.

. Home

. News

. Contacts

.

. Territory

. Local Systems

. Spatial development

.

.

.

The new territorial interdependencies raise the question of whether municipalities are the appropriate level for regulating the trajectories of economic and spatial development. In Italy , with reference to the country’s big cities, the need for territorial integrated planning which extends beyond municipal borders has led to development of the notion of  “metropolitan area”. Since the 1990s, legislatives changes have made it possible to define forms of administrative and strategic cooperation among municipalities.

In this new territorial network, a large number of collective decisions which still pertain to municipal administrative autonomy have necessarily assumed a supra-municipal dimension. This is a consequence of  the substantial negative/positive effects of these decisions on the territories of contiguous municipalities. The expansion of the existing industrial areas and the creation of new ones, the local transport network, the production of basic services, the localization of infrastructures, building development, and many other collective decisions have already assumed an inter-municipal nature and should arise from an integrated decision process. In many cases the strategic orientation of individual municipalities should express strategic cooperation among contiguous municipalities.

Stimulating forms of strategic cooperation in order to govern territorial interdependencies has been made more urgent by the increasing strategic behaviours of municipalities. As a consequence of recent institutional changes, municipalities are now endowed with organisational and financial instruments to steer local development trajectories. Encouraging them to establish forms of inter-municipal cooperation  – so as to reconfigure strategic functions –  should in itself be an objective pursued by an economic development strategy.

When defining an economic development strategy for such a differentiated territory as the province of Macerata , the above-mentioned issue of cooperation among municipalities in the field of strategic planning should necessarily be addressed, given that this kind of cooperation is crucial for determining the province’s trajectory of economic development. Starting from acknowledgment of the strategic autonomy of individual municipalities – not only with respect to the other municipalities but also with respect to the Provincial (and also Regional) Governments  – the problem to be solved is how to construct stable forms of  strategic cooperation among municipalities by means of incentives and other instruments.

Cooperation – and even collaboration – among contiguous municipalities continues to encounter numerous obstacles in Italy ; and in the Province of Macerata  as well. For this reason, at levels of regulation higher than that of the municipality – particularly, the regional and national levels - attempts are being made to incentivise cooperation/collaboration agreements among municipalities. (Currently, a top-down approach which would force municipalities to cooperate does not seem politically feasible – although it should be borne in mind that institutional reform of this kind has been accomplished in other European countries in the past decades). Accordingly, the Provincial Government of Macerata, too, could introduce a system of incentives rewarding forms of cooperation/collaboration among municipalities, thereby strengthening  the strategy proposed at regional and national levels.

Incentivising forms of cooperation/collaboration among municipalities raises the issue of which clusters should turn into units of regulation area by area. The most effective solution is the one whereby agreements among municipalities respect territorial patterns. This means that the “islandes of cooperation” among municipalities must be decided, not with respect to the efficiency of public services management, but rather with respect to the effectiveness of economic development strategies. In order to achieve sustainable local development, the regulation of positive and negative externalities is much more important than the optimal management of the public services.

Identifying the local systems in the Province of Macerata and defining the procedures by which municipalities take common decisions are the first steps to be taken in building an effective regulation system at the provincial level characterized by the strategic autonomy of the local system and by interaction among different local strategies.