Regional Landscape Planning and Local Planning. Insights from the Italian Context

Landscape has acquired great importance in the urban and territorial policies of European countries after the European Landscape Convention. Italy has a long tradition in the protection of landscape and cultural heritage, characterised by a particular attention to the history and the identity culture of the communities. The main rule in this field, the Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape of 2004 (Urbani Code), refers to a mix of environmental, cultural, and social factors belonging to different types of natural and urban landscapes that Regional Landscape Plans have to identify, sharing with local communities. The most important innovation concerns the attempt to overcome the binding and regulatory approach, only focused on protection constraints, in order to generate high awareness about the identity value of landscape and to encourage a more democratic community participation in the landscape policies. The ineffectiveness of landscape policies is often due to the lack of sharing of the landscape vision and planning approaches established at regional level, with local authorities and settled communities. This paper reflects on the topic of inter-institutional collaboration between national, regional, and local authorities, by focusing on the process of adaptation of urban local plans to the regional landscape plans and comparing different regional contexts. The article highlights a strong delay in the approval of regional landscape plans and a relevant inter-institutional conflict in the co-planning phase with the national authority, leading to the ineffectiveness of landscape plans in the transfer of regional landscape planning guidelines to the local landscape scale, with relevant consequences on territorial government, between conservative measures and transformation drivers.