Top down policies and bottom up practices in Urban and Periurban Agriculture: an Italian dilemma

The paper deals with the issue of urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) in Italy, highlighting some relevant aspects of its contradictory processing in the planning perspective: the traditional exclusion of agricultural areas from the goals of territorial planning; the too sharp distinction between top-down policies and bottom-up practices; the lack of agricultural policy at the local scale, quite completely dependent on the CAP policies. Following this track the paper develops into two parts. In the first one an overview of the slow evoluting relation between planning and agriculture in the Italian planning system is given. This overview shows on one hand how the current separation between agricultural and territorial policies has been reflected in the time at the various levels of government from Region to Municipality; on the other hand it shows how a gradual overcoming of this separation has been experienced with the regional legislation and its related plans, mainly resulting in two levels of regulations: one related to the aspects of farming activities, the other to the protection of landscape and the environment. In the second part the paper focuses on how, due to the lack of suitable solutions coming from regional and local planning, a large number of initiatives were started by diverse actors in autonomous but not always convergent ways. Starting from this evidence, and in order to show the limits and the great potentialities of these various approaches, three peculiar experiences based on the Milan, Turin and Pisa territories are presented. As an eloquent cross-section of the variegated Italian situation, these cases are today facing changes that require clearer choices to integrate food policies and UPA in an overall strategy of urban transition. In the concluding section the authors argue how it is just in the field of governance and inclusiveness that arises the first challenge in Italian context, i.e. to overcome the limits inherent to the tradition of the top down planning system. To this end, it is necessary that also the present distance between the spatial planning and the food planning approaches, which echoes that of the historical opposition between town and countryside, be overcome through appropriate forms of disciplinary interaction and social participation.