What Happens to the Urban Periphery? The Political Tensions of Postindustrial Redevelopment in Milan

Introduction

In the past 20 years, planning research and practice has generally agreed that strategic planning action involves “deliberate efforts [author’s emphasis] to make connections among disparate and often conflicting and colliding pieces of [the] institutional infrastructure to generate momentum around particular ideas” (Healey 2002, p. 1787). These “efforts” imply a choice of engaging in decision making with often uncertain outcomes. However, in most empirical studies (frequently focusing on best practices), this choice is not analytically questioned. While some municipalities seem to achieve innovation in practices of urban development, adapting to social and economic changes is highly problematic for others. In Europe especially, there are differences between the innovative experience of large municipalities—with more active citizenship, variegated local economies, and dynamic social environments—and that of the smaller municipalities within the region who are in a critical position. This paper specifically looks at the redevelopment of the urban periphery in larger agglomeration. This term indicates the spaces located in the densely urbanized zones of metropolitan areas, just outside the inner zones. Urban peripheries are at the interface between core cities and the outer, less dense, suburbs. In the European context, peripheries are autonomous municipalities, at the border of denser core cities (i.e., inner urban rings), but in other contexts they can also be included within larger governmental units (Bontje and Burdack 2005). These spaces are becoming a new hotspot for investments and planning experimentation, being located in proximity to existing infrastructure and not far from the economic cores of the region (Bogart 2006). However, they often occupy a weaker position in regional politics, which makes their development within regional networks problematic, especially in times of economic crisis, when investments tends to target prime and less risky locations (Orfield 2002).

Today, the developmental trajectory of the periphery is influenced by two main trends in planning. First, large-scale development projects are the major drivers of urban change within large agglomerations (Fainstein 2008; Salet 2008; Swyngedouw, Moulaert, and Rodriguez 2002). National austerity programs and fiscal decentralization erode the capacity of governments to steer these projects although these interventions might be crucial to raise wealth to finance social policies (Lovering 2010). These projects are risky endeavors for smaller localities as they are often promoted by large investors, with strong power of lobby in metropolitan spatial policies (Thornley et al. 2005). Second, the economic and social condition of peripheral municipalities depends on the relationship they establish with core cities in political and economic terms. Their future is affected by the type of metropolitan governance in place, necessary to overcome the social problems connected to metropolitan fragmentation (Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom 2001; Ross and Levine 2006; Salet, Thornley, and Kreukels 2003). The combination of these two trends is likely to determine the developmental legacy of the smaller communities of large agglomeration and the overall development of the metropolitan area.

In this paper, I explore the “political tensions” (Phelps, Wood, and Valler 2010, p. 374) of peripheral development. Early research has already investigated the political construction of city-regions and how this is consistently affected by changing market dynamics (see Jonas 2012). This paper contributes by examining the behavior of political coalitions and the influence of electoral and ideological beliefs in planning processes. While planning is generally considered a political task, the connection between electoral dynamics and land-use outcomes is underinvestigated (Campbell 2001). The paper thus explores a long-term project by using a conceptual model able to integrate political factors into the land redevelopment process. The analysis of a 14-year-long planning legacy for the “ex-Falck” site, a 150-ha brownfield in the large municipality of Sesto San Giovanni (Sesto) on the border of Milan, sheds light on how political calculations might affect planning negotiations.

The current paper presents a study of one particular project in the north of Milan. It is thus a single-outcome case study (Gerring 2006), namely, a study that aims to elucidate the mechanisms that lead to a specific outcome with a specific context. I am interested in uncovering the manner in which electoral and ideological factors affect the transition from industrial to other forms of productions and living within the urban periphery. In this case, I explain a specific planning outcome: a long-lasting stalemate around the redevelopment of a brownfield despite market pressure with interested business actors and a strategic location within Milan metropolitan area. The question is, “In what way do electoral strategies impact peripheral development?” The paper concludes that under conditions of metropolitan fragmentation, urban development is likely to experience political gridlocks and conservative strategies by political coalitions. The case of the Falck brownfield in Sesto San Giovanni provides an interesting case to examine this problem: It is a large unitary property to be redeveloped, with high costs of development, within a municipality traditionally governed by left-wing interests, struggling to guide the transition to a postindustrial economy.

