Planning peri-urban areas at regional level: The experience of Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna (Italy)

This paper describes the measures adopted by Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna (two Italian regions) for planning their peri-urban areas at regional level. Peri-urban territories merge urban and rural features and extend beyond the municipal administrative boundaries. This prevents their precise delimitation, as well as the adoption of municipal plans for their governance that are coherent with their spatial, economic and social development. As a consequence, many municipal authorities do not give significant attention to these territories and adopt territorial plans that are exclusively based on the urban-rural dichotomy or land-use micro-transformations. Since their jurisdiction extends to a supra-municipal level, the regions could play a decisive role in peri-urban governance. This is the case of Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna regions, among the few in Italy to have drawn up specific legislative and planning documents aimed at supporting the spatial urban-rural equilibrium in the urban fringes. As demonstrated at the end of a documental analysis concerning spatial planning laws and plans, both regions have experimented with specific measures to address the agro-environmental balance and urban regeneration in peri-urban areas, but they do not delimit them spatially or adopt specific measures for their governance. Furthermore, they do not engage in joint regulation or planning of the urban macro-region that extends across their regional territories, from Varese (North Lombardy) to Rimini (South-East Emilia-Romagna), resulting from the merging of their peri-urban areas.