1919 4,745,270 19.0

1919-1945 2,633,517 10.5

1946-1960 4,095,790 16.4

1961-1971 6,090,200 24.3

1972-1981 4,940,627 19.7

1982-1991 2,523,118 10.1

Total 25,028,522 100.0

92-97* 1.470.000 5.9

*Estimation on data provided by Istat, Ministero dei Lavori Pubblici, and Cresme

source: calculation on Istat, 1991

3. Family networks, informal provision, and sociality

Family promotion is quite common in Italy: that is easily acknowledged with reference to rural areas and, basically, to the remnants of the pre-industrial era. However, the role of the family in industrialised countries tends to be undervalued (Padovani 1988) whereas it represents, in Italy as well as in many western countries, an important agency in the housing market (Padovani 1991).

In several southern European home-ownership constitutes the main way of accommodation for the widest range of income groups, and it is associated with the role of families. Actually, the rate of home-ownership has been higher in Southern Europe among the low income, even before public support.

This can be explained with the role of extended families, which mobilises all available assets to provide members in crucial need with resources intended to provide access to ownership, or even with a ready-made dwelling. The example highlights two important features of family involvement: the inter-generational pact, that transfers resources, good, services and even more (for instance, housing models and localisation choice); and the relations between state and family, one of contrasting as well as making up for welfare inequalities, an issue that will be dealt with in the next paragraph.

As for the transfer of goods and services, usually references are paid to the construction of a single family house in rural areas, where it has been an affordable task for a long time even for a low-income family (provided at least the ownership of a building lot).

Actually, the importance of family networks is underestimated, since it affects not only the informal providing but also accession to ownership in general. Families help accession to ownership either financing the purchase on the market (which account roughly for half the total), or providing a dwelling through inheritance or self-provision (including self-construction).

It order to state that “inter-generational transfers pave the way generously to home ownership” (Tosi 1995) several examples have been advanced: Tosi reported findings by Cuturello and Gotman, who have stated that 28% of the owners have had family backing in their purchase, and that 13% of the semi- and unskilled working class achieved home ownership either through inheritance or donation.

In Italy in 1978 it was estimated that 30% of owner families had received their home through inheritance, an habit not limited to rural areas, being the same percentage 15% in big cities (Istat 1978); a few years later, when a huge pressure was exerted towards an extension of the ownership area, sometimes subsidising the purchase of a newly-built flat, the same index was still at 23% (Istat 1985). However, ownership due to the financial help generated in families is commonly accounted for a substantial percentage of the total: in an area of settled and widespread urbanisation like Lombardy, “21% of owner-families gained their home through inheritance or gift, and 27% received financial assistance from their parents for the purchase or construction of a home (Tosi 1987), trends confirmed some years later (Cremaschi 1997).

However, family promotion is responsible for an important and growing share of total building completions: according to some estimates, this figure has changed from 40% of new dwelling construction in the first half of 80s (Cresme 1993) to 30% in 90s. In the same period, industrial providers, such as building companies and construction firms, hold an approximately stable share of 30%.

Some ethnographic records report in detail the articulated family strategy over time, however this effort does not refer to extended family only. In fact, it has been identified in areas where the modernisation process brought extended families (Pitkin 1985) which were not among the original features of local societies.

In this case, construction was directly promoted by the householder: somehow, he acted as his own “general contractor”, searching for loans, looking for building materials, co-ordinating workers, asking sometimes for planning permits (sometimes ignoring them deliberately, as in the widespread case of illegal construction: Cremaschi 1990), etc. Often he took on part of the job, possibly with friends and relatives; and often built not only his own home, but also a house for every child. In order to accomplishsuch a task, every financial and human resource of the components of the family are involved.

However, it has been stressed that “this recourse to the family network cannot be read simply as a strategy for increasing resources on an economic-rational basis… relationships count as least as much as the nature and level of the resources exchanged” (Tosi 1995). Findings by field researches have suggested that these exchanges are not only generating a real economy, but they develop primary socialities and identity processes.

4. The Italian Social Welfare system

As for the relation with state welfare, the scarce protection should be remembered provided for several social groups. The Italian welfare system is in fact centred on the existence of broad insurance schemes grounded on an employment basis. Workers are in fact fully protected by a scheme covering against the risks of being unable to work due to unemployment, loss of job, sickness, inability, retirement age, etc. (Tosi, Kazepov, Ranci 1998).

As a consequence, if exception is made for the health service, no system of social welfare protection has developed in Italy that is capable of providing cover to all citizens for risks connected with insecure or “irregular” work (Negri and Saraceno 1996).

This state protection model has a clear residual character, as opposed to universal systems of social protection: but such a “conservative” welfare system, considered to be a topical feature of Italy, could be not inadequate in a period of occupational growth, when the non-protected are a small group somehow connected to the ones who benefit from the protection schemes.