Milan city-region is also struggling to address issues of metropolitan governance and postindustrial development in its first urban belt. Over the past decade, the socioeconomic pattern of Milan, the economic capital of Italy, has changed substantially (Gualini 2003) with expanding peri-urbanization, a shrinking core, and the emergence of peripheral clusters within the first belt (cerchia urbana). These are characterized by a leading service economy, media industry, and informatics. At the same time, Milan’s inner urban ring continues to display fragmented spaces, scattered pockets of poverty, congested urban environments, social marginalization, and social conflict (Zajczyk et al. 2005). This periphery thus reflects the duality of Milan city-region, with an emerging economic polycentrism combined with institutional, political, and social fragmentation.

In this paper, I first define the interlocked challenges of urban development in the urban periphery. Next, I explain the inherent power-holding nature of local political coalitions by considering their behavior during different time periods, with data collected between 2010 and 2011 from 34 interviews, content analysis of newspapers, and direct participation in public meetings. Finally, I explain recurring stalemates by exploring the context of Milan’s metropolitan geopolitical fragmentation.

The Triple Challenge of Urban Development in the Urban Periphery

It is generally agreed that the capacity to govern urban development is related to the definition of win–win solutions between public and private interests, matching the need to achieve financially sustainable and profitable projects with the expectations of community benefits. The success of projects thus depends on the alignment of these interests through formalized cooperation to control opportunistic behaviors and to promote long-lasting collaboration (Sagalyn 2007). Most literature on brownfield development has focused on the economic problems of land redevelopment and the importance of public subsidies in pursuing collective interests (Dair and Williams 2006; McCarthy 2002). This perspective is based on the presumption that private investments naturally target profitable sites in inner cities or migrate to suburban areas where land is cheaper. However, the complexity of today’s peripheral development lies in a “prism” of conflicts (Godschalk 2004) that includes noneconomic factors directly affecting developmental choices, like quality of space or sociocultural change. In short, ambitions for growth clash with the need to protect existing patterns and to maintain livable spaces, even when growth is necessary to meet the cost of environmental and social policies. Similarly, the preservation of local sociocultural milieus and spatial patterns can restrict the adaptation of local economies.

The analytical model here considers three main critical dimensions of peripheral urban development: property development, collective benefits, and socioeconomic change. Property development refers to the financial costs of the land reuse, relating to, for example, soil remediation, building, and interest on investments. Collective benefits are the extent to which development gains are redistributed to communities in the form of public services, infrastructures, or tax relief. Socioeconomic change refers to the social and cultural implications of spatial change that, in turn, affect the composition of local communities. Governing urban development in formerly industrial localities implies all these dimensions because it (1) involves significant initial investments, (2) is a key opportunity for local municipalities to regenerate their economic wealth, and (3) has an impact on areas with strong local political cultures. Three main challenges emerge from this triangle of dimensions (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

The three interlocked planning challenges.

Growth challenge (property development/collective benefits) emerges from the tension between the high costs of land development and the redistribution of the gains generated through land reuse. Local authorities need to find a balance between the need of private investors to generate earnings from the development and the contributions that those developers need to give to the community (e.g., public amenities or betterment fees). This is a matter of negotiation and it depends on the demands of local political interests (Wolf-Powers 2010). To facilitate land redevelopment of particular areas, local authorities can relieve pressure through tax allowances or contribute with direct public investments. They can also use land development as a source of income (e.g., property taxes) without increasing existent taxes. The challenge stems from the fact that by increasing the public fees on the development, the intervention might turn to be unprofitable for the developer. On the contrary, by decreasing these costs, they risk to reduce the collective returns from the private development.

Identity challenge (property development/socioeconomic change) stems from the tension between the need to attract new forms of living and production, and the imperative to protect local communities from gentrification or displacement. Land redevelopment has relevant social costs, especially in industrial municipalities. Here the rent gap could attract new investors seeking opportunities for alternative economies, like creative industries, high- level education, or large-scale retail. The new activities attract new social profiles with different living styles and demands. This challenge encapsulates the erosion of existing cultural, spatial, political, and symbolic landscapes to accommodate the demands of new urbanities and economies (Dembski and Salet 2010). The market challenge therefore requires the capacity to manage the social impacts of urban change while protecting and valorizing heritage, history, and local culture.

