ABSTRACT
Introduction The global financial and economic crisis started in 2008 and continues to date in the form of a sovereign debt crisis that has added a further dimension to the increasing social and economic complexities of contemporary urban life (Cash et al., 2006; Gibson, Ostrom, & Ahn, 2000; Holling, 2004). The crisis has generated growing challenges for territorial governance, as it has been traditionally conceived in the different European Union (EU) member states. Answers had to be developed within the ongoing process of consolidation of a so-called multilevel governance model that, since the advent of globalisation, redefines the distribution of powers and competences from the local to the EU scale, from public authority to the private sector (ESPON, 2013). The crisis, the development of complex cooperation and competitive relations between cities, the emergence of a new form of territorial governance, and the process of globalisation itself have put cities at the heart of the turmoil in multiple ways. On the one hand, public administrations have experienced a crisis of the tools that have been traditionally adopted to manage territorial transformation and which, in the majority of the contexts, consisted of local land-use plans now illequipped to interpret the heterogeneity and fluidity of contemporary urban phenomena. On the other hand, cities and their regions have quickly become key institutional laboratories for restructuring territorial governance, and for experimental policy-making. Nowadays, confronted with a further wave of austerity urbanism, politicians and urban managers continue to look for new strategies to cope with the intensified contradiction between shrinking resources on the one side, and the need to guarantee development and cohesion on the other. To shed some light on this process, it is worth trying to link the evolution of territorial governance arrangements in a specific territory to the contextual conditions that may have influenced them. This chapter discusses the various territorial governance initiatives that have emerged in the context of the Turin Metropolitan Area1 in the last 20 years,2 reading them in the light of the two crises that affected the city in the 1980s and in the late 2000s. The case of Turin has been chosen due to its peculiar history in the Italian framework, characterised by waves of crisis and recovery that started in the early 1980s, when the
shift from Fordism to post-Fordism undermined the economy of the most successful Italian one-company town (Bagnasco, 1986; Governa, Rossignolo, & Saccomani, 2009). Building on the recent literature about ‘planning with soft spaces and fuzzy boundaries’ (Allmendinger & Haughton, 2009, 2010; Haughton et al., 2011), the authors show how traditional territorial governance has been increasingly paralleled by a heterogeneous set of ‘softer’ policies and tools for boundaries that vary ‘fuzzily’ in relation to the issues at stake, the actors involved, and other factors. After a brief introduction to the ongoing debate over the tensions between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ spaces in territorial governance, and to the methodology of analysis in the second section of this chapter, the text in the third section presents the evolution dynamics of Turin’s Metropolitan Area, starting from the local crisis of the 1980s up to the recent global economic crisis. The analysis in the fourth section then focuses on the territorial governance models that emerged during the last 20 years, subdividing them into ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ geographies and reflecting upon their characteristics in terms of scale, statutory character, actors involved, and geographical and thematic scope. A concluding section rounds off the contribution, discussing the presented results in light of an additional territorial layer, which will be introduced to the Italian institutional system in 2015: metropolitan cities. As will be shown, this process derives more from reasons of economic austerity than from a thorough analysis of actual territorial governance needs.
