New scenarios for the Metropolitan City of Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy

The recently established (2016) Metropolitan City of Cagliari (MCC) comprises 17 Municipalities of South Sardinia, including Cagliari, the regional capital. The population is approximately 430,000 inhabitants, in an area of 1,248 km². The area is surrounded by mountains to the East and West, by the Gulf of Cagliari to the South, and by the agricultural Campidano plain to the North. In 2018, the MCC Public Authority started the work on its first planning initiative, the Territorial Strategic Plan, which is going to set the development framework for future physical planning. However to date, no inter-municipal planning have been carried out. Hence, developing a new strategic plan for the area represents a challenge and an opportunity for innovation, both in technical and socio-cultural terms for the local community. This study represents a first attempt to explore possible future development scenarios, in line with the IGC assumptions and perspectives on territorial technology innovation. In the last decades, while the MCC faced overall stable trends in population growth, affected mainly by the limited movement of population from the inner small towns of Sardinia. Despite very limited immigration flows, the Municipality of Cagliari lost approximately 30% of its inhabitants in favor of neighboring municipalities within a 15-20 km radius, due to market dynamics. The MMC needs to balance spatial development patterns in terms of infrastructure and services.