Engaging small and medium-sized towns in metropolitan governance: evidence from Italy

Metropolitan areas represent nowadays the main drivers of European development. This puts traditional spatial governance models into crisis, with existing territorial units that are challenged by phenomena hardly manageable within their fixed administrative boundaries. A growing number of governance experimentations have emerged in Europe aiming to address the metropolitan dimension. In the Italian context, this process led to the introduction of 14 Città Metropolitane, that substituted the respective provinces in particularly complex territorial contexts. Due to its nature, however, the reform raised a number of challenges in relation to the actual role that small and medium towns should play within the new governance arrangement, and how their cooperation with the large urban core they gravitate around can bring reciprocal benefits and added value. This paper sheds some light on the matter, discussing the state of the art of metropolitan governance and planning in the country, to then use the cases of Torino and Bari to highlight how different levels of territorial fragmentation contribute to raise different challenges for metropolitan governance and planning. In doing so, the authors reflect on the advantages and disadvantages that small and medium towns encounter when participating to metropolitan governance.