For instance, welfare benefits have been often directed towards the aged (protected by inability or retirement schemes), which possibly have already attained their own private homes; surprising as it can be, the “consequences of this biased welfare distribution might not be as severe as it could be expected” (Sapounakis 1997), and can be explained with reference to the role of the family.

Family solidarity has so far compensated for the otherwise unequal welfare distribution; the uneven combination of strong family and social networks, on the one side, and a weak state on the other, has partially absorbed the shock produced by economic change and social transformation.

However, many scholars have expressed concern towards the capability of familial and reciprocal institutions to prevent the effects of social deterioration brought about by the “post-fordist transformation”. Long-term unemployment, protracted dependence of children in terms of income, combined with the effects of demographic change and economic restructuring induce a growth of the risk of poverty non only in Southern cities, but in Northern ones as well (Mingione and Morlicchio 1993).

As a consequence of economic restructuring “the familial and kinship system is overloaded with responsibilities and the risk of individuals being dragged down into poverty depends on its capacity of supporting their conditions of need” (Kazepov 1994); and the risk appears impending as far as cuts in the national social budget are going to add to the “traditional shortcomings of the social policies system” (Tosi 1994b).

5. Policies for the 90s

Typical housing policies have been the construction of new dwelling and the subsidising of ownership for a long time. In the past twenty years housing policies have been changing. In most European countries changes have been fairly similar notwithstanding differences in previous and present political orientations.

There was a general decline in public investment; a shift away from government regulation towards market mechanism, in particular in the control of the rented sector and sometimes (but not always) in the subsidising of housing consumption; often a decentralisation of government control, with direct involvement of (and partially a devolution to) local authorities; and “the (declining) financial support shifted from generic to specific subsidies, targeted to the groups with the weakest socio-economic position” (Boelhouwer and van der Heijden 1994).

However, in Europe and in other western countries housing policies are now facing mostly problems of poverty and exclusion, a widespread problem of affordability, and sometimes a new “shortage” especially for the urban poor. Nowadays, people with housing needs do not form a distinctive social group, one that could be described as large, coherent and widespread, as it was possible with blue-collar households for a long time. Such people belong today to heterogeneous niches, and are characterised by many social and economic disadvantages, and often are gathered in certain urban neighbourhoods. For these people, social problems of exclusion (for instance, because they are immigrants or foreigners) and economic problems (because unemployment, etc.) are mutually reinforcing.

Later estimation of housing needs suggested then different approaches (Irs 1994), stressing that poverty, on the one hand, and housing stress, on the other, are not coincident factors, but combine in producing demand. Besides, housing stress is articulated according to different geo-economic areas, being particularly extended in southern big cities. And finally, process of exclusion from housing interferes with the former more traditional factors, creating a reduced core of people in “extreme need”. A minimum estimated of 900 thousands families (5% of the total), which can be extended to a twice as maximum, were expected in this situation five years ago. Moreover, housing problems and deprivation areas concentrate in major urban areas, especially in a few high-rise estates.

In such a climate, it is quite unlikely that families keep supporting positive efforts to face the poverty risk. A re-establishment of housing policies is then required, as some programmes implemented in Europe have tried to do, drawing on two separate issues: the multiple combinations of poverty and housing processes, on the side of social actions; and the renovation of the built environment, on the other.

Some key-words of such experiences (for instance, a multidimensional concern with the poverty issue, partnerships, participation and empowerment, local community involvement, a close evaluation of the effectiveness of the intervention…) suggest that the logic and structure of public policies has changed over the past twenty years. The objective of an integrated approach is to get actors who, until now, have ignored each other, to work together, to modify their ways of thinking and acting and indeed to promote a change in administrative systems in order to make them better fitted to the complexity of the problems faced. Often partnerships are built up with the local residents. Development, change and service delivery in an area are most likely to succeed when those most affected by policies and programmes are effectively involved in the process and share a sense of benefit from its results.

However, as a methodological point, “local” characteristics of the intervention should be stressed in order to achieve greater “multiplier” effect. As has been stated, “neighbourhood is the appropriate place to carry out a dynamic and relevant analysis of the difficulties faced by its inhabitants, and within which all the family, community and institutional networks (…) can be mobilised” (Commission 1993a).

This does not mean of course that all the solution can be found within a territorial framework, but that working within a defined locality fosters partnership and synergy. It is quite commonly recognised that policies can not but fail when addressing only one feature of a global problem or, whilst addressing several issues, failing to control the overlap of contradictory outcomes. “Improvements to the built environment are not only a matter of technique and finance: they require a clear analysis of residents’ expectations and must aim at changing the neighbourhoods’ image in the city. Furthermore, integrating actions in this way enhances synergy and stimulates more impact than when they are implemented piece-meal” (Commission 1993).