Regional planning and territorial competitiveness: the role of Identitary Heritage. The case of the Sardinian Region

The recent economic crisis has strongly affected the spending capacity of local governments which have had to adopt austerity policies and increase their territorial competitiveness. Regions and global-cities are then looking for "original" plans and programs, tailored on resources available in a given territory, respectful of its settled communities and their identity, and able to provide sustainability to the global competition. In Europe many regions have identified in landscape planning based on historical, cultural and environmental heritage the way to a sustainable future. Despite this, in Italy the regional landscape project culture acts through the instrument of the obligation. Only recently it has been discussed the possibility to make the restrictions become a shared instrument for landscape project, as demonstrated during the first revision of the Landscape Plans drafted after the adoption of the Italian Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape in 2004. The paper aims to investigate the innovative methodologies introduced by the landscape planning in building set of rules referred to stratified, historical and cultural sites within planning instruments and according to territorial competitiveness principles. It is taken into account the case of the Sardinian Regional Landscape Plan (2006), now in redraft, in which they were introduced new problematic categories of cultural assets detected on the bases of their identitary value. The objective is to defining a set of rules in order to clear up Identitary Heritage concept and its implementation in urban and regional planning in order to ensure an effective sustainable territorial competitiveness.