Local development challenges and the role of “wide areas” in strategic planning. The case of inter-municipal territorial unions of Friuli Venezia Giulia (Italy).

The present WP offers a contribution to the open debate on local development challenges regarding “wide areas” where urban fabric is mostly based on SMSTs. The document is structured along the following lines: firstly, it will briefly discuss the competitiveness issue in a post-industrial society, specifying the differences and complementarities between the two “false friends” concepts of competitiveness and attractiveness of places (section 3); secondly it devotes some space to a “demand-side & supply-side” approach of place development (section 4); and finally it looks at the ongoing experiment of the Italian wide area approach to local development at a sub-regional level, with specific attention to the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region and its UTI “experiment” (section 5), taken as a case study. The conclusion of the WP in section 6 is by no way an evaluation of this specific experience (not even a preliminary one) but rather it presents a set of recommendations and some methodological suggestions and policy recