The ‘future’ of urban rent from the perspective of the metropolitan territorial plan of Naples

The Metropolitan City of Naples, as in the art. 1 of its Statute, aims «to restore the environment, to regenerate and reorder the urban tissue, to safeguard the common goods, guaranteeing their access, to reorganize the territorial polycentrism, overcrossing the center-periphery dichotomy and to promote the civil, social, cultural and economic development, enanching the diversities and the territorial excellences». In the Statute (at Article 35), the Metropolitan City is expected to provide coordination and general territorial planning by means of the Metropolitan Territorial Plan, consisting of a structural and an operational component, with measures of “urban equalization”. The structural component defines the vision of the territory, while the operational one programmes the actions of metropolitan interest to be implemented by the metropolitan city as well as the indications for the municipalities of the metropolitan city over a three-year period. In December 2017, the proposal for the Territorial coordination plan was adopted, which substantially recovers the Provincial Territorial Coordination Plan of 2007, repealing certain parts. The TCP of the metropolitan city of Naples is based on the redevelopment of the existing patrimony as a way of contrasting land consumption, in line with government plans. The main strategic elements of the plan, in fact, are the conservation and enhancement of the environmental, natural, cultural and landscape heritage, the adaptation of the housing supply, concentrating it only on the margins or within already established sites – densification –, and the enhancement and re-articulation of the urban system in a polycentric and reticular key. It is therefore, from this perspective, that this article seeks to elaborate a number of reflections on the possible ”future of urban rent” in the context of the metropolitan spaces of Naples, where the “potential” of the value of abandoned land in peripheral and/or peri- urban areas assumes a strategic role in the processes of regeneration and densification envisaged by the TCP. In terms of TCP operation, the principle should be to “expropriate” as little as possible, making use of the “equalization instrument” to ensure economic operators the necessary profit (an “interest in doing”).