Electoral challenge (collective benefits/socioeconomic change) entails the tension between the need of municipalities to improve local services activating land development and the political risk that socioeconomic change entails. These risks stem from the implications that the change of industrial activities and real estate have on the composition of local communities. This change leads to the change of local constituencies that support coalitions in power. Risks are also involved whenever local political coalitions opens up more participative processes of decision making to generate consensus over policies. Local polities work on the basis of consensus consolidation in their choices and are supposed to operate according to electoral mandates. In pursuing urban transformations, they are in the difficult position of pursuing urban regeneration while protecting the interests of their constituents. Urban change has political risks in the shift from production to consumption, from work to living, or even from factories to entertainment amenities (T. N. Clark et al. 2002). While building some forms of public–private partnerships or inclusive governance might smooth this transition, governments need to invest significant resources (political, technical, and monetary) with uncertain returns in terms of consensus and/or finance. The process of including different opinions and addressing conflicts with more flexible decision making can be highly costly and politically unsustainable in the long run (i.e., the “voice” approach in addressing internal political conflicts, Hirschman 1970). Political elites often perceive innovative planning as a risk because it stirs local antagonism and has unexpected effects on local polities (Savini 2011). In addition, public–private partnerships always entail a certain degree of inequality, deriving from the trade-off of public accountability and transparency against technical and economic efficiency.

Power-holding Strategies of Political Coalitions

Urban development is a dynamic process of negotiation, compromise, and bargaining between clusters of stakeholders. These interests are distributed around the three elements of the triangle mentioned above. Following Rittel and Webber (1973), this process is not purely rational since the definition of the problem is affected by the array of ideological and political positions (i.e., “wicked”). Hypothetically, an ideal-type situation would finally lead to a win–win solution, where all actors would agree on a land-use plan that does not hinder or protect their specific interests. Such an end point is a matter of conceptual speculation, as planning consists of a series of agreements based on a “trading” of gains and losses (Mäntysalo, Balducci, and Kangasoja 2011). Within political systems of representative democracy, the behavior of politicians and political parties remains one of the major factors in understanding land-use choices. Yet, the behavior of alderman and mayors in the practice of land-use planning tend to be underinvestigated (A. Clark and Krebs 2012). In this section, I build a hypothesis to guide the empirical investigation on the behavior of political coalitions in land redevelopment. Looking at the crisis of Fordism, structuralist approaches have emphasized that urban development policies reflect changes in circuits of capital accumulation (Harvey 1985). Since the pivotal work by Peterson (1981), urban development has been associated with calculations of economic growth. At the base of this argument, there was the assumption that despite the political rhetoric, choices of urban renewal and expansion are the product of economically rational choices to increase urban wealth. This means to attract profitable functions and to maintain a stable pattern of city growth that would eventually affect social well-being. This explained also why cities compete for resources within regions, as land development would mostly be used as a source of municipal income. Business-led entrepreneurial coalitions are considered the agents of this transition, with their capacity to manipulate political processes toward priorities of growth (Harding 1995; Logan and Molotch 1987). Under these conditions, projects are likely to follow real estate markets (e.g., suburbanization, inner-district gentrification, or CBDs). In the past 20 years, a large amount of work, however, has readdressed the position of political calculations over economic ones. It has been demonstrated that urban development choices are instead the product of a complex set of calculations, which are also political and not only economic (Sanders and Stone 1987). These motives can follow ideological principles, symbolic values, and electoral strategies (Swanstrom 1988). Political logics do complement economic calculations in land-development processes and might even lead economically irrational decisions. The paper builds upon these arguments to empirically grasp the link between land-use planning, electoral politics, and metropolitan fragmentation. It focuses on today’s postindustrial redevelopment to combine the reflections proper of urban politics theories with notions of land-use planning.

