Understanding the impact of the EU-led urban initiatives on city-making: evidences from the case of Palermo (Italy)

Southern Italy – the “Italian Mezzogiorno” – is recognised as one of the most controversial case for regional development in the European Union (Leonardi, 2005; Piattoni and Polverari, 2016). Within this broad geographical unit, home of around one third of the country’s population, after thirty years from the reform of the structural funds that in 1988 reshaped Cohesion policy, large regions such as Campania and Sicily have never changed their status of ‘less developed regions’. Major urban areas within these regions, therefore, reflect – and to some extent are an expression of – all the development questions the EU’s regional policy has aimed to address from the beginning: infrastructures gaps, lack of competitiveness, weak economic processes, social exclusion. The paper article seeks to investigate the role played by the EU’s programmes on the evolution of urban policy in Palermo, the second largest urban area in Southern Italy and capital of one of the most populated Europe’s lagging regions. The case history, anticipated by an overview on the debate on urban areas which took place at national level in recent years, is developed according to the following temporal sequence: • The nineties, when the first EU-led initiatives were developed in the city under the reformist climate leading to the rediscovering of urban areas in national policies; • The 2000s, marked by a drastic change in local politics, resulting in a clear reshape of priorities within the development policy for the city; • The last period across the crisis, dominated by austerity, characterised by the emergence of new sectoral approaches in policy-making and stronger connections with the European and national agendas. The last sections of the paper provides some hypotheses concerning the direct and indirect influence of EU’s policy over the city’s changing process. These hypotheses are concerned to three main domains with respect to which the paper seeks to provide a series of critical (qualitative) evidences: urban regeneration, local governance and planning innovation