Governing the gap. Strategies and instruments for the territorial development in European cities

This thesis addresses the topic of how strategies of urban spatial development act through existing urban planning institutional contexts. The research has roots in strategic planning and spatial planning theory but pertains to the interdisciplinary field of urban studies and therefore is at the edge between policy analysis, urban planning and social studies. In this work, strategic planning is defined as a set of methodological approaches and instruments that contributes to the management of change. The change I refer to is the shift towards different forms of urban development and governance in European cities, happening at the turn of the century and largely debated by urban studies academia. Although this change concerns all the areas of public policies, I have focused my interest on spatialrelated decisions and strategies and developed my observations on three different scales. The three levels of analysis (European networks level, urban level, and urban projects level) are linked to three different indicators of strategies embeddedness: international transfer mechanisms, existing planning cultures and local institutional constraints. To each of them, I have dedicated one chapter of the thesis. In the first chapter, through a socio-graphical report of strategic planning emergence and dissemination in Europe, I have defined my entry point in the existing literature and exposed the need to re-establish a sound comparative attitude according to this broader definition of strategic planning. In the second chapter, I have looked at the strategic planning-related discourses and diachronic innovations (between the beginning of the ’90s and the end of the 2000s) in three European capital cities – Rome, Vienna and Paris. My aim has been: to reconstruct the infrastructural organization on which the governments have embedded their objectives; and to identify the adjustments operated on the institutional settings related to spatial planning culture. The result of this analysis questions the existence of a unique model of strategic planning institutionalization, despite the convergence of related narratives and expected governance models. In the third and last part of the thesis, I have analysed the development of the polycentric urban strategy, pursued by the centre-left “reformist” municipalities in Rome, between 1993 and 2008. In this dig at the local scale, I have elaborated on the link between strategies and strategic projects, to obtain information on how the existing instruments and institutional structures determine the absorption of strategies at the implementation level. My results relate to the need to consider these normative and cultural constraints when looking for indicators of strategic planning manifestations. In other words, the institutionalisation of strategies characterises contemporary strategic planning models in distinctive ways, related to implementation instruments inertia.