Bologna's history has been largely determined by its geographical position: set in the middle of that part of the of the Po valley bounded by the River Po, the Adriatic Sea and the Tuscan-Aemilian Apennine, the town became the natural meeting point for travellers crossing Italy from north to south or from east to west. This ease of access made this town a privileged centre for the exchange of ideas and goods; over the centuries it fostered an important cultural life (the university), manufacturing and commerce (the city's trade fair). But the city's urban growth was limited and the administrative decisions of previous decades were intended to restrict drives towards expansion, so preserving a pattern of development that for years was synonymous with a good quality of life.

And yet in recent decades Bologna has also been affected by the typical problems of medium-sized European cities: a sprawl of inhabitants and functions from the inner city, loss of identity in the outer-city suburbs, dispersal of the built up areas.
It has become increasingly difficult to govern these trends, which are, in fact, capable of compromising the equilibrium of development so effectively defended before. The result is that Bologna has expanded well beyond the boundaries of the municipality growing not only along the main radials but crowding, without any obvious rules, most of the surrounding territory. In the old inner city, offices have gradually ousted housing, banks small shops and everything that is pushed outside the city seems destined find room in places at a greater distance, with serious problems for mobility. This is the problematic picture that emerges from the surveys conducted in preparation for the Territorial Plan for the Province of Bologna.
The need to deal with Bologna's future by means of a far-ranging project covering a very large area was the foundation of a long and fertile period of supra-communal planning achievements. The first attempt dates back to the 1960s, when Bologna had 500,000 inhabitants. The Inter-Communal Plan (PIC) aimed to establish new facilities and logistic functions, to unite in a single plan the interests and the decisions affecting the road network and the availability of cheap working-class housing in the 15 municipalities which, on a voluntary basis, took part in the project. The lesser attention devoted to the production sector was one of the causes of the problem of fragmentation of the production areas evident today.
The PIC embodied some important decisions: the location of the trade-fair pole, of Centergross, and the Interporto cargo hub (all on the plain to the north of Bologna), the layout of the new stretch of motorway, decentralisation of the university, etc. This experience was followed by the Inter-Communal Urban Plan (PUI), developed in the early 1980s in the context of the Master Plan for the capital, which provided a supra-communal framework for planning forecasts by the communes of the Bologna area, with the aim of pursuing a comprehensive and coherent pattern of development, above all in infrastructure and the areas of expansion, which were again restricted and located along the main axes of communications. The Communes participated in the PUI on a voluntary basis, as they had done earlier in the PIC.
A decade later the Infra-Regional Territorial Plan (PTI) was approved: this was the first to be drafted at the provincial level, in the context of the recognition of the Province as a territorial authority intermediate between the Region and Commune, under regional Law 142 of 1990, which invested it with powers that included responsibility for planning. The Province of Bologna had drafted a planning instrument with a progressive character whose main objectives were to contain the dispersal of development, a phenomenon never recorded before with the same intensity, and rationalise the transport network, without neglecting protection of the natural environment and the landscape. A hierarchy of urban centres was drafted, on the basis of the types of connections that each of them had on the territorial level, strengthening three priority axes of development to be connected to the present and projected railway system.
Another opportunity offered by Law 142 was taken by the administrators of the Bolognese area: the institution of the Metropolitan City The mayors of almost all of the Municipalities of the province of Bologna, united in the Urban Conference, had supported the definition of a Scheme Director of the Metropolitan Territory, a voluntary planning instrument for local planning decisions involving supra-communal phenomena.