Reflecting critically on Turin’s Strategic Planning Experience

Strategic planning experiences have been widespread across many European countries in the past decades and have been the subject of many articles and essays. In Italy these experiences occurred later than in other countries. Actually, the first well-known strategic planning experience in Italy was developed in Turin at the end of the 1990s. Thus, Turin could be an interesting case to study, because it can been looked at as a paradigmatic case from different points of view, perhaps not only related to the Italian situation: the point of view of economic and social changes, the point of view of spatial transformations, the point of view of the undertaken policies and also the point of view of the innovative government processes that have been developed in the last ten years. At the end of the last decade this sort of innovative turn seemed to be over; a new cycle in the economy as well as in the strategy for looking at the future and in the policies and politics that will govern the city and its metropolitan area may be about to start. This paper describes the changes that took place and tries to reflect critically on the results of the strategic planning process that was developed during the last decade as an answer to these changes, underlining especially the weak points of the experience, which could be at the base of the current situation too.