Urban Standards monetisation: experiments between limits and perspectives

After the Ministerial Decree no. 1444/1968, which introduced urban standards, the need to update the set of rules that determine the development of public spaces was periodically questioned. As early as 41 years ago, regional urban planning laws began to introduce specifications to Ministerial Decree 1444. In particular, having to decide how to waive urban standard areas, the Regions introduced the monetisation scheme. This issue, although a limited part of a wider and more complex discussion on the renewal and coordination of national urban planning regulations, has a number of critical issues and theoretical-operational opportunities that are worth dwelling on. Starting from a comparative analysis of Italian regional regulations and from numerous examples of application in municipalities, this paper focuses mainly on the method of calculating monetisations and discusses an innovative case study that has included in the calculation also a principle of equal distribution of services based on the amount of urban standards present in the zones of the Urban Development Plan. Spatial information tools have been used with the aim of better understanding the distribution of data on urban standards in the places where they have been or will be developed. The proposed calculation method could enable the public decision-maker to use monetisations without too much discretion and in a more conscious way than the simple calculation of the real estate value of the land that is now widely used in Italy.