Taranto
municipal administration is seeking to replace not only negative trends
but also the established representation of the town both for its citizens and for other people:
the image of a polluted and deteriorating “steel-town”.
Such an attempt is clearly expressed in its
recent strategic spatial plan. Cities
and regions are materially and imaginatively produced. An effective
image not only is able to depict the characters of a city in the collective
imagination, but has also a generative potential for action. Images as products
of mind's eye are important in planning as a future oriented activity. They may
help to build collective visions for future development. An examination of literature reveals
some important underlying elements of successful images in planning,
whether these are conceived by disciplines (Rodwin and Hollister,
1975), or by local government institutions for city marketing (Ashworth
and Voogd, 1988; Kotler et al., 1993). Even more important is that
the ability to create new conceptions of ‘city’ and ‘territory’
in public policy through some kind of collective mental work may mobilise
strategic resources for collective action in the context of urban
governance (Healey, 2002). However,
many concepts currently mobilised within declining industrial areas
(e.g. the ‘competitive city’) are reductionist concepts,
which at least highlight one dimension of urban life (ibidem, p. 1779).
Moreover, literature shows few examples of successful stories of long
term efforts to regenerate widely deindustrialisied regions, which
adopted strategies differing from the property-led regeneration approach.
One of the most well known examples in Europe is the case of the Ruhr
in Germany (Kunzmann, 2001). Acknowledging
the importance to build a new collective imagination about the future
that people most desire in order to promote local development and
urban regeneration, this paper comments §
on
the new city conceptions mobilized by the strategic spatial plan §
on
the new relational spaces entailed by the so-called “territorial
actions” co-financed by the EU. The
conclusions highlight the risk, both for Taranto and its hinterland,
of narrowly focused images of the city and related practices, which
neglect the potentials for building new development paths through
the opening of the policy arena to multiple social-territorial relations. From
the end of 1970s economic recession and the globalisation process
turned the tables in southern Italy (the so-called Mezzogiorno). Heavy
manufacturing industries, in particular state-owned branch-plants
that had been settled in the “growth poles” à la Perroux
during the industrialisation phase of “Intervento Straordinario
per il Mezzogiorno” (Extraordinary Intervention for the Mezzogiorno)
(1957-1965), began to face a severe decline. The recession was universal,
but steel, chemical, petrochemical and engineering industries passed
through a dramatic crisis. On the contrary, some areas experienced
unknown, and often unexpected, economic development: namely, the so-called
“southern Adriatic line” in Abruzzo and Apulia and some
inland areas of Campania and Basilicata. This was due either to endogenous
growth or to de-localisation of multinational companies. In some situations,
they gave rise to embryonic industrial districts, i.e. sets of small
independent firms specialised in different phases of the same production
process, which are predominant in a local economy (Sforzi, 1989; Viesti;
2000; Goglio, 2002). Also
as a consequence of such change in forms and paths of economic development,
a number of scholars have started to elaborate new discourses on the
Mezzogiorno. These discourses have questioned the traditional image
of the Mezzogiorno as a uniform, underdeveloped and poor region, and
have emphasised its internal emerging development differentiation
(Bottazzi, 1990). The notions of “growth without development”
and “development without autonomy”, stressing the wicked
effects of forty years of state policy in the Mezzogiorno (Trigilia,
1992), have been considered inadequate to describe the new development
patterns emerging in its most dynamic areas. What cities and regions
of this varied geography share, on the one hand, is the persistent
deficiency in social infrastructures, and on the other hand, it is
the systematically lower propensity to develop institutions that provide
collective goods, which is considered the competitive strength of
industrial districts in northern and central Italy (among others see
Putnam 1993). In
the Mezzogiorno institutional changes assume more dramatic features
than in other parts of Italy. In 1992, the post-war model of state
support ended, due to the abolition of the “Intervento Straordinario”.
