Sviluppo industriale e governo del territorio: il caso della provincia di Caserta

The relationship between industrial policy and territorial organization is a theme that has been widely debated in the Italian urban planning, especially since the late fifties, when industrial planning began with the ASI Consortia. The paper analyses the planning activity of the ASI Consortium of Caserta, the body in charge of the territorial management of industrial settlements, according to an interpretative model which, by measuring the weight of industrialization by Areas on the spatial development models of the areas involved and on the formation of territorial hierarchies, is intertwined with the complex story of regional planning. In the province of Caserta, the situation is emblematic: no territorial coordination plan existed until the year 2000, while the ASI Plan existed since the sixties. Since, as is well known, the ASI plans were equivalent to the Territorial Coordination Plans of the National Urban Planning Law and, therefore, like the Territorial Coordination Plan, had the power to bind the municipalities in the area to conform their regulatory plans to the directives set by the consortium plan. In this perspective, the focus extends to themes that are crucial in the current urban planning debate: planning on a supra-municipal scale, in which the ASI plans are inserted, the function of sector plans in the Italian planning system, the concept of the efficacy of plans, the new tasks of planning in the city and in deindustrialized areas.