Environment and Urbanization in Modern Italy by Federico Paolini

Author:Federico Paolini [Paolini, Federico]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Italy, Technology & Engineering, Environmental
ISBN: 9780822987253
Google: xnfYDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 2020-05-12T03:35:23+00:00

In this picture concrete implementations have run aground in the face of governments’ inability (including those of the center-left from 1996 to 2001 and from 2006 to 2008) to approve new town planning reform, and in the face of the constitutional modifications introduced by Law No. 3 (October 18, 2001), which permitted approval of regional town planning laws. The result has been the country’s government losing its national dimension, instead being fragmented into a warren of often very dissimilar regional approaches. Deregulation has thus increased private influence over the management of building policies.43

The parabola of environmental policies has followed a different trajectory, due to two external factors whose importance turned out to determine the definition of concrete realizations. The first is represented by the United Nations which, beginning with the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (1972), succeeded in promulgating a global perspective on environmental problems. The United Nations Environment Programme (1972)44 was able to elicit dialogue among the scientific community, technical experts, and policy makers. Perhaps the best-known outcome concerns the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which in 2015 concluded a universal agreement on the question (COP 21, Paris). The second concerns European Economic Community (EEC) action, of fundamental importance for the broadening of environmental legislation in member states.45 In Italy too (indeed one could say above all in Italy and the other countries of Mediterranean Europe) the environmental regulations since the 1980s have been progressively defined and updated on the basis of European directives. The importance of community policies is evident in the Italian case: in the absence of the European obligation, in fact, there would have been much greater resistance to approval of an efficacious body for environmental legislation. Without the political persuasion of the EEC—with which Italy had to comply in observance of signed treaties—the pressure groups that had delayed application or weakened environmental laws promulgated in the 1960s and 1970s would have continued to procrastinate the approval of incisive regulations.

However, in spite of EEC suasion, environmental crises continue. For this reason, in a framework characterized by progressive public mistrust of national and local policy, the experts are increasingly involved in environmental conflicts: on the one hand they represent the professional figures who propose infrastructure projects of public interest, while on the other they are engaged by environmental associations and civic committees who have recourse to technical-scientific knowledge in attempts to back up their own theories that are against development. Often the experts engaged by environmental organizations turn out to be more authoritative and credible than those hired by politicians: “the only expertise that takes the floor in a systematic manner and with recourse to technical-scientific arguments is the one that opposes the project, presenting more numerous and detailed assessments, questioning the overall design of the work, the conditions and objectives that justify it.”46 So paradoxically “the technicalization of a controversy may both cushion and stoke a conflict, close down conversational spaces or contrariwise open them, exposing the political matrix of the same technical options inasmuch as they are, precisely, options and not necessities.

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