This implied a severe diminution in nationally organised redistribution
programmes and contributed to an increase in the autonomy of regional
policies and in local level pro-business policies. In
the 1990s, these changes were supported by the institutional reorganisation
on the national level. One of the most important aims was to remove
the “Italian anomaly” in comparison with other European
countries: public administration inefficiency and political instability.
These features were considered crucial obstacles to the improvement
of the competitiveness of Italian cities and regions. The
institutional reorganisation has mainly consisted of a process of
decentralizing national governmental functions to regional governments
and local authorities as well as proliferating policy-making levels,
in terms of the constitution of new entities and agencies formed to
carry out new functions or to reinterpret the ways in which these
were performed by existing institutions (Dente, 1985; Cassese, 2001).
These
changes marked a turning point in decision making, especially in the
areas where the state-led industrial policy had focused on. Under
the “Intervento Straordinario”, in fact, only a few strong
institutional actors were active in the occasional negotiations that
took place for fund allocation: essentially industrial associations
and trade unions. Obviously, formal agreements were strongly influenced
by informal negotiations among interest groups. These included local
representatives of political parties in the parliament or national
government as well as businessmen. These actors constituted the hegemonic
political-institutional apparatus in shaping development trajectories. European
Community has not only contributed to the multiplication of policy-making
levels but has also played a relevant role in innovating the public
policy arena. In Southern Italy, one of the EU-Objective 1 areas,
public administrations were more and more directly involved in the
management of Structural Funds and the decision arenas have become
more crowded. During the elaboration of the Community Support Frameworks
(CSF) 2000-2006, apart from the increasing importance of regional
governments, negotiations have included a number of new actors such
as representatives of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), financial
and business sectors, Chambers of Commerce, as well as non-profit
organisations and research institutions. Moreover, a number of Programmes
under Community Initiative based on competitive bidding processes
and requiring transnational, inter-municipal and/or local co-operation,
have forced public administrations to open the policy-making process.
The Urban Programme that involved twelve southern Italian towns in
the first round and five in the second one, is a good examples of
such innovation. The
European Union has also contributed in Italy to spread a policy framework
oriented to support innovation, broaden market opportunities, and
favour the emergence of a competitive environment not only for firms
but also for cities and regions (Janin-Rivolin, 2002). This innovation
was creating relevant impacts on the Mezzogiorno’s institutions,
which were previously used to transfer funds from central government
– heavily influenced by political parties aiming to maintain
their consensus in the area. Regionalised
structural measures together with area-based initiatives, founded
on common economic and social cohesion objectives as well as principles
of participation and partnership, introduced new ideas concerning
the need of joint identification of common strategic visions of development
through co-ordination and co-operation between a wide range of actors.
Obviously, cities and regions not only differ in their ability to
use the resources offered by the European programmes and initiatives,
but also in the extent and way of introducing these changes. Taranto,
a town of about 200.000 inhabitants at the Ionic Sea in Apulia, can
be considered as a characteristic case of exogenous industrialisation
in Southern Italy. This process started at the end of the 19th century,
when the military arsenal and dockyards were built. It culminated
in the 1960s, when Taranto was chosen by the “Intervento Straordinario”
to locate a big steel plant owned by the Italsider group, a state-holding
industry with its headquarters in northern Italy. In
1965, the steel plant was completed. It employed 5.000 people. At
the beginning of the 1970s, the new national steel and iron development
plan decided to redouble the capacity of the plant in Taranto. In
1976, more than 22.000 people were employed and the factory occupied
an area of over 11 sq. Km. But only a few years later coinciding with
the international crisis of the steel sector and new European Community
strict industrial regulations, the total product of Italsider began
to decrease gradually. In 1995, the Taranto plant was yielded to Riva,
a private group outright leader of the steel sector in Italy. From
the early 1980s up to now, the industrial employment in Taranto has
been cut off to about 12.000 jobs. However,
the about 19 sq. km. of industrial area, to be compared with the 24,5
sq. km of the Taranto urban area, are still occupied by big industries:
besides Ilva, by Cementir concrete plant (3,1 sq. km) and Agip refinery
(2,0 sq. km). The
rise, and then the decline, of the steel industry had a huge impact
on the social and economic structure of Taranto. A
traditional economy based on handicraft activities and small industry
was suddenly replaced by the branch-plant-driven development. At the
same time, whereas the steel industry largely failed to generate the
planned spin-off effect (which was supposed to provide linkages between
old and new industrial structures, and between local and external
entrepreneurs) (Borri and Camarda, 1990), it left on the town the
mark of severe long-term health- and environmental damage. On the
other hand, one of the most important consequences of the industrial
restructuring has been social decay. This led, among other things,
to an increase in organised crime and a deep crisis of confidence
in the state ability to help local development (Marzano, Gatto, 1999). Moreover,
the industrial decay has had huge effects on the image of the town.
