Analysis of soft policies for landscape protection in Italy through the Urban Maestro model

Over the last decade, soft policies applied to the quality management of urban transformations have been increasingly used in the European administrative landscape. The relevance of these practices can be found in a recent, international, and interdisciplinary bibliography. Notable authors and institutions have explored concepts such as soft law, soft space, soft planning, and soft power, defining the field of scientific debate on the role of informal practices in the management processes of urban transformations. The research “Urban Maestro. New governance strategies for urban design”, funded under the Horizon 2020 program and conducted between 2019 and 2021 by UN-Habitat, Bouwmeester Maître Architecte of Brussels (BMA), and University College of London (UCL), is a significant reference for analyzing and classifying soft policies oriented to promoting design quality in the European landscape. This contribution aims to read the most relevant practices in the Italian administrative system through the Urban Maestro model. It is based on the practices described in the “Report on the state of Landscape Policies”, drawn up in 2017 by the National Observatory for Landscape Quality. The “Report” presents a broad compendium of soft policies the Italian Ministry of Culture and its peripheral offices applied, with satisfactory results. This contribution analyzes the cases explained in the aforementioned “Report” to test the Urban Maestro model in the Italian context and evaluate the potential and limits of soft policies for managing project quality in the national cultural and administrative context.