Interviews with Piero Cavalcoli, architect, director of the Territorial and Transport Planning sector of the Province of Bologna

1- For some time, now, and not just as director of the Territorial and Transport Planning sector of the Province of Bologna, you have always been an attentive observer and student of large-area planning in Italy. How does this new PTCP of yours fit into the present Italian context? What are the novelties with respect to the past and the gambles, including those bound up with design, it contains?

The Italian context of large-area planning is a context has been getting more complicated in recent years, particularly because of the application of law 142 of 1990 which regulates local authorities.
On the one side there were excessive expectations of what would be achieved by this reform and on the other a lot was staked on an authority like the then weak Province for the territorial governance of large areas. Law 142 was an invention of institutional engineering, with all the consequences of this disproportion between expectations and real possibilities, but which at first created a season of strong interest and large technical movement that was above all descriptive. We submitted an incredible volume of stories about the territory to the attention of the discipline, but then, because we were supported by a weak political framework, we failed to take many steps forward on the choices.
The question of the large-area planning is also being complicated by the process of the excessive contextualisation of the rules. The regions have become the authorities within which the rules are set, with a total absence of coordination nationwide. All this is leading to a behavioural diaspora in the discipline. These elements have distorted the classic subject of "how to draft a plan": the established schools and techniques are no longer recognised.
The result is there is no longer any unifying element that can express the features of the planning season we are now traversing as an aid to making in-depth comparisons. Some common elements can, however, however, be distinguished: one of these is the recognition of the absolute necessity of consensus as the factor that endorses planning. Any form of planning that is remote from the themes of the common sense of the general public or that tends to impose forms of behaviour is a ineffective planning and it produces no beneficial effects in people's behaviour and ideas.
An underlying novelty is the quest for real consensus through the cross-influence of the plan and of sectorial and economic operators.
We have to move beyond the concerned attitude of those who think that if we promote participation we have to accept compromises and that the plan has to be defended from the public… I'm in favour of taking the gamble of accepting a plan that can serve and be understood by others, not just those who actually devised it, enabling the public to feel it belongs to them. The novelty of this kind of planning is to have accepted this gamble, to be a truly participatory plan, even in the distribution of responsibilities. The first thing that was done was to break down the distance from the communes. The second was to transform the processes, the culture and the way of behaving, starting from the very subject that promoted the change.
So the problem is not just the participation of the 60 communes but above all of sectors within the Province. The plan should first of all be judged on these two objectives: a plan that transforms the authority that drafts it and that simultaneously seeks to transform the authority at which it is directed in terms of the responsibility of the subjects.
The previous experience of planning gave us the Infra-Regional Territorial Plan. This was a light, rapid and spare plan; however it avoid internal comparison. We tried to make the new plan the voice of the whole authority. All that has a price, meaning a document dilated to the point of giganticism. So it was not a not simple operation, and its result will become ephemeral if it fails to pursue continuity on the level of internal collaboration. The plan, so conceived, is not a product but a process. (The effort that produced this plan is difficult to maintain. In fact we have already observed that there are area plans appearing and that tend to go their own way. Besides, at election times the political conflict increases.)
On the front of the Communes, the novelty is that the plan has set in motion aggregative processes with respect to planning, by reasoning on the subjects of the comprehensive negative and positive externalities of an urban area, which can be dealt with through the Associations of Communes. We shared with the Associations some elements of the implementation of the plan, starting an important though risky process. The experiments have just begun, but the impression is that they are building up unprecedented local solidarity.

2 - Technicians and administrators of the Bolognese territory have well-established contacts with their colleagues in other European countries, with technicians and administrations of areas of other nations. What is the contribution that your new work can make and what ideas could it receive or has it received from other European experiences?

I'm not sure there has been a continuous comparison with the situation in other countries. Today we certainly need it, particularly in relation to those major subjects at which the plan aimed. Associationism and the local communities could provide a topic of comparison with other European experiences. We need to engage in this kind of dialogue. Universities have a stronger tendency to keep up international relations, while it's rarer and more difficult among municipal administrations, partly because a good international reputation has no spin-off in electoral terms.
Of the European experiences that I know, two that seem convincing are those of Lille and Lyon. Their most interesting achievements were, on the one hand, the ability to bring together this nebula of communes in apparently solid institutions, solid because there are obvious commitments to expenditure, premises, offices … on the other the creation of an operative structure in the service of the commune. In this case there is an inverse relationship between the authorities. It is not the central offices that appraise the plans produced by the communes, but the communes that assess the plans produced by the central offices: they interpret the policy of the commune through a broader territorial vision. In our case, instead, the central offices appraise the work produced by the communes, which in their turn entrust their actual objectives to individual professionalism. The French situation has a lot teach us about political, economic and financial determination as well as building the apparatuses and the agencies which the local communities can draw on.
For us, all this is a point of arrival of the process that began to be shaped parallel with the Provincial Plan. The PTCP accommodates the tendencies of aggregation of the local community and motivates them and gives instruments to build offices of plans. The plan interprets the variety of the territories and renders them explicit. The French perhaps do it in a more determined and practised fashion. In part this is most likely because of the tendency they have to consider everything within a democratic process.