In the case of Taranto, the development model that inspired the investments
of the 1960s and 1970s was the “growth pole” à la Perroux.
This “planning doctrine” (Faludi and van der Valk, 1994)
has had significant influence on the regional planning policy for
Southern Italy. At first, it was linked to optimistic images of economic
growth; afterwards to negative images of towns characterised by industrial
mono-structure and economic decline as well as environmental crisis. It
is anything but easy to turn the bad image of Taranto, which since
the 1980’s predominates not only in experts´ but also common
perception, into a new and more differentiated image. More or less
consciously, sometimes the important role of Taranto in the ancient
civilisation of Magna Grecia has offered suggestions for a different
image. But it has assumed the form of a memory start rather than a
lucid acknowledgement of local resources and the opportunities that
the development of these resources can imply. In fact, it seems that
it had no generative value so far: the lack of planning aiming to
promote the improvement of the huge archaeological heritage of the
town seems to confirm this. Recently,
the municipal government of Taranto adopted a strategic plan (Città
di Taranto, 2000), a voluntary planning tool that, in recent Italian
experience, is used to foster territorial change and, if associated
to local plans, to overcome the rigidity of traditional regulatory
plans (Mazza, 1996). An external consultant group developed the plan
with neither much involvement of local stakeholders nor public participation.
Improving the image of the town is considered of crucial importance
in the strategic plan for Taranto. One of its basic ideas is that
constructing a new "cultural identity" would allow the town
to keep its distance from the threat of a univocal identification
and to throw itself towards the awareness of being a “complex
town”. Among other aims, this strategic plan includes the generation
of shared visions, able to steer local actors into objectives upon
which they agree and that they wish to pursue in the common interest.
Such an effort, in the perspective assumed by the plan, implies "creating
favourable conditions in order to make citizens aware of local values
and resources, rebuild a positive image of the town, redefine the
relations between citizens and their territory"(Città di Taranto,
2000). But
what are the images of Taranto included in the strategic plan? First,
the image of a “competitive town” is emphasised.
It is well known that this is a 'ready for every use' image, which
underlies a notion of town as container of economically exploitable
goods. It is an image borrowed from different cultural systems and
discourses, often grasping only their epiphenomena. “Environment”,
“Transportation and logistics”, “Urban real estate
heritage” are the issues on which the plan centres its development
projects. Environmental improvement and urban regeneration, according
with the above-mentioned focus on the “competitive town”,
are considered essential elements in order to solve the problem of
the decreasing attractiveness of Taranto at regional and national
levels. But
the most vivid images are produced with respect to the second issue:
Taranto as a port-town. They are not inventions of the plan,
but reflect representations of the town that are penetrating in the
local context, risen by the recent completion of a new container terminal
in the Taranto port and the transformation of this into one of the
most important southern European hubs for transhipment. This was mainly
due to the signature in 1998 of a terminal-service agreement with
Evergreen, a world leader company in freight sea transport with its
headquarters in Taiwan. The effects of these investments have been
enormous: in 2002, Taranto has gained the fifth position in the list
of Italian container terminals, with a traffic of 471.000 containers
(teu) and an increase in the goods moved
of +149% compared to 2001. Obviously,
such changes are very important for a port and a town with a long
legacy of dependence on “industrial mono-structure”. Moreover,
it reminds citizens of the ancient role of Taranto as an important
seaport, a crucial node within the Mediterranean exchange networks.
