Introduction

This second issue of IJPP, which starts with a reflection of Leonardo Benevolo
about the job of planners, is entirely dedicated to the presentation of some case
studies in the region of Campania. These represent challenging contexts
characterised by weak planning in an area where decades of neglect, illegal
building activity and lack of any effective public spending policy have created
favorable conditions for the development of illegal planning practices.
What emerges from the cases presented is a socio­political context with a
poor perception of the role that planning could play as one important
element for development.
The authors have centred their attention on the difficult processes that have
characterised their plans rather than the results and outcomes of their work as
planners. What clearly emerges from the papers is the importance of the
relationships between public and private actors who determine these processes.
In the case of Acerra for example, a municipality of considerable complexity
because of both its important historical heritage and environmental decay
and abandonment, only one plan has been produced since World War II, in
1982. After that, the process for a new plan was started in 2008 but the years
since have been characterised by two different administrations, both of
which have ended up in compulsory administration.
IJPP ­ Italian Journal of Planning Practice IVol. II, issue 1 ­ 2012

ISSN: 2239­267X

Massimo Santoro
City of Acerra Manager



The plan for Monte di Procida, where a careful analysis and reconstruction
of landscapes has been carried out, has contributed to highlight heritage
values which make up the quality of development in an administrative
context which used to consider the Plan to be merely a tool for building
regulations.
In Pompeii’s plan, the dualism between the government and the dominant
role of the Curia brings out the complexity that exists even between public
actors. Despite this, it is an example of good management of such
relationships by local planners. The same is true for the case of the Urban
Implementation Plan for the Neapolitan neighbourhood of San Giovanni a
Teduccio. Here, the plan tries to find new solutions to the somewhat
counterproductive duality between port activities and the need for urban
regeneration, crystallized in the difficult relationship between two strong
players, in this case the municipality and the port authority.
From some contributions, a sort of bitterness emerges about the ways in
which different stakeholders and public policy makers have been unable to
cooperate and make land use decisions. This is the case of the plan for the
five municipalities affected by the construction of the high speed train
station in the outermost suburbs of Naples.
Despite their variety, the cases presented in this issue share common
problems and challenges which have to do with the procedures set out by
regional regulations that often delay the whole process of plan approval.
Therefore, there is a need to understand why the intentions for innovation
and renewal of planning practice are still affected by great slowness.
In Campania, only in 2004, a new regional planning act was passed, more
than twenty years after the previous one (L.R. 16/04). Out of 551
municipalities, there are only a few dozen municipal urban plans approved
under the new regional act. Most of the municipalities have a planning
instrument with an average age of almost twenty years and many regulate
their planning activity by means of the Programma di Fabbricazione,
building regulations which were introduced by the national act of 1942.
In such a context it is of great importance to deepen and compare the
significant experiences that are beginning to take shape. For IJPP this is a
commitment which cannot be ignored.

IJPP ­ Italian Journal of Planning Practice IIVol. II, issue 1 ­ 2012

ISSN: 2239­267X