European Regional Science Association
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European Regional Science Association
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The abstract for paper number 107:
Sandro Fabbro, Department of Civil Engineering of the University of Udine, Udine, Italy
Between Places and Networks: a “Strategic Planning System” for Institutional and Negotiated Policies at the Regional Scale
According to the logic of “complex systems”, the European regions must inevitably integrate more and more reflexive functions as well as strategic abilities, simultaneously aimed both inward and outward, in order to cope better with the new global perturbations as well as with those connected with the next enlargement of UE to the Countries of the Eastern Europe. This is also the perspective of the Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia in the Norh East of Italy, a border region where a traditional system of planning (based on land use control) needs to be changed introducing a new Regional Strategic Planning System (RSPS). With reference to this case, the paper wants to sustain that a RSPS -at the regional level and not only at the urban level (Healey, 1997)-, liberated from a certain business reductionism the concept of urban strategy implies and able to integrate, at the same time, institutional and also negotiated practices, can thus be the instrument to cope effectively with the emerging conflict between the traditional “economy” and “culture” of places, on the one hand, and the interests – potentially, but not necessarily, deterritorialised – of the emerging “economy” and “culture” of networks, on the other (Castells, 1996). Thus, RSPS is not only intrinsically aimed at innovation, change, and thus development, but must, almost necessarily, be aimed at encouraging local independence and self-organizational skills avoiding to forcibly reduce environmental variety and complexity (and, possibly, restoring those environmental elements that go missing). From this perspective, a different image of the future that – according to a certain logic of specularity and reciprocity between places and networks – tries to combine the “networking” of places, on the one hand, and the regional and environmental “rooting” of networks and nodes, on the other, seems to be a desirable general frame also for the Regional Strategic Plan (RSP) that is the instrument, of the RSPS, specifically aimed at adequately framing the environmental, transport and local urban plans and projects. A RSPS so aimed could also be a valid regional implementation of ESDP as well as of the general principles of sustainability and subsidiarity.
References
Castells M. (1996) The rise of the network society, Blackwell, Oxford. Healey P. et al. (1997) Making Strategic Spatial Plans, UCL Press, London.
Unfortunately full paper has not been submitted.