It thus seems appropriate to facilitate a process of identity re-shaping.
This could produce an idea of the town through a collective process
of imagination of what the town is and what it might be. Thus it would
have the potential to arouse the production of new meanings and possibilities
for spatial activities. Moreover,
thinking of Taranto as a “seaport” allows the town to remove
the terrible images connected to the “dirty industry”, with
its visible and invisible burden of pollution, and the rhythms that
it imposes to it. And it reminds of suggestive images of geographical
spaces crossed by real but also virtual flows, and punctuated by nodes
whose positions are changeable and unstable (Dematteis e Guarrasi,
1995). In such images, the opportunity of connections among nodes
that ignores attributes such as distance, geographical position, and
any other direct physical determination, throws the town in a relational
space that seems to open indefinite horizons. Right
from the post-war industrialisation, it has become common sense for
the local people to associate the region surrounding Taranto, named
“Arco-Ionico”, with the fate and image of Taranto. This
collective imagination seems to resist economic restructuring and
institutional innovations. It constitutes a sort of fertile ground
on which the new images of Taranto, such as that of the “seaport”,
can flourish. Values and forms of governance which underpin urban
and regional regeneration strategies are left unquestioned. Focusing
attention on Taranto’s development scenarios rather than on the
region seems to direct this collective imagination towards an unchangeable
fate of regional dependence on the “success” of this pole.
But is this still the case? Or is keeping alive this imagination a
way to avoid rethinking both the past and the future from an interwoven
rather than a dependent perspective? Rethinking the past and the future
in a regional perspective could help facing old and new social justice
problems underlying the past and the possible development models.
It would mean searching for future development possibilities and opportunities
without committing them again to a new univocal development model
promising a “common good” such as competitiveness. It would
mean questioning what kinds of interaction could turn local population
habitus to accept or delegate their future into an active approach
towards public life. Shifting
the focus from Taranto towards the “Arco-Ionico” region
aims at revealing endogenous processes of change that are under way
in this area. These processes have been enforced by economic restructuring
and institutional innovations. But the collective imagination and
the perspective on Taranto tend to block these processes. Our aim
is to understand which opportunities they disclose for the regeneration
of the “Arco Ionico” region and of Taranto itself. At the
moment there are only clues or traces of emerging processes of change
because of the “urban centred” character of the discourses
on development privileging the “steel town” as subject of
study and political action. The
Arco-Ionico region is a territory of small and medium sized towns.
The region includes 28 municipalities: 24 towns have a population
ranging from 2.000 to 20.000 inhabitants and only 4 – Martina
Franca, Massafra, Grottaglie and Manduria - have a population ranging
from 20.000 to 50.000 inhabitants. The industrialisation of Taranto
has not completely changed the traditional agricultural structure
of the “Arco Ionico” region. After a consistent loss of
jobs during the 1960s and 1970s, the local population working in this
sector has stabilized around 20%: The industrial environmental pollution
apparently has not reached the many environmental resources that sign
its landscape. Focusing
on local responses induces us to reconsider the regional geography
thinking of the Arco-Ionico region as shaped by the very action and
as something “in becoming” (Allen et al. 1998). The local
responses/ practices to which we are refering are two European funded
Programmes: the Leader Programme under Community Initiative and the
Territorial Integrated Programme (TIP) under the mainstream of Structural
Funds. “Leader Programme” (Liasons Entre Actions
de Developpment de l'Economie Rurale) aims at helping to develop the
local economy of rural areas. It is addressed to a number of different
situations: from the underdeveloped regions and fragile rural areas
to the very low populated territories of the Nordic countries. Territorial
Integrated Programmes aim at integrating different projects included
in the Italian Communitarian Structural Funds (CSF) for Objective
1 regions at the territorial level. The number of Territorial Integrated
Projects (PITs) and addressed issues were approved by the Apulian
regional government, according to criteria considering strengths and
weaknesses of different areas of Apulia. On the contrary, Communitarian
Initiative Programme (PIC) Leader emphasises the bottom-up approach. Both
are area-based and integrated programmes, which imply the promotion
of local development through co-operation between sectors, actors
and territories as well as co-ordination of different interventions.
