GEOGRAPHY AND PLANNING THIRTY YEARS ON CONSIDERATIONS MADE IN THE MARGINS OF AN UNUSUAL BOOK

Abstract

The author is inspired by a recent book (2014) written by Giovanni Crocioni, an engineer and urban planner, to take up once again a past debate on concepts and themes used both in geography and in planning such as city, territory and region. After retracing opinions formed in the past century, the author focuses on the development planning of wide area, pointing out how the British vocabulary, in its various compounds (town-planning, city-planning, regional planning, town and country planning, city and regional planning), expresses greater attention for the global problems of the territory. Nowadays, in Italy, the issue is concentrated on both the strategic value and the scale of planning to stress its united and inter-disciplinary nature. In order to achieve that aim, administrative reorganization and consequently a new juridical frame, are fundamental. According to recent opinions collected from the Società Geografica Italiana and the Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica, the author concludes by stating that it is time for the two disciplines to find a point of convergence, in order to avoid deferring action and to obtain concrete measures, made more pressing by the degradation of both natural and manmade territory.