Urban/rural co-productions. Planning and governance approaches for improving the relationships among city and countryside in Italy and England

The thesis explores the relationship among local governments’ cooperation and planning policies in two domestic contexts, Italy and England. The purpose is to investigate the relational politics, processes and practices of cooperation by which local governments can shape planning policies addressed to improve the contribution of agricultural production in building stronger ties among city and countryside. The research problematized this topic by looking at the planning actions and interactions, connection and disconnections among local governments in two domestic contexts, Italy and England, and in three cases of contrasting administrative and geographical size and configuration: the metropolitan area of Milan, the Aso Valley in Marche region and the City Region of Bristol. The thesis adopts a qualitative research methodology, in which the data collection relies mainly on a series of semi-structured interviews, addressed to institutional actors and civil society representatives, and a documentary analysis on reports and official planning documents. A further methodology employed by the research is the scenario-making, which is used for evolving the planning and governance processes of the three case studies towards more effective collaborative arrangements. In the metropolitan area of Milan, the two forms of cooperation investigated within the space of the South Agricultural Park —the Park Authority and the Rural Districts— although spatially overlapping and sharing a common space of action, they have not established any significant relationship yet and they have been expressing two different planning rationales. While the Park Authority’s planning policy has a narrow focus on land-use regulation due to important financial and management constraints, the Rural Districts have shown a high transformative potential which has conveyed a process of critical reconnection between food consumers and producers across the urban/rural continuum. In the Aso Valley, a number of spaces of cooperation among local governments and civil society, which intersect and overlay, can be recognized. They have constructed a collaborative landscape of variable geometries where local actors have promoted a strategic and forward thinking towards local development. These cooperative geometries have resulted in reformulating the urban/rural dichotomy into a multifunctional and strongly interdependent countryside. Current challenges lie in guiding local governments to construct a consistent and efficient joint planning policy able to express a coherent vision of development for the whole valley. In the City Region of Bristol, the relevant issues of transparency and accountability raised by the Local Enterprise Partnership —the newly business led inter-municipal body established in 2011 by central government— come together with a planning policy only addressed to housing and infrastructure demands. The result is that, in the process of delivering new developments, the Plan has discarded the quality of agricultural land and the location of green and blue infrastructures. Hence, it has originated negative impacts on the agro-ecological resources of the city region and, more importantly, it has overlooked the contribution of the countryside in addressing city region’s social and economic growth. The study offers a contribution on planning research and practice by investigating three different governance and planning approaches to the issue of agricultural production within the urban/rural interface. What the three cases elicit is a delicate tension among city’s pressing social and economic needs and countryside’s unexploited contribution to more localized patterns of agricultural production.