The programmes place confidence on the creativity and resources of
local actors, according to the so-called “local territorial approach”. The
Arco Ionico municipalities are involved in three Leader Programmes
and two Territorial Integrated Projects named “Transportation
and Logistics” (F) and “Innovation and development of the
agricultural and rural economy” (H) (see figures 1 and
2). Fig.
1: Leader Programmes in the Arco Ionico Region (left); Fig. 2: Territorial
Integrated Programmes in Apulia (right) In
order to explore how spatialities are ‘constructed’ thorough
the considered European programmes we use discourse analysis focusing
on policy documents. Discourse Analysis offers an innovative way to
study political transformations in national and transnational politics
(Hajer 2002). In fact, it interprets policy change as a battle for
discursive domination in which actors try to affirm their definition
of reality. A discourse is defined as a specific set of ideas, concepts,
and categorisations that are produced, reproduced, and transformed
in a particular sort of practices and through which meaning is given
to physical and social realities (Hajer 1995). Therefore, although
we focus on policy documents, because they capture the re-presentation
of space in language and reveal some of the power relations that contest
these re-presentations, we do not consider them like a mirror of the
interplay between different rationalities in a specific “institutional
setting”. In a discourse analysis perspective we reconnect them
with specific social practices placing them within the context of a live policy process (Richardson and
Jensen, 2003). Thus, socio-spatial relations “ can be conceptualised
in terms of their practical ‘workings’ and their symbolic
‘meaning’, played out at spatial scales from the body to
the global—thus giving notion to an analysis of the ‘politics
of scale’” (Richardson and Jensen, 2003). In this paper
we show how the TIP “Transportation and Logistics” and the
different PIC-Leader in the Arco Ionico region create the conditions
for a new set of spatial practices and thus a “new”
relational system between images/imagination and practices. Basing
on this analysis, we have built two different geographies: the former
describes the relationship between the small and medium-sized towns
of Arco-Ionico and Taranto; the latter, vice versa, depicts the relationships
between Taranto and the small towns. The relationships to which we
refer are territorial relations as well as local actors’ interactions.
The Leader programme has encouraged the municipalities
of Arco-Ionico to rethink their development from a local perspective.
It also helps to seek social, economic and environmental affinities
among them as a base to build new policy coalitions and to practice
new development strategies. Common concerns are: §
the
employment crises and the stagnant labour market determined by the
declining steel industry, §
the
problems of local communities to boost their endogenous entrepreneurial
potentials or to trigger processes able to generate new ones; §
the
presence of big industries, which has discouraged entrepreneurial
attitude; §
the
identity crisis which has psychologically disoriented local people
and communities. The main objectives
underlying the different development
strategies are: §
to
re-invigorate and promote agricultural innovation and development
in order to avoid “young generation drain”; §
to
identify strategic local cultural and environmental resources in
order to make this territory more attractive and protect nature; §
to
promote tourism. The TIP is still under
approval by the regional government. It is, however, possible to highlight
its focus and objectives. TIP’s basic idea is that the integration
of different public and private initiatives and projects is likely
to generate complementary development paths between different social
economic systems. Its objective is to strengthen the economy of Apulia
using negotiative planning in order to trigger projects and initiatives
of local development. TIP focuses on: §
the
innovation and development of existing or new agricultural and industrial
local systems by integrating and diversifying their productive assets;
§
the
construction and development of service and transportation networks. The Leader Programmes,
when observed from the perspective of the territorial relations (Fig.
1) and actors’ interactions, reveal self-organising processes.
