disP - year 2019
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Item Open Access Territory, Economy, Society and Institutions in Transition: Keynote Speech Presented at the 2019 AESOP Congress “Planning for Transition” in Venice(Routledge : Taylor and Francis Group, 2019) Balducci, AlessandroIntroduction I will try to interpret the transition that con- fronts planning by looking at economic, social, urban and institutional change. There are abundant studies that analyse transformations of territory, economy, society and institutions separately, but far fewer studies that allow us to consider the relationships between the profound processes of change that affect each of these systems, and their mutual influences. I will approach this issue by trying to under- stand the directions of causal relationships and how we can intervene to improve the policies that concern them, looking in particular at the role of the physical space. I open with an initial consideration drawn from Willem Salet's comments in an informal seminar: "The economy and society change with increasing speed, the physical space is hardly adapted to these changes, producing resistance and reconfiguring itself, the institutions adapt with even greater effort". It is worth adding here that the same applies to our perceptions and our ability to see the profound transformations that emerge from the intersection of these dynamics. I will address the transformation processes of the European city from my point of view: from Italy and in particular from Milan. The change in the urban economy If we limit our gaze to the last few decades, we can see a profound transformation in the eco- nomic base of cities. I remember that urban plans in Milan in the 19708, as in London and in many other cities, tried everything to prevent the abandonment of industrial areas. It was a desperate operation and failed to stop divestment, and in the more fortunate cases, such as Milan, the closure of the factories was compensated for by the development of other expanding economic sectors. Cities today are mainly service centres, the nodes of economic globalization processes. However, the manufacturing that has abandoned cities as a place of production has not abandoned them as a primary source in the development of companies, which continue to produce goods in increasing measure. In a recent book, significantly entitled La societé hyper-industrielle, Pierre Veltz (2017) explains how the impression of the dematerialization of the economy is basically wrong, how world manufacturing production has continued to in- crease (in 2010 it was one and half times that of 1990) and how cities are the centres of government for world production, which has be- come increasingly articulated in a series of segmented processes. The manufacturing sector, thanks also to the robotization of a large part of the work once performed manually, is increasingly similar to the service sector. The Techno centre Renault in Guyancourt, Paris region, hosts 10000 engineers and technicians, while their largest production plant in Douai employs fewer than Sooo workers (ibid: 17). Veltz argues that contemporary industry develops thanks to two main systems first, infra- structure, with harbours and airports, but also underwater optical fibres, satellites, electricity networks, computer networks, server farms, the cloud and shared software, which form a capillary and gigantic network. Compared to the infrastructure of the past, which simply connected the companies from the outside, it now emelops them and penetrates into every pro- duction or exchange operation. Second, data, ideas, information and knowledge that feed modern production and are partly crystallized in machines and infrastructure, but also circulate freely in universities, interpersonal meet- ings, cafes and city squares (ibid .: 61-6a). It is at the intersection of these two dimensions that innovation develops. The new infrastructure also includes the node of connection with the platform economy, which has exploded in recent decades. Nick Sricek (2017), in his book Platform Capital- ism, illustrates the very rapid transformation that the development of digital platforms has produced, namely the creation of new economies and new business models. Alessandro Balducci, Architect and PhD in Urban and Regional Planning, is Full professor of Planning and Urban Policies at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies of Politecnico di Milano, where he is scientific director of the escellence initiative on "Territorial fragiliry". He has been Deputy Mayor for Urban Planning of the City of Milan, Vice Rector of Polisecnico, director of the PhD program in Spatial Planning and Urban Development, President of AESOP, founding member of EURA, the European Urhan Research Association, president of Urhan@it the National Center for Urban Polcies, and chair of the Italian Society of Urbanists