Negotiations in land-use planning involve a process of mutual adjustment between contrasting interests and it driven by nonrational mechanisms (Lindblom 1959). The process is affected by systems of beliefs (i.e., “biases”) that condition the definition of planning problems. While theorizing on electoral choices and party behavior, Downs (1957) argued that ideologies are instrumentally used to manage consensus around political choices and organize public consensus in conditions of limited knowledge (i.e., limited rationality). According to the classic work of Weber, ideological beliefs define a type of “rationality” that is “substantive” and not “formal.” Differently from “formal rationality,” substantive rationality regards the way in which actors define goals and how they address them (Weber 1978), and it sets the conditions of collective action. In the frame of this paper, such a substantive rationality is likely to determine how the three planning challenges discussed above are interpreted and prioritized by involved actors. Development choices that might seem economically irrational (such as long-term vacancy) can be fully explained by this political logic (Wolman 1988). In a planning process case study, Flyvbjerg (1998) has demonstrated how rationality is not a static and objective concept, but it is constructed by political actors. Planning decisions are made by influential stakeholders that eventually “rationalize” their choices by manipulating the knowledge available on the problem at stake according to either political or financial considerations. These manipulations inform concrete policies of adaptation or resistance to economic and spatial change. In the long run, these ideological considerations are institutionalized into patterns of action that condition future planning choices or might even reduce responsive policies to economic change. They structure specific governing methods and identify acceptable and desirable schemes of problem solving (DiGaetano and Strom 2003).

Empirically, American research in urban politics has examined the role of mayors, aldermen, and civic groups in addressing urban and economic change (DiGaetano and Klemanski 1999; Savitch and Kantor 2002). To explain their behavior, they demonstrated that governing coalitions have a built-in tendency to hold . In doing so, they maintain the capacity to govern establishing patterns of cooperation (i.e., “intermediate structures” or “coalitions”) to address conflict (Stone et al. 2011). Stone (1988) has defined this mechanism as social production, and has emphasized that it is based on a logic of preemption: the structuring of collective actions to enforce urban policies and to protect agendas from conflict by holding a position of influence. Accordingly, it can be hypothesized that under conditions of uncertainty, political coalitions are likely to hold fast to their power base. The trajectories of urban development undertaken by peripheral municipalities will be instrumentally geared to protect existing political interests. Political groups are likely to make conservative decisions when faced with complex problems because the electoral costs of making a choice will be higher (Hall 1982). In planning, the responsiveness of elected officials to emerging issues depends on the electoral risk they can bear. However, because it is hardly possible to know the potential electoral consequences of a planning choice in advance, innovative decisions are highly risky. Politicians try to protect their power base, to simplify urban problems, and to work toward known and controllable planning processes. Elected coalitions can also build on shared ideologies or traditions to maintain power and consensus (Mossberger and Stoker 2001; Stone 1993).

While these reflections have often built on a careful analysis of inner city redevelopment, today they are particularly interesting in the context of smaller municipalities of the urban periphery. These localities often depend economically on the wealth of larger cities. Their mayors and alderman tend to reduce their risk of losing the next election, especially in outer areas where there are particular conditions. Voters in the periphery tend to have weak support for incumbents, to be more informed and active, and to more carefully evaluate specific policies than voters in larger cities (Oliver and Ha 2007). Moreover, the pressure on elected officials is higher in inner peripheries, especially if the localities are less socially homogenous, with more political groups competing with each other within smaller jurisdictions. Peripheral executives are thus operating at a short distance from their constituency increasing the political pressure on their choices. Smaller municipalities in the urban periphery (inner urban belts of metropolitan areas) also differ in their fiscal condition. Especially in Europe, they do not benefit from the fiscal advantages of outer suburbs or core cities. Outer municipalities are usually wealthier (this is the case in Milan) than inner peripheries, where deindustrialization has been traumatic and poverty is concentrated. Core cities can instead benefit from more flexible systems of taxation and from profitable functions settled in their jurisdictions (e.g., museums, finance, education) (Klausen and Røe 2012; Kunzmann 2010). In the following section, I show how the electoral challenge conditions growth and identity challenges by looking at the behavior of the executive in Sesto San Giovanni.

The Implications of the Falck Project in City Planning, Politics, and Economy

Sesto San Giovanni (Sesto) is a city of 80,886 inhabitants, with 23% of its active population employed in industry and manufacturing. Approximately 20% of its surface is currently brownfield land. The city witnessed 40 years of economic and demographic growth from 1951 to 1981, being a key attractor of labor force from the whole north of Milan. Today, it has potential for development, being at the interface between the developed northern districts of Milan and the Monza-Brianza productive region. However, the city still has poor public services and a lack of green spaces, significant traffic congestion, and a fragmented urban pattern of newer social housing estates and post–World War II industrial residential blocks.