These processes are possible because the interactions between the
higher hierarchical administrative levels, i.e. the regional government,
play a limited role in the process of formulating strategies and proposals
as well as in the selective procedure. The small towns of the eastern
“Arco-Ionico”, breaking the provincial administrative border,
escape the influence of Taranto and try to connect themselves to the
south-eastern territories of Salentina peninsula. The TIP project
H shows a similar aggregation of municipalities. A key to understand
such a detachment is obviously its focus on agricultural and rural
economy, which has almost disappeared in the Taranto’s hinterland
due to its high concentration of heavy industrial settlements. In the Leader aggregation
the rich agricultural towns of the western Arco-Ionico region show
a self-organizing attitude. The observation of their behaviour in
regional programming confirms this. In this programme they express
the will to strengthen their economy excluding the influence of Taranto.
Moreover they are not included in the TIP perhaps due to the strong
role of the Regional Government in defining the “boundaries”
of the programme. Their economy is more similar to that of the Arco-Ionico
region in Basilicata than to the adjacent area of Apulia. But current
Structural Funds programming does not allow inter-regional aggregation.
Thus, just to avoid pursuing objectives distant from their own interests,
they preferred to be excluded from the TIP. It is worth mentioning
that the big, productive and well-organised farms of this rich area
of irrigated, intensive agriculture benefit of major funds under Community
Agricultural Policy (CAP). A similar attitude affects
the only town of the Province of Taranto characterised by the presence
of an industrial district specialised in textile and clothing industry:
Martina Franca. There is no voluntary co-operation with Taranto in
development programmes at all. If we look at the little
municipalities near Taranto (S. Giorgio Ionico, Massafra and Statte),
which suffered from the worst damage of pollution and undesirable
environmental impacts of the industrialisation, a willingness to differentiate
their economies emerges. In fact, they are aggregated into a Leader
programme aiming at promoting their environmental and cultural resources
(ravines, archaeological sites, ancient farms and other kinds of cultural
landmarks). These municipalities, however, are not able to escape
the aggregation with Taranto in the TIP project (F) on “Transportation
and Logistics”. In this context they have to accept the leadership
of the capital town in the programme formulation. In fact this TIP
project includes a number of actions aiming just to implement the
vision of the “seaport” included in the strategic plan for
Taranto. These programmes, when observed jointly, reveal
that the different municipalities have a common intentionality: to
escape from Taranto´s influence and to adopt a proactive behaviour.
In any case, this intention is developed within a reactive framework.
To act and formulate strategies, the small medium sized towns of the
“Arco-Ionico” region would need not only more autonomy but
also a richer institutional capital, including its three essential
dimensions of knowledge resources, relational resources, and the capacity
for mobilisation (Healey, 1997). The
TIP project on “Transportation and logistics” provides Taranto
an opportunity to turn the image of the “seaport” into reality.
In fact, the TIP´s key concept used to articulate the strategy is
“opening the territory”. The actors involved in the formulation and implementation
of the programme are both the local and regional governments (Taranto,
Statte, Massafra, S. Giorgio Ionico and the Province of Taranto).
During the current approval-procedure they are negotiating about the
allocation of resources and central objectives. There is also a social-economic partnership based
on a voluntary agreement with the above-mentioned actors, which supports
the project with ideas and proposals. Two actors play a key role in
the negotiation: the regional government and the responsible for the
programme. The latter is a society linked to Taranto municipality.
Furthermore, among the local governments that have adhered to the
programme, Taranto is the actor that proposes the programme to the
Region. As evident, Taranto plays a crucial role also in the negotiation
process. On the other hand, a number of actors crucial for the implementation
of the programme are still excluded from the negotiation-process:
among others, the port authority. In accordance with the CSF ob.1, the TIP project
F aims to turn the problematic periphery into an attractive area.
In this context, turning the transhipment port into a gateway port
is considered a crucial goal. An essential premise in order to achieve
this goal is to take advantage of a flourishing hinterland.[1]
To this purpose, it is necessary to improve transportation
and logistics infrastructures, but also to act in different directions,
ranging from the regeneration of industrial areas to the construction
of immaterial infrastructure such as training courses able to generate
social capital. In
such a social economic and environmentally problematic area this programme
fails to take into account both the integration and the territory.
