Economic Growth and Land Use Restraint

Abstract

AbstractThe injection of huge capital resulting from the European measures to cope with the pandemic (Next Generation EU) led to a revival of the economy which was then conditioned by the beginning of the war in Eastern Europe. The Italian situation promises considerable resources (PNRR) destined for the driving sectors of the production of goods and services. This will provoke the request for new settlement spaces for the rising companies and for the development of the existing ones. This need contrasts with the UN recommendations on the containment of land use (Sustainable Development Goals - SDGs - UN 2030), already supported by the European Commission (2012) in the guidelines for limiting, mitigating, and compensating for the waterproofing of the territory. Therefore, a gap is created between yearnings for economic growth and, on the other hand, urban and environmental sustainability, a dyscrasia which then finds a specific rebound in the regulatory-urbanistic condition of many municipalities whose areas of productive settlement must face up to nonrenewable expired expropriation constraints, despite the availability of lands included in the homogeneous areas intended for industrial settlement. If on the one hand this condition contains the transformation of new lands, on the other - in the presence of a strong demand for settlement - it entails the need to take a census of what is unused, to reacquire it to the public hand and to reintroduce it on the market at reasonable prices from a financial but also a social point of view. This study deals with this issue with reference to urban areas destined for industrial settlements, with reference to the definition of the problems of reacquisition, evaluation by reassignment and the discontinuity of the existing urban fabric due to the fragmented map made up of funds that become available again.The study presented will be followed, in the forthcoming publication, by the examination of a case study of an industrial area of the Italian territory.