Planning Tool Mosaic (PTM): A platform for Italy, a country without a strategic framework

The following work proposes the institution of a technical device named “Planning Tool Mosaic” (PTM), defined as a total homogeneous and standardised framework for the principles contained in municipal regulatory plans: assignment of zoning, legends, and technical rules. The programmes and transformative actions of builders, infrastructure, social services of every kind, and each function over a national territory of more than 300,000 km² are controlled by nearly 8,000 municipalities as well as mayors, councils, and city halls that govern pieces of land in polygons several kilometres on each side. This generally takes place through city planning tools developed outside of any general guidelines or protocol and very often largely disconnected from their contents thanks to national norms that disempower them and sometimes make them substantially uninfluential. This is a European example of city planning mismanagement that needs to be brought to the broader attention of the European technical/scientific context. The PTM, though intervening when municipal plans are already in effect, introduces an element of social and political transparency to planning before transformative events occur, providing a continuous framework on the probable future of territories, thereby overcoming the current opacity with regard to public cognition of future arrangements.