This seminar, focusing on the topic of cities of the future, brought together specialists in the field of urbanism, local administrators, entrepreneurs, urban traffic experts and representatives from the welfare sector. Divided into three day-long sessions, dealing with governing complexity, competitiveness and quality of life respectively, the seminar raised various issues for debate and put forward a series of concrete proposals aimed at resolving the many problems afflicting the governance of Italian cities.
The debate got underway with a reference to Aristotle and Plato, examining the ancient Greek philosophical notion of the polis as the defining unit of social and political life of a community confined within a geographical space yet evolving over time. The seminar explored various longstanding issues in the field of urbanism, such as the uses of value functions and the growth of cities. New possibilities were, however, also discussed, such as the idea of overcoming the culture of viewing immigrants, poorer people, the elderly and the marginalized as a drain on society so as to involve them in development and income-yielding activities, thereby turning them into drivers of an innovative trend underpinning a new ethic of coexistence.
The mayors participating in the seminar, leaders of small, medium-sized and large cities such as Oristano, Lecce, Varese and Genoa, recalled the changes brought about by the introduction of the direct election of mayors, once the impact of major events as a stimulus for development had waned, which saw municipalities become coordinators of new “strategic plans and agreements“ through which to involve the private sector.
Several concrete proposals were put forward during the seminar to improve the governance of cities. These included amalgamating neighboring municipalities in order to improve shared infrastructure, freeing up the granting of permits for commercial premises larger than 1500 square meters (that are currently also subject to regional zoning plans), and overhauling the taxation of land rents in order to ease development costs and thereby enable the financing of urbanization and heavy infrastructure, as occurs in Spain, London and Hong Kong.
Overall, the participants supported the idea of “reestablishing the responsible exercise of discretionary power in the administration of urban centers”.