Dealing with agriculture, environment and landscape in spatial planning: A discussion about the Italian case study

Only a few decades have passed since when in Italy spatial planning considered the countryside as an indistinct "blank space" only deserving marginal attentions. At the same time it is well known that the outcomes of the spatial and economic planning systems developed and tested over the past decades have been showing their critical poor suitability compared to the complexity of the socioeconomic system, which calls for specific planning policies, differentiated according to the various features, vocations, expressions and attitudes of the countryside. Therefore, the rural space experienced a long time after urban areas the use of specific spatial planning criteria aimed at a well-ordered, efficient, and sustainable development and a better quality of the settlement system, crucial issues which still wait for thorough and final answers. Moreover, the following issues have become more and more topical: the importance of defining specific planning policies for rural areas, and the need to go beyond the identification of zones to be intended for a specific and homogeneous type of development, by carrying out an ever more focussed and proper classification of rural areas. This paper reports the results of a critical discussion about the above-mentioned themes. The work is part of a broader research dealing with the development of a research model aimed to define a new idea of "spatial units", meant as analytical and design tools suitable to support syntheses of land-use, economic, agricultural, and landscape planning.