The XXI century periphery: Turin and the urban crisis

The crisis affecting the city of Turin needs to be framed in the Italian situation for its general outlines: plunge of the building sector production, contraction of the real estate market, housing crisis. The major planned scenarios seem to be stuck, despite the best intentions of the city government in offering favourable conditions to entrepreneurs. Looking at the peripheral areas of the city, the situation seems to be particularly dramatic. In the increasing competition for localizing new opportunities of development along the urban territory, the suburbs seem to be condemned to exclusion. In absence of favourable benefits, the entire mechanism of urban transformation seems to stop irreparably. The planning tools and procedures have always implied a sort of automatic pressure coming from the development profits, which are now becoming widely uncertain. In a pessimistic projection, cities like Turin could find themselves in a situation of marginality within a globalized real estate market: a sort of XXI century periphery of the world capitalization, where the possibility of driving the public transformation by leveraging private investments is increasingly weakening. We can suppose that, in this situation, the role of urban design and planning should deeply change in order to provide new tools in governing the future development.