THE ROLE OF PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS IN STRATEGIC TOWN PLANNING AND TERRITORY GOVERNANCE IN ITALY

The inadequacy of planning intervention on the part of Small Historic Centres (SHCs) can be traced to the absence of specific regulations and a scarce capacity for territory governance. On an institutional scale, the process of decentralisation in Italy, from the 1980s onwards, has changed the relationship between centre and periphery. This has contributed to rendering the elephantine bureacratic machine of the State more agile and has favoured greater administrative independence. At the same time, as concerns territory planning and intervention, normative institutes based on inter-institutional cooperation, negotiated planning and public-private partnerships have been consolidated. Public-Private Partnerships are an instrument to which SHCs, quite often incapable of attracting investments, have to resort, taking into account the financial difficulties being faced by local Authorities. This implies mechanisms of self-organization and experiences that envisage the active role of private sector stakeholders. Resorting to Public-Private Partnerships is furthermore, motivated by the fact that SHCs are from a geoeconomic perspective, mixed goods, in other words, a combination of purely private goods (residences, shops, workshops and so on) and purely public goods (streets, public squares ad so on). This implies necessarily, the involvement of the private sector in the devising and governance of planning initiatives