Iron therapy for Rome, the challenges of implementing integrated policies

In the light of the best practices for integrated planning, the urban plan of Rome developed from 1995 and adopted in 2008 tries to introduce a new way of planning and of thinking the city of Rome after decades of uncontrolled growth. The new plan is based on the development of dense urban fabric around the main rail transport hubs (to be improved with the transit policies called cura del ferro) defining a new polycentric system of metropolitan level. The implementation of the plan started already during the design phase according to planning by doing philosophy. However, despite the technical quality of the plan and the multiple innovations introduced in the planning process, the development of Rome in the last fifteen years do not appear so coherent with the rhetoric and the principles of these policies. This thesis aims to investigate this difference between expected and actual results. More specifically, what happened during the implementation of the transformation programs launched during the redaction phase of the planning documents, in terms of governance and coherence to the principles of the plan in order to generate such discrepancies between expectations and results. This was done mainly through an analysis of existing literature, data analysis and structured interviews with privileged observers or actors involved in the design and implementation of the plan. The research hypothesis underling the work is that some deficiencies were committed already during the definition of guidelines for the single transformations, starting a chain of problems enlarged by the difficulties of the administration to tackle and coordinate sectoral interventions. Problems of evaluation of mobility effects, negotiation with developers and administrative hesitations, generated problems of synchronization of the actions for the same program, trigging heavy and unplanned consequences for the metropolitan system in terms of urban structure and mobility demand.