Governing the urban regeneration: the case of Ravone area in Bologna

The Italian government of the territory is regulated by an urban planning law dating back to 1942, designed to regulate and plan the urban growth and expansion of the post-war. Over the decades this law has insisted almost unchanged on any attempt to adapt it to the changing socio-economic context and has become an instrument for the protection of land and real estate income. It has been a long path towards the right to the city (Lefebvre 1968), recently re-emerged in the international political scene (Harvey 2012), and often conceived as broader theoretical and ideal framework of urban justice and democracy (Ooman 2016). However, in Italy, the distance between population and territory seems to be unbridgeable, motivated by the inability to build (or re-build) a pact of collaboration between institutions and society that allows us to understand that the territory is at the same time an economic resource for individuals and for the community, but above all a shared and common resource (Iaione, 2017). Abandoned buildings and dismantled areas, which would be suitable to become laboratories for experimenting new practices, are today deprived of the possibility of being temporarily employed and excluded from any form of active participation by potential emerging subjects because the regulatory urban Plan has proved to be completely inadequate to deal with the exceptional conditions that the crisis has generated. Taking as a pioneer prototype the re-activation process of the Ravone area in Bologna, a 18 hectars abandoned freight yard where the establishment of an emerging structure of different stakeholder has provided a well-founded framework for the interpretation of the urban plan as a dynamic social pact, the aim of the paper is to contribute to the definition of a governance for urban regeneration practices, opening up a new frontier of discourse on the city.