Retail Planning for Regional Development: The Design of Resilient Scenarios in Trentino (Italy)

The paper presents the recent evolution and development of Trentino retail planning policies and discusses an experimentation of a meta-evaluation methodology, namely TIE (Territorial Integrated Evaluation), for designing retail resilient scenarios. A research team from the Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning of Politecnico di Torino applied this methodology experimentally to the practices of spatial planning in order to integrate territory and retail in the Trentino development policies. The application of TIE set out to design territorial retail scenarios that integrated various topics—retail, tourism, infrastructure, nature and landscape. On the base of TIE principles and criteria, each VC (Valley Community) is now implementing how to design its territorial scenarios assuming different approaches and visions according to its retail opportunities and risks. Starting from some best practices, the paper focuses on the innovative perspective for retail planning and for retail sites designed in Trentino. The emerging regional policy is aimed at linking quality of territorial retail development with environmental sustainability, respecting attractiveness and balance among different retail sites.