Dalla vision del piano strategico alla strategia del piano metropolitano: una prospettiva interattiva per l’operatività

Focus of the contribution is the interconnection of interactive governance and regional design in spatial planning practices. First, processes of governance rescaling will be explored across Europe using the concept of interactive governance as the conceptual framework. Notwithstanding the obvious differences in the institutional systems and planning cultures, the contribution provides a comparative perspective with West European countries (France, Netherland, Italy) where governance rescaling is introducing a series of institutional reforms expected to tackle the challenges of globalization and of efficient public spending. These reforms of planning, while incentivising planning practices across local boundaries, affect the interaction among institutional and soft planning spaces: in a context of meta-governance, Governments expect Local Planning Authorities to undertake partnerships for working jointly on sub-regional planning issues. In this context, processes of defining and redefining sub-regional boundaries call for spatial visioning for both institutional and non-statutory areas. Using the conceptual framework of “interactive governance” to approach the relationships among statutory and soft planning spaces, with a focus on images and their role, the contribution identifies interactions between statutory planning processes and the formation of soft spaces of governance across local boundaries. In this framework, Regional design acts as an argumentative practice that evolves in the context of planning concepts, shared ideas about the spatial organisation of regions, and may be used with different scopes: to challenge prevailing political values and norms, to define new analytical perspectives, to shape regional futures. Focusing on images, visions and visualisation instruments as elements of interactive governance, the author investigates the interrelation between regional design, governance and spatial planning in the case of the Strategic Plan for the Metropolitan City of Florence, and argues that visioning and regional design practices can matter for shaping the boundaries of urban regions and conceiving shared visions of their spatial development.