LIBRI DI LUIGI MAZZA

Urban planning culture in Italy, but also elsewhere, is experiencing a period of particular academic and social weakness. This weakness is seen, at least in part, in the absence of rules for the discipline to reinforce training processes and to give them authority. Planning culture today is characterised by a large number of different objectives which are not always clear and consistent with each other. No codified technical language exists with which to communicate without too many misunderstandings. A training process cannot be based on practices alone, but requires the support of institutionalised knowledge and it is therefore indispensible to ask the question whether it is still possible to refer to spatial planning as a discipline.

Il volume analizza le interazioni tra diversi fenomeni emergenti, quali l’evoluzione delle culture e dei modelli organizzativi, la crescente pervasività dell’innovazione tecnologica nei processi sociali e lavorativi, lo sviluppo delle politiche di human resource management e di comunicazione d’impresa. I contributi raccolti propongono casi innovativi di rilievo nazionale e internazionale, come American Express, Nokia Siemens, Sorgenia, Telecom Italia, Agenzia spaziale italiana, Agenzia del territorio del Ministero dell’economia e delle finanze…

Strategic planning from an Italian republican perspective - In order for it to be complete, a planning system cannot be limited to local considerations. A higher level of conceptualisation is required, though very often this is lacking or else is present only formally, hence without any tangible consequences. In the debate of the last few decades, commentators have reached consensus over the fact that strategic planning should be seen not only as being on a higher level than local planning, but above all as a different way of planning. The present article explores the discontent that for several years has been a constant companion of this type of planning and traces the reasons for this in three main issues, all of which boil down to excessive expectations in strategic plans. The piece concludes by arguing that it is possible to design and implement a complete planning system only in a republican perspective, by which is meant using a spirit of ‘constitutional patriotism’ as the foundation on which to rebuild an authoritative role for the state in the context of legality accompanied by a renewed sense of responsibility vis-à-vis planning.

Hippodamus and the plan - It was with singular anticipation that in his writings on Hippodamus Aristotle placed social and spatial control in relation to each other: in this perspective planning is not only the art of building a city, but it is also a tool of government and the spatial order produced by planning is presented as an instrument of social control. The name Hippodamus is associated with a checkerboard urban layout, known as a ‘Hippodamus’ grid’. Hippodamus was not the inventor of the grid which had been in use many centuries before him, but he can be considered as the inventor of planning, if it is defined as an instrument of social control through the control of space. The exercise performed on Hippodamus is designed to underline the association between a grid and constitution and to identify the political nature of planning practices in motives that are more radical than those normally recognised for it. It is also an attempt to ask questions about the criteria that govern planning action and to identify the elements that characterise it in order to condense them into a concept of planning, whose independence does not divorce planning actions from political designs. The paper concludes with the basics of a theory of social order planning.