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Following the Italian Government's decision to fund strategic planning in order to promote a sustainable and competitive development in city-regions in southern Italy, the regional governments were asked to steer proactively strategic planning initiatives within their respective territory. In the cases of Bari and Taranto, it was the first time that 31 municipalities constituting Metropolitan Bari and 28 municipalities constituting sub-region Taranto attempted to think collectively in order to prepare the strategic plan. This paper evaluates strategic planning in Bari and Taranto sub-regions and discusses lessons learnt for future efforts in strategic planning. We examine why were the strategic plans made and how was the planning process organized and what, if any, impact these attempts had on development strategies and governance models at the urban-regional level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Analytic Network Process is a multi-criteria measurement theory that is used to derive relative priority scales of absolute numbers from individual judgements. The Analytic Network Process offers a general framework to deal with complex decisions, which provides a comparison of the different options. The paper shows the application of the Analytic Network Process to support the decision-making process related to the choice of different transport scenarios in the town of Venaria Reale, Northern Italy. In particular, considering the necessity of improving the connections between the city of Torino and the town of Venaria, the need for new infrastructures emerges. In this sense, it is necessary to investigate different project solutions, taking into account the problems related to sustainable mobility and the impacts on the urban structure that will, from necessity, be changed to a great extent. The paper illustrates the work that has been done in order to make the decision makers able to consider the different aspects of the problem simultaneously, to identify the key questions and to prioritize them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategic urban and regional planning, which emerged in Europe in the 1980s, has become an instrument to establish sustainable development of previously successful industrial areas today affected by the crisis caused mostly by the globalisation of the 1990s. Strategic urban planning concerns organisational land use which in turn regulates resource protection, sustainable development, regeneration and infrastructural investments and multilevel governance. Careful planning is imperative to reach goals such as enhancing local competitiveness and life quality. These dimensions represent the two focal points of the majority of city planning strategies. Their implementation depends not only on planning effectiveness, but also on the organisation and the management of the implementation process by the planning agency or the equivalent local promoter. This paper looks at the experience of Italian cities, in order to derive implications for theory and for future planning processes. More specifically, it analyses the extent to which Italian cities follow similar or divergent paths at the stage of the design process; the Italian case study is then compared with the guidelines proposed by the planning literature and with other European cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]