Geography and new models for territorial planning: Italian case study

The contribution aims to discuss the efficiency and the efficacy of a new political and administrative planning method. It’s different from the past because it researches the subsidiarity and its apply at local and sovra-local public powers (regions, province, municipalities) moving by the sustainable values. The paper presents how an specific original geographical research can contribute to built a new model of Public Territorial Planning in Italy, in the actual transitional fase from a functional and monocentric regional vision to a polycentric regional one for federalism and European integration. The methodological base born by the critical discussion of last experiences in matter of strategic planning, realised in Italy and Europe (larger metropolitan plans), because they derived from a coercive planning action (the reference is a hierarchical-functional network of hard powers), the powers are centralised (top-down model), the offer of planning is fixed a-priori as project ideas, the plan is indifferent to the citizen demand of "bottom up" organisation. An intensive experience is at the base of this reflection, made from 1999 to 2003 into the picture of the Rome General Provincial Plan. It speeds up provincial government – a medium level of subsidiariety in Italy - to orient economic-territorial regionalization on the sustainability, moved by geoeconomic and geopolitical research, to estimate ex ante the effects that newborn federalism will be able to have on the economic-territorial organization of Italy and future organisation of Capital Area. An original planning and the different use of geographical instruments (a special GIS project applied to management the first case of European Environmental Strategic Evaluation – ESE) explain impacts appraisal of transformation from current regional mononuclear model for Capital District or Region to equipotential polynuclear one on local and cohesive base (11 communities of municiplaties), clearifing i) on which principles the federalist community must model the system of territorial local government (territorial plan of large metropolitan area) and to which conditions (the rules of metropolitan governance) to begin a national Capital; ii) if, in the Italian case, current political rules of territorial and administrative subjects can orient the choice, so that local communities maintain potential resources to let future generations use them, also puting towards a progressively aware increase.