The Participation of Local Communities to the Landscape Planning: a Controversial Path in Sicily

The European Landscape Convention (Florence, 2000) foresees the integration of landscape into town planning policies and spatial planning (Art.5.d). However, landscape protection instruments (landscape plans), that are active today in many European countries, particularly in Italy), almost always take sectorial value, hierarchically prevailing to other planning tools and evading the democratic process of sharing with local communities. In relation to these considerations, the present paper focuses on the results of a critical reading of an experience of landscape planning in Sicily: the Landscape Plan of the Specific Area 8 in the Messina’s province. In this area the Nebrodi local community, organized in a network, in relation to the critical aspects of the landscape plan was opposed to the rigid logic of the planning process, through the “construction” of a participative process of review of the plan before its approval.