Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
29
period of exceptionally long stability for a city that in the previous three decades had seen a
succession of 26 different City Councils. Bassolinos’s administration was initially identified
with the ‘renaissance’ of the city and was seen as an example of ‘good governance’ capable
of improving the quality of local life. The city government returned to play a key role in
urban planning by revisiting proposals of urban innovation that had been frozen twenty years
earlier and by demonstrating a new vitality.
However, it was only in 2004, under the mayor Rosa Russo Iervolino, that the City
Council approved the Strategic Plan for Naples, while elsewhere similar plans had been
adopted much earlier (for example, in 1988 in Barcelona; in the second half of the 1990s in
other Italian cities). Strategic planning can be seen as a new form of urban governance that is
needed to manage a growing special complexity in the context of global competition and of
the new challenges cities have to meet. In the case of Naples, the city plan included main
projects such as the regeneration of the dismissed industrial areas, the revaluation of the city
centre and the modernization of the port area. They were all thought of as a way to reverse
the negative image of the city. The strategy also included new institutional instruments, such
as the Urban Free Zone; that is, the delimitation of an area allowed to have a special system
of low taxation and which is set up by the national government with the aim of attracting
international investment and promoting occupation and social inclusion. If all these projects
and instruments had been put into practice, Naples would have probably become more
attractive in terms of economic competition, sustainable environment and quality of social
life. Instead, as the review of two examples of urban policies included in the strategic plan –
the renewal of the Bagnoli district
2
and of the Historical Centre – and the attempt to adopt the
Urban Free Zone in delimited areas of the city will soon show, the difficulties that the City
government met during the process of implementation undermined their potentiality for urban
innovation.
There is a good reason for comparing these three urban policies in that the first
project, pertaining Bagnoli, was started more than twenty years ago, the second (pertaining
the Historical Centre) was started about fifteen years ago and the third (the Free Trade Zone)
never actually started, even though it has fuelled a very lively and interesting public debate.
In essence, these are three of the most important policies adopted by the City Council, and
they have all had the same outcome: a difficult implementation that has
thwarted their
potentiality for urban change. Interestingly, for all three policies the method used to achieve
2
Bagnoli is a municipality at the immediate Northern periphery of Naples.
