This article analyses the production of urban space in the globalizing city of Milan, Italy. The authors present the evolution of a 30-year development process in a semi-central area of the city known as Garibaldi Porta Nuova, contrasting present and past conditions. Initial attempts to develop the area began in the early 1980s but came to nothing; a previous study of the same area attributed that failure to the inability of fragmented local political elites to coalesce into an effective pro-growth coalition. In the early 2000s, a new coalition of political and economic actors, in particular financial and real estate interests, revived the process of regeneration and drove construction of a large-scale mixed-use project. This article offers an account of the process in terms of both the internal dynamics of the local coalition and the contextual and institutional factors framing the bargaining of political and economic elites over the development process. We use two theoretical frameworks – growth machine theory and regime theory – to assess the distribution of power and resources. Our analysis indicates that the outcome is the result of a specific growth machine fuelled by international capital, and that changes in the intergovernmental system in Italy induced local political elites to accommodate the requirements of international investors.
This article analyses the socio-economic impact of the Naples business centre (CDN), a large redevelopment project for a complex of offices and residences built in the core of the metropolitan area of Naples over the last two decades. Naples, one of the major cities in the underdeveloped regions of the south of Italy, presents specific processes of social exclusion and polarization. Currently the city faces the restructuring of the local economic system as well as the problems generated by its historical path of development. The article begins with a discussion of the main dimensions of social, economic and political exclusion. In this context, it discusses the two fundamental sources of exclusion in Naples: labour problems (unemployment, informal work and the impact of a clientelistic welfare policy) and the lack of a ruling framework of legality (new links between organized crime and the political system, widespread corruption, money-laundering). It then describes and evaluates the city’s urban policy and strategy in the face of these problems over the last three decades. The decision-making and implementation processes of the CDN are described and an account given of the dynamics of the public-private partnership involved in its development. The final section evaluates the physical, economic and social impact of the CDN project and demonstrates that it has not only failed to address the principal problems of the city but has actually aggravated them.
In this paper three case studies of urban development policies are outlined in order to advance two models of the diverse structuring of interaction between business and politicians. The three cases concern the Italian cities of Pavia, Parma, and Modena. For each city we describe the economic and political context and review the planning policy, focusing on specific decisionmaking processes. This sets the stage for an analysis of the interaction between political and economic actors and for an evaluation of the results of that analysis with respect to the effectiveness of the decisionmaking and implementation processes of urban policy. Those factors which account for the relative strength of business interests and elected officials and favor their engaging in the bargaining relationships are discussed, and two contrasting models of their interaction are presented.
We contrast three societies in terms of the way property development is socially organized by real estate entrepreneurs, political parties, governments, and corporations. Whereas local growth coalitions dominate in the United States, this is less true of Japan and Italy. National government, linked to conglomerate firms, plays a significant role in Japanese development. In Italy, the national political party system (as opposed to government) is prominent in setting the conditions of local development. Although large corporations are a critical force in all three societies, the manner in which they impact locality differs substantially with divergent consequences for urban morphology and citizens' daily lives.
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