Charter for Urban Regeneration
of Tuscany Towns

The Department of Urban and Regional Planning of Florence University and the local Architects Association promoted two seminars on city design and regional policy in Italy during the 2010. The aim of both seminars was to define new strategies for relaunching urban regeneration in Tuscany.
Several Tuscan cities have undergone significant transformations over the past fifteen years but  private and speculative interests have often prevailed, therefore the resulting new urban spaces have worsened the situation, meeting opposition from the inhabitants. Only recently the regional government has started to address this issue in a comprehensive way: considering the effects that each development produces on the whole city and evaluating the relationship between public and private interests from a new point of view. The ongoing revision of the Regional Planning Law can help to achieve this goal. This was the motivation for the abovementioned seminars which promoted a debate between Tuscan politicians, regional and municipal officials, architects, planners and researchers from various Italian universities.

The Charter for Urban Regeneration of Tuscan Towns summarizes the proposals that emerged during the seminars in 11 thesis. These points define strategic solutions to the major problems raised by the last cycle of urban transformation. They provide a summary of critical thinking and best practices developed in the solution of similar situations in Italy and Europe in the last three decades. Therefore the Charter can be a common point of reference and comparison for many other European cities.

The thesis proposed can be divided in two groups: the first one (Thesis 1-6) deals with the structural objectives of regeneration shared by Tuscan and other Italian and European cities: connecting new public open space to historic landscapes (Thesis 1), the role of infrastructures in urban sprawl (Thesis 2), density and land use (Thesis 3), new social housing (thesis 4), a vision not only of the physical urban transformation but also of the social and economic issues of urban regeneration (Thesis 5), new regional policy to create city networks and efficient city hubs as to prevent urban sprawl (Thesis 6). The second group deals with the tools required to achieve the stated objectives. Two thesis deal, respectively, with the Municipal Plan (Thesis 7) and the transfer of development rights for equitable distribution of benefits, costs and duties of urban development (Thesis 8). The last three deal with a particular issue of the planning process in Tuscany, where the preliminary analysis have become rather abstract and excessively expensive documents: analysis selection and finalization (Thesis 9), zoning and layout (Thesis 10), representations methods (Thesis 11).

Overall, these thesis stimulate a new culture of urban design that can revive the values and image of the city to compete more effectively with the ongoing changes, to be better understood by the inhabitants, and to promote the procedural simplification and reduction of costs and length of time needed for the planning procedures.
The Charter editing was coordinated by Marco Massa, head of the University of Florence Urban and Regional Planning Department, and a group of researchers and members of the same Department. Benedetto Di Cristina discussed the issue of social housing and regulation of uses and densities; Francesco Alberti worked on the infrastructure urban project and integrated renewal, Luca Nespolo dealt with aspects of the public–private partnership and the transfer of development rights.

Florence, June 2011


Marco Massa
Professor of Urban Planning, Facoltà di Architettura di Firenze
Dipartimento di Urbanistica e Pianificazione del Territorio
Francesco Alberti
Assistant professor of Urban Planning, Università degli Studi di Firenze
Dipartimento di Urbanistica e Pianificazione del Territorio
Benedetto Di Cristina
Professor of Progettazione architettonica, Università degli Studi di Firenze 
Dipartimento di Architettura, Disegno, Storia, Progetto
Luca Nespolo
PhD Candidate in Progettazione Urbanistica e Territoriale, Università degli Studi di Firenze