3 - We know you like travelling and are an attentive observer of distant territories. If we were to ask you tell us of a place or a subject that has been little explored but that merits attention, that would be worth the trouble of exploring in an international review, what would you answer?

Places very close to hand and unknown places. The least urban part of the territory. Cassano says that it is in the twilight that ideas are born. There are places very close to hand that need to be discovered because it is in them that new experiences are born.

4 - This PTCP is a tool that, in our opinion, outlines clear strategies and precise choices; at the same time much of its success is due to the effectiveness of processes and instruments of governance that do not have a long tradition in our country. How is this process constructed, what difficulties has it encountered and/or expects to encounter?

The experiments with new procedures of governance has not been extraordinarily positive. Involving the private subjects that have a significant part in the construction of the future in the process of visioning, while bearing in mind the public interest is a complex result. In these processes of defining the field of co-responsibilisation, there is still a long way to go. With respect to new models of governance, we also have to take into account the political difficulty inherent in these processes. The experiences of strategic planning in Italy are not particularly rich. The case of Turin is perhaps the most interesting. Rome and Naples for example, have become more liveable, but without applying these instruments of governance. By and large the transformations were managed simply by good individual capacities.

5 - Infrastructures, a burning subject. The choice contained in the plan to realise the new Passante motorway link to the north of the city aroused conflict, including the opposition of the local population. In a recent article you conclude that the Province of Bologna and the associations of communes affected by the work have a shared responsibility to "transform a possible environmental disaster into an extraordinary opportunity for replanning, also in environmental terms, the whole of the plain of Bologna". Can you explain what you mean? What are the risks and the opportunities of this operation?

If we talk about infrastructures we have to talk about the model of organisation contained in the plan. It is necessary to refer to a territorial design that was not invented by this new plan, but that derives from a vision of continuity with the earlier plan (apart from the novelty of the Passante motorway link), which dates back to 1965-66. That spatial model is the basic framework for every operation or chain of ideas that seeks to change the present so as to give it greater functionality and scope, also in environmental terms.
This model was not born from a project invention or an unusual interpretation of phenomena; it stems from the studies carried out since the 60s into the inner-city/outer-city relationship and the connections between them. With respect to this vision the PTCP does not cause a traumatic discontinuity, but it is an evolution, which takes account of a long process that has taken place around these subjects and the present capacity of convergence around this project's decisions.
What happened at Bologna in the late 60s was almost an astral conjunction, a situation that produced the conditions that made Bologna for 20-30 years a competitive city from all points of view: perhaps today, by interpreting this new and purposeful plan, we will be enabled to perceive something similar. The PTCP seeks to anticipate this condition by offering an instrument of work and of reflection and it seeks to make the interest of different "geographies" converge (there is a compact city, a diffuse city spread on the plain, the problems of the mountains and of small towns in the hills), in a comprehensive model while also seeking to lower the tone of the conflict.
Today we find ourselves confronted with the obvious conflict between the Communes in the outer belt that continue to attract population, with people moving out from the centre, and a central city that has to cope with a falling population and spend money on services that are used by a much broader community. The plan identifies the lowest common denominators of the different geographies and propose a convincing design to redress the balance. In short, the territorial scheme can be summed up as a series of focal points for broader processes which are arranged in a network along the major roads and joined with the centre by the mass-transport system in a radial pattern. Within this model, the role of the Passante is decisive, not as a simple functional solution to the problem of 70,000 cars that drive through the urban core every day without having any connection with the territory and leaving nothing behind except the CO2 they discharge there, but as a element in planning of the territory. The infrastructure is an element in reorganisation of the city. This is what it has been in the history of our territory; and leads to an enhancement of the processes of development. A further challenge is to plan a more comprehensive solution than mere ribbon development for this infrastructure.