Futures Digging Up Present: Towards the New General Regulatory Plan of Turin

The paper explores some strategies adopted by the city of Turin’s urban planning team in drafting the update of the General Regulatory Plan (henceforth PRG). In particular, it analyzes how a backcasting approach is used to counterbalance the time mismatch between a series of ongoing structural urban interventions, which are the result of a huge public investment, and the slow and cumbersome process for the approval of the new Plan. It is in this misalignment that lies the core of a work composed of pilot projects, forecast scenarios and projective models; all “anticipatory tools” through which transformations are oriented toward a certain idea of the future. Through three case studies – three of the anticipatory projects mentioned above – the article examines this approach, also providing some critical reflections on the methodologies adopted in relation to the objectives.