Piero Tortola

“The legacy of Europe: Studying post-URBAN area-based regeneration in two Italian cities”

abstract

Despite its largely institutionalist orientation, the literature on Europeanization so far has paid little attention to issues of time. In particular, often overlooked in models of Europeanization is the question of how durable any EU-induced domestic change is, especially in the face of changing political circumstances—an important question in all those policy areas where the level of EU involvement is likely to vary over time. Using the case of EU-funded urban regeneration, I tackle this question by looking at the experience of two Italian cities, Turin and Pescara, as they transitioned from participating in the URBAN Community Initiative in 2000-06 to being inserted in the the more decentralized regime of the programmi integrati di sviluppo urbano for the budget period 2007-13. The most immediate aim of the paper is to contribute an empirical assessment of what URBAN has left behind in terms of local policy and institutional legacies. Building on the in-depth examination of these two cases, however, the project also aspires to elaborate a new theoretical framework integrating existing explanations of Europeanization.