Planes fuera del sistema: instrumentos ad-hoc para la ordenación y gestión de las áreas urbanas

Abstract

After half a century of intense urbanization, municipal boundaries -those generally associated with local scale- show explicit contradiction regarding current territorial dynamics. New urban patterns are more related to the concept of 'urban area' and the ambiguous and fluctuating sub-regional scale. Thus, the need to jointly address local and regional phenomena challenges conventional planning systems and the subsidiarity of historical administrative structures. The aim of this paper is to evidence the innovation and specificity of recent urban areas’ management. In particular, we explore the heuristic nature of intermediate planning instruments, focusing on how they re-define the territorial scale of ‘the local’ and ‘the regional’, and implicitly the idea of the city and its governance. To this end, we rely on a multiple case study of three recent plurimunicipal plans, implemented in an ad-hoc manner, and referred to different European cultural models. We argue that intermediate design and governance instruments allow rearranging a meaningful scale for “the local”, overcoming tacit and static levels of planning systems.