Presentation 3 Author(s): Marco Picone, University of Palermo (Italy); Filippo Schilleci, University of Palermo (Italy) Title: Mediterranean Neighbourhoods: Is There an Alternative Governance Model for Local Identities? Abstract: Back in 2002, Le Galès acknowledged that European cities are composed of increasingly diverse social and cultural groups. As Beck and many others state, most world cities are experiencing a deep change, due to cosmopolitanism and globalization. However, there is one scale of analysis that might at first appear entirely unrelated to the new emerging spatialities (conurbations, city regions, post-metropolises). This scale is the neighbourhood, which looks like a relic of a now lost time. The authors believe that neighbourhoods host the majority of urban social (sometimes ‘insurgent’) movements, along with interesting negotiations of governance processes: therefore, they cannot be rejected as useless and outdated realities, even within contemporary European cities. The main topic the authors discuss concerns the applicability of the traditional Anglo-American notion of neighbourhood to Mediterranean cities. Is globalization determining the diffusion of just one model of neighbourhood (i.e. the Anglo-American) all over the world? Or is there a distinctive Mediterranean model of local identities for our cities? Starting from the analysis of case studies from Italy and Spain, the paper suggests the need of describing Mediterranean neighbourhoods in a new way, while strengthening their role as the ‘connecting ground between private and public spaces’ (de Certeau). Presentation 4 Author(s): Juli Valdunciel, University of Girona (Spain) Title: The failure of land-use planning in Spain within the context of the housing bubble and the uncertain transition towards a sustainable urban model Abstract: The contributions of the early 2000 to the expansive urbanisation debate in Spain described and criticized the irrationality of this development model and pointed out the neglected role of the actors involved (administration, financial and real estate sectors). The recent contributions have drawn a much more complex framework, in which a tacit consensus among developers, governments and local society was achieved in return for economic development and in a general absence of territorial culture. This paper reviews the debate on the housing bubble through the study of the geographical literature published in the last years. Firstly, it will analyse the planning institutional architecture and its response to expansive urbanisation. Secondly, it will focus on wrong practices in urban governance (oversize local development schemes, modify them according to the individual needs of developers, etc.) and the diffused corruption recently reported. The conclusion is that expansive urbanisation was not only due to the fact that the normative was ineffective but also to wrong practices in urban governance sometimes linked to corruption. Although the recession has meant a forced stagnation in residential development it is not clear that many of the current practices, such as the recent laissez-faire modifications in the Coast Act, are going in the direction of the UE directives and the new green growth visions. Presentation 5 Author(s): Sabrina Iommi, IRPET (Italy) Title: A multi-criteria approach for the identification of Italian metropolitan areas and the formulation of territory-specific policies Abstract: In Italy the delimitation of metropolitan areas and the assignation to an unitary government or, at least, to a well-structured system of governance is an age-old problem, which has not yet found a solution. Furthermore, when legislative proposals on metropolitan areas have been formulated, they did not refer to any of the criteria used in the scientific approach (level of urbanization, presence of specialized economic functions, commuting areas), but they identified some cities in an aprioristic way, mainly referring to provincial borders. The paper suggests a multi-criteria approach for the identification of Italian metropolitan areas, which has two main advantages: it considers all the aspects that concurrently make a metropoly (population size, population density, level and composition of the production base, internal and external connectivity, system of governance) and it allows to identify specific deficits for each pole (in size, in density, in functional specialization, in governance, etc..), which required territory-specific policies.
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