The Innovation of the Landscape Planning in Italy

Landscape is a special focus of interest and innovation of spatial policies in the European Landscape Convention of the Council of Europe (ELC, 2000).The ELC holds that landscape is ‘an essential component of people´s surroundings, an expression of the diversity of their shared cultural and natural heritage, and a foundation of their identity´ as well as an economic resource to implement sustainable development (art. 5a). The ELC is taking a dynamic approach to landscape, recognizing that nature, history, and culture coexist and interact in the landscape. Therefore the safeguarding of landscape should be redefined as a project and a program for action in order to help landscape undergo environmental, economic, and social changes in view of the needs and expectations of various social actors (art. 1e) and in view of changes in territories that have been stipulated by planning. This innovation has been implementing in Italy in the new Italian Code for the Heritage and the Landscape (DL 42/2004 e DL 157/2006) and in the recent Regional Laws for Territorial Governance (in the Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Veneto, the Toscana, the Lombardia, the Umbria, Campania e Sardegna) and in the new Regional Landscape Plans (in Piemonte, Abruzzo, Molise, Puglia, the Sardegna). According to the international guidelines, for the first time in Italy the Code develops the Regional Landscape Planning to the entire territory (to the ordinary and the excellent landscapes) and it introduce a new operative framework to promote the sustainable landscape valorisation policies and projects, that should be implemented in the practices. In this view, the paper wants to describes: 1. the new approaches on the landscape, the environment and their interactions in the Regional Laws, in the policies, in the Regional Plans and in the most recent landscape projects; 2. the new principles of the Regional Italian Laws for the landscape and the territory, that are introducing new contents to the landscape and the environment protection and valorisation policies and projects, with reference to plans; 3. the innovation of theories and methodological approaches of the recent Landscape Planning, aimed at describing the evolution of protection policies, the subjects and the forms of the plans, the weaknesses at operational level, the relation between landscape planning and the new planning tools for sustainability. This innovation process can be traced to the upgrading of the Regional plans (in the Province of Trento and the Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Veneto, the Lombardia, the Toscana, the Lazio, the Campania, the Calabria) and to the experimentations of new plans aimed at the Code and the ELC. This comparison of italian regional experiences wants to defines the new methodological approaches and the experimentations to promote landscape policies and projects and the integration of the environmental and territorial processes aimed at sustainability.