The Falck brownfield was formerly occupied by the largest steel factory in the country, covering 13% of the Sesto jurisdiction. Today, it is a 150-ha vacant space in the middle of the city, adjacent to the central station and easily accessible from the Northern and Eastern Motorways. After the factory closed in 1996, the area attracted the interest of investors who saw an opportunity for profit from the cheap land in a highly dynamic city-regional real estate market. The project became a long-term enigma for the municipality, as the land was acquired over time by four different corporations who made three separate plans with international architectural firms (Kenzo Tange, Mario Botta, and Renzo Piano). Due to the long-lasting stalemate, the acquisition price rose from 200 million euros (400 billion Italian lire) to 220 million euros in 2005, and to 433 million euros in 2011. The project has the juridical status of an Integrated Intervention Program (programma integrato di intervento), permitting quicker derogation to statutory planning (Law 142/1992 and Law 9/1999) and giving central importance to project-based bargaining between public authorities and development corporations on costs, revenues, and collective benefits agreements. The project is thus under the direct responsibility of the municipal government and the mayor.

A development program here will have considerable impact on the condition of Sesto and on the urban pattern of northern Milan. In Sesto, the resolution of growth, market, and political-electoral challenges is likely to condition the political context of the municipality.

The Legacy of the Falck Project

To illustrate the different implications of local coalition power-holding strategies, I will differentiate three main periods of the planning legacy of the project. The first period (1996-1999) is characterized by a strong focus on the labor and reindustrialization issue, with the city of Sesto benefiting from regional, national, and European support and a locally dynamic coalition oriented toward industrial stimulation. Between 2000 and 2005, the city engaged in complex bargaining over land-redevelopment costs and gains, driven by a political coalition uncertain about the city’s future, finally opting for a restrictive development agenda. Between 2005 and 2011, the project became a central question, a catch-22 between accommodating market demands and addressing sociopolitical conflicts.

The Implications of Metropolitan Fragmentation on Urban Development

Deindustrialization has heavily affected Sesto’s socioeconomic landscapes, but local political coalitions have, for many years, been unable to redevelop their land. The Falck case shows that political strategies affect land-development choices and that local political coalitions tend to protect their interests when faced with uncertain outcomes. Why this outcome? How could we unlock these trends? Many different approaches could be adopted to answer these questions: for example, analyzing project management structures and legal instruments, providing leadership in goals setting, or even focusing on the impact of financial economy on urban development (for example, see Olsson 2006). However, my argument here is that the resolution of the gridlock between growth, market, and political challenges in the Falck is caused by a power-holding behavior induced by metropolitan fragmentation. The political resistance of Sesto is de facto induced by weak inter-municipal planning. There is a mismatch between the inter-urban scale at which growth and market challenges take place and the city scale at which urban development is addressed. While the Falck project is a strategic endeavor for the city of Sesto, the tensions of the project are of such a complexity that a cooperative planning process is hard to reach without considering the challenges at a wider scale, including Milan’s border and the first urban belt (i.e., the denser parts of the metropolitan area).

There is no functional discontinuity in the urban texture of Milan and its first belt. Sesto San Giovanni has density equal to northern Milan’s neighborhoods and is a major attractive pole for commuters within the city (Piano Intercomunale Milanese [PIM] 2006). Real estate prices are similar to Milan due to good accessibility (e.g., Tangenziale Nord, Malpensa) and office space is even more profitable in some cases (OSMI 2011). The shrinking of Milan in the last 30 years (by −8.3% of population between 1991 and 2001) has made the city dependent on its first belt and on the suburbs for affordable housing. Economic activities are thus progressively relocating to the outer areas, like Segrate (e.g., Accordo di Programma [AdP] international business), the South-East, and the North-West (e.g., Stephenson district and EXPO 2015 area) and development projects are following these trends (Figure, 2). However, this dynamism is uncoordinated between municipalities and problems of high long-term office and housing vacancy (6% and 10%, respectively), and a lack of affordable housing in the inner districts exists. Traffic congestion and air pollution are increasing in the whole region.

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Figure 2.

Main ongoing projects in Milan and Sesto San Giovanni.

