An Italian Urban “Fashion”: The Urban 1 Programme as a Catalyst for Institutional Planning Shift

Since the 1990s Italy has been going through changes and experiments concerning modes and tools of urban government. New methods, based on public-private partnership, on a consensual basis, were progressively adopted, overcoming the traditional authoritative mechanisms and role of public actors. The contribution of Community policies such as initiatives on urban areas, has been crucial in creating new tools, influencing the existing ones and activating new approaches to planning. This paper builds some theoretical considerations on the contributions the European Programmes’ implementation has given to the changes in the conception of urban interventions and the debated shift in urban policies between “government” to “governance”. The aim is to build a critical analysis about how the Urban 1 initiative acted as a “catalyst” for the evolution of urban practices, accelerating the innovation of the planning cultures and practices. The article examines three cities where Urban 1 Programme has been developed: Genoa, Naples and Palermo. The cases have been selected in order to catch the wider variety of interpretations of EU initiatives across Italy, fostering a critical discussion on EU programmes and their relationships with local planning policies.