Production facilities sprawl: the Veneto's case

Abstract

The issue of urban sprawl is particularly evident in the Italian North-East and particularly in the Veneto.

Within the general settlement sprawl, the spreading and fragmentation of the production system is the result of a distinctive mode of transformations induced by the economical processes. The production facilities sprawl is a process characterized by considerable temporal continuity that has maintained almost intact its antecedents and constituent functional processes with (seemingly simple), continuously adapt to the changing practices of the genius loci.

The understanding of this phenomenon is a key element in planning policies. In fact, next to the well-known problems related to sprawl and common to most of the settlements, the case of diffusion of manufacturing activities has resulted settlement in severe conditions of unsustainability in relations to with specific issues such as the supply of raw materials, the accessibility in general, the provision of infrastructure services, the organization of production activities, the consumption of soil, etc..

The Veneto Region has tried to solve the problems arising from this situation through specific legislative instruments and directing regional planning towards these issues. Indeed, the production facilities sprawl has already been dealt with regional laws 80/1980 and 24/1985 that face the problem from the point of view of diffusion in historical town centers and agricultural areas, even before the approval of the Regional Planning Law (Regional law 61/1985). From a planning perspective, Veneto Region with the Law 11/1987 wrote off all the production facilities outside production settlements, however endorsing the diffusion and fragmentation of the production areas. The problem of non-proliferation of sprawl have therefore remained as a key issue in regional coordination plans.

These paper wants to further illustrate the proposed methodological approach and the principal results of the working group of the Department of Architecture, Planning and Surveying - University of Padua, in the processing steps of the new Regional Territorial Coordination Plan of the Veneto Region.

These reflections, which allowed us to evaluate intervention strategies focused on the recognition of the territory of settlement types specific to refer to.)