Issues of growth, sprawl, and social redistribution affect the spatial, social, and economic interrelationship between Milan and its neighbor communities. These require a planning approach that defines win–win scenarios at the metropolitan level to accompany the polycentrism emerging in Milan. The framing of market growth, industrial settlement, and green area production can thus be done only at the regional level, weighting costs–gains of developments. The emergence of strategic forms of regional cooperation are based on recognition of the benefits to each municipality in collaborating on solving collective action problems, creating economies of scale in development, and coordinating public service production and delivery (Andersen and Pierre 2010).

The inter-urban character of these socioeconomic and environmental problems is well known in the politics of Milan and its metropolitan area. Nonetheless, most of the inter-municipal policy-making experiments undertaken so far have failed to overcome the political resistances to cooperation: the 1960s-1970s experiments of the PIM, associating 63 municipalities and two provinces; the national framework of Città Metropolitane, which attempted reorganization of administrative structure based on voluntary agreement between municipalities (Law 142/1990); the Milan’s Framework Document (Documento di Inquadramento) in the 2000s (Healey 2004) that experimented with more flexible city planning; and the recent Città di Città project that explored and designed the polycentrism of Milan Province (Balducci 2011). In spite of their potential to “manage” growth and market dynamics at a higher scale, these initiatives have not taken root in local development choices because, when it comes to definitions of land usage, local politics often fear win–lose situations. Milan metropolitan area is instead governed by noncooperative and noninstitutionalized inter-municipal coordination (Balducci 2003; Kantor 2008), consolidated by an integrated system of hierarchical planning that does not allow innovation in development policies. According to Balducci, Fedeli, and Pasqui (2011, p. 5), there is a “chronic lack of correspondence between administrative boundaries and the phenomena to control,” which in turn generates “a context of multi-level governance in which the boundary lines multiply and overlap putting increasingly more pressure on the traditional boundaries of administrative organization” (Balducci, Fedeli, and Pasqui 2011, p. 31).

Inter-municipal competition increased the perception of the electoral risk of land development in Sesto’s political elite. The formerly industrialized urban belt of Milan is alone in its large-scale strategic project, with scarce resources, many planning responsibilities, and in a competitive context of regional development. The Falck project suffered isolation from higher levels of negotiation. Land development became a closed negotiation between politicians and financiers, with upper levels of government providing only normative frameworks. Although the latter can make use of different planning tools to orient development (Piano Territoriale di Coordinamento Provinciale and the Piano Territoriale Regionale), they have few resources to enable innovative decision making. They operate on infrastructure and protected environment but not on strategic development projects (e.g., the PII remain a wholly local responsibility). The combination of localized planning competences, weak incentives for strategic cooperation, and a decentralized fiscal system generates an institutional situation that makes it hard to reorganize and reframe sociospatial (and political) asymmetries between Milan and its belt.

In the periphery, metropolitan fragmentation has a direct effect on the (political) capacity of local government to respond to challenges of economic change and thus has indirectly conditioned the emergence of a balanced polycentrism in the region. Conservative localism has tangible impacts on the economically riskier developments; these are those areas in transformation where the need of redevelopment is high but also the social and economic impacts on existing environments. In the smaller municipalities these challenges tend to be significant with consolidated historical identities, high concentration of poverty, and more significant need for social services. The Falck site lost the competition for profitable functions because it competed, rather than cooperated, against more profitable projects in the core city (e.g., Santa Giulia, City-Life, Garibaldi-Repubblica).

A rescaling of the project might have affected the planning process in several ways. First, it could allow the strategic connection of local economic development issues with larger trends in the Milan region. Within metropolitan platforms of cooperation, local politicians can become more aware of the changing dynamics of other municipalities. They can also better understand how local plans compete or complement neighboring visions to better address planning agendas in long time spans. Moreover, the political stress over land development could be relieved by, for example, coordinating core-city development with the management of green landscapes and or transports in the periphery. A coordinated strategy of development reduces the political risks of complex developmental policies in the long term. Second, local political groups could find new opportunities for political coalitions by looking at the whole metropolitan area. The growth of poorer outer areas still depends on the dynamism of the core city. More cooperation could allow a better understanding of this interdependency and discover that specific policies for Milan municipalities might also promote wealth in the periphery. The economic specialization of subcenters can avoid competition between projects for investment, but this can only be discovered by engaging in strategic discussions at regional levels. Finally, rescaling peripheral projects would also strengthen the capacity of local groups to attract investments from higher tiers of government, as these subjects need to see the yields of their investments. By framing large projects in a regional perspective, it becomes possible to attract more resources and to develop integrated planning solutions to large infrastructural policies. A lack of strategic thinking on the streamlining of regional investments made it harder for Sesto to leverage subsidies from higher levels and support from public and semi-public institutions (e.g., national railway companies).