If, on the one hand, the environment plays a marginal role, on the
other the territory assumes a value only in relation to the Taranto
development goals. In fact, within the TIP, sustainability and integration
can be considered a result of a bargaining process between pressing
needs to promote an urban market economy and weak social-environmental
justice concerns regarding the development of the all Arco Ionico
region. The underlying idea is that competition will solve the problems
of the declining “growth pole” and, consequently, those
of the Arco Ionico small cities which, in this perspective will continue
to depend on Taranto. In the “global” city region perspectives
Taranto continue consuming its hinterland, its outlying areas of supply
and its cultures and people (Mendieta, 2001). Therefore, in the TIP
programme the local territory is still a “no mans’ land
“ which has value –an economic value- only if considered
as a base for justifying the flourishing of Taranto as a port town,
while its “real territory” is the Mediterranean
basin seen as a space for new global relationships . Thanks to the TIP project of “Transportation
and logistics”, Taranto is emerging again as a key actor able
to decide the rules of the play and to relegate its hinterland to
a perspective of dependence. The TIP reveals Taranto’s will to
become a city-region in the network society. However, the lack of
a more enlarged vision focused not only on the city but also on the
region and thus really able to open itself to a changing territory,
associated with the willingness to reinforce its dominant role in
this area, risks from the beginning to undermine the success of the
project. There
are further issues that question the potential for change linked to
the image of Taranto as a “seaport”. The first issue concerns
the problem of turning such an image into practices of territorial
production. The second issue concerns the risk that what is emerging
is a new univocal image and a new kind of dependence, this time on
the Taiwanese giant rather than on the steel colossus. The third issue
concerns the risk that the strength of this image distracts citizens’
attention from other existing and possible images, thus hindering
rather than disclosing horizons of possibility for the town. Towns are surely material artefacts, but not only.
Their existence and ability to act also depends on the way in which
they occur in mental representations, as well as in the way in which
this practice of imagination is mobilised in order to shape governance
activities, public policies, and projects. It is far from easy, however,
to turn the traditional forms of such activities into other ones able
to face social and economic dynamics based on fluid and multi-nodal
spatio-temporal relations. Spatial images are socially constructed. They
show ideas about the town that reflect interests, power and cultural
orientations of different individuals and organisations. And there
are images associated to practices of territorial production which
is really difficult to remove. In the case of Taranto, there are a
number of projects that have been waiting for political consensus
and financial support for a long time. We refer, for example, to the
idea to develop in the port hinterland a Distripark for handling general
cargo and providing value-added logistics services and an “Agromed“
centre for the semimanifacturing, transformation and marketing of
agriculture products, which would occupy an area of over 200 hectares.
We also refer to the new development plan for industrial settlements
of about 177 hectares in Grottaglie. These projects visualise traditional
settlement models that are likely to produce heavy environmental impacts.
Today, in the view of port development, the image of Taranto as a
node of flows in the field of freight transport is given new meanings
to these old projects, catalysing political consensus and financial
resources. The
image of a “nodal town” presents many limits, and even risks,
due to the ways in which it was produced and spread. When it is associated
to the ambiguous concept of urban competition, it seems to prevent
decision-makers and citizens from giving the reality a disenchanted
interpretation. This would recognise the fragility of the local system
of governance and the structural weakness of the Tarantine economy
as well as the exogenous character of recent developments of the container
port. Despite
the widespread mobilization of the concept of urban competition, we are far from having demonstrated that such a
concept can be immediately transposed from the interpretation of the
world of corporations to that of regions (Krugman, 1996, and - from
a different point of view - Amin and Thrift, 2000). Really,
who competes today at the global level is not the town but Evergreen,
thanks to a thirty years concession of the “multi-sectoral wharf”.
In this condition, the risk to generate a new form of dependence for
the town seems to be considerable. Moreover,
Taranto may be in a position of vulnerability in the context of global
scenarios of freight transportation development. In fact, much of
the literature on the development perspectives of seaports in the
more advanced industrial countries stresses the decreasing ability
of maritime activities to support jobs and incomes due to the huge
technological innovations that affected the freight transportation
cycle. The same literature highlights the diminishing importance of
the traditional advantages of coastal location for activities connected
to shipment material and immaterial treatment, since well-equipped
internal nodal regions can present even higher advantages (Giannopulos
and Gillespie, 1993; Hepworth and Ducatel, 1992). The
third issue concerns the risk that the power of the images promoted
by the strategic plan (the competitive town and the seaport) diverts
attentions away from other existing and possible images of the town.
The narrow base and scarce
involvement in strategy making of local stakeholders and citizens
make them unconscious of the new strategic understanding. In this
context, the strategic directions sketched by the plan are unlikely
to endure. Strategic
plans and other plans based on local partnerships such as PIT, however,
have also the potential for creating networks of collaboration and
trust which can provide a foundation of social and intellectual capital
upon which new development paths could be built. But the question
is: which social, cultural, economic groups will be reached and mobilised
by the image “competitive town” or “nodal town”?
Which kind of creative resources will the powerful political, professional
and economic elite (who spread such images) inhibit? And are there
wider possible horizons for the future of Taranto if we solicit plural
images? What images may arise if we try to enlarge the sphere in which
images are produced, involving a broad range of stakeholders who experience
a multiple dimension of territory, based on different frames, knowledge,
and spaces of activity? Surely, the images promoted
by the strategic plan and reinforced by TIP risk to stifle the plural
images of local resources and practices emerging by the PIC Leaders
and other programmes, as well as wider regional governance orientations.
What
kind of governance might be practiced in order to avoid this last
risk? If we focus on the emerging image of Taranto as a port town,
a more inclusive conception of partnership, involving all the relevant
stakeholders in the Arco Ionico, would be desirable to open this city
to its hinterland. But in the city region perspective, and its underlying
new regionalism ideology, partnership is still seen as a way to ‘shape
the minds’ of social agents (Faludi, 2001) in order to: 1) restore
local control and democracy; 2) increase economic returns; and 3)
strengthen sense of attachment (Amin, 2004, p. 35). In this vision,
“there is a defined geographical territory out there over which
local actors can have effective control and can manage as a social
and political space” (Amin, 2004). Indeed,
if we try to abandon the territorial perspective implied by the new
regionalism, as our analysis concerning the different PIC Leader suggests,
there is a strong need to rethink the local development in a relational
perspective rather than in an exclusively territorial one. In this case,
a more complex conception of governance emerge. In it partnerships should
be considered not only in a more inclusive perspective, but also as one
of the many and differentiated activities aimed at promoting an enlarged
social debate through which reimagining local democracy and development
futures involving stakeholders as well citizens. Angela Barbanente
and Valeria Monno, Politecnico di Bari, Dipartimento di Ingegneria
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dei distretti, Rome, Donzelli. [1]
The concept of hinterland is intended here as a space extended
much beyond the traditional boundaries traced according to criteria
of spatial proximity and contiguity.1. Introduction
2. The Mezzogiorno
towards new models of economic growth and regional governance
Spatial polarisation and decline
Institutional changes and development trajectories
European contributions
3. Taranto: a declining
“growth pole” in Southern Italy
Growth and decline of the industrial base
Impacts of restructuring
4. The troubled
attempts to replace negative trends and the creation of a new image:
The strategic plan for Taranto
Turning the image
Strategic planning for a new image
Suggested images
5. Collective imagination
and local practices: a regional perspective
6. Taranto and
the Arco-Ionico region: territorial relations and actors’ interactions
European programmes in Arco-Ionico and institutional
change
Self-organization practices in the Arco-Ionico region
Taranto: towards a city region
7. Potentials and
threats of the new image
Practices of territorial production
New kinds of dependence
Narrowing the perspectives
References