It is important to stress that metropolitan governance entails political conflicts and that large city politics tend to dominate smaller localities. Although political conflict might make cooperation impossible, my argument is that large-scale projects can help frame inter-municipal cooperation at a more pragmatic level by focusing on the long-term gains for the whole region and eventually on issues of wealth redistribution. In doing so, political coalitions might be stronger against instrumental profit strategies of large developers. They can also grasp opportunities to build political power outside their jurisdictional borders. This can facilitate the building of political support for policies formulated at higher levels that could promote the identity of local communities.

Conclusion

This paper aimed to cross-fertilize planning knowledge with concepts proper to political science. It used a spatial-electoral approach to empirically understand how electoral issues affect land development. The periphery is today a space crucial for metropolitan change, but in many cases, it needs to reinvent its socioeconomic condition, adapting to new global economies and meeting demands for public services. The extent to which metropolitan regions are able to exploit opportunities of urban change and avoid risks of regional polarization depends on their capacity to manage multiple types of planning challenges at an inter-municipal level. These stem from the interlocked effects of financial, socioeconomic, and political matters of area redevelopment.

This paper used a single-outcome case study to reveal how political-electoral dynamics, market change, and growth strategies are interlocked in practice. Urban development was conceptualized as a political problem surrounding the combination of financial and economic priorities of investors, the redistributive ambitions of local governments, and the electoral implication that growth has on socioeconomic change. Specific combinations of these ultimately determine whether, how, and what type of developmental policies will be realized.

What can be learned from this particular case? The limits of single case studies are well known and they regard the limited external validity of the result. The case of Milan is certainly peculiar, with lower economic polarization between core city and inner periphery, enrooted political subcultures, and a stronger role of government in planning. However, it shows a negotiated practice of land-use planning similar to English and American contexts, a practice also increasingly used in northern European countries wanting less public involvement in land development. The legacy of Sesto is similar to the postindustrial transition of some of the rustbelt cities or with the political dynamics of the European red-belts. This study does not claim to be generalizable, but it aimed to advance steps toward the underinvestigated relationship between electoral dynamics and planning in contemporary American and European literature and to catalyze more interdisciplinary research between planning and political science. It provided detailed, qualitative information on a case to set the bases for a new hypothesis of research, and possibly to combine them with large N comparative case studies more frequently used in political science. Further investigation might address the behavior of neoliberal parties, or test the relationship between electoral turnouts and land-use planning policies.

This study shows, first, that electoral strategies do influence development in times of economic growth and crisis but that politics may have a conservative bias. Politics also has a role to play in achieving innovation in land-use planning, but this requires specific conditions. This statement attempts to complement discourses on the domination of market subjects, especially in times of economic crisis where business tends to stick to established practices of development. As demonstrated in the past, political dynamics do affect urban development and can frustrate economic outcomes. In the Falck case, the project turned to be a never-ending problem for private developers and local politics despite its great urban potential. This paper has, however, added that, today, metropolitan governance is yet an important factor that affects these dynamics. As such the political construction of metropolitan political spaces and its effect on urban change needs to remain in the research agenda. This might suggest that planning in times of economic crisis might not only need economic solutions but also discussion of the democratic justification of growth policies. Second, the study suggests that under the conditions of emerging polycentric metropolitan areas, the degree of innovation in planning is related to capacities for rescaling and reframing development agendas at a metropolitan scale. Considering local parochialism, the cause of failure for metropolitan governance might make institutional change difficult. In this article, I took an opposite point of view, looking at creasing local conservative policies in peripheral municipalities and arguing that metropolitan fragmentation might increase these tendencies (rather being simply the consequence). This is a shift in point of view that provides insights to inform and sustain experiments in the practice of metropolitan government. My argument is that local governments in the periphery might miss important opportunities by pursuing protective inward-looking strategies, and this does weaken their position in metropolitan political platforms in the long run. Institutional experiments might thus attempt to rejuvenate the political linkages between local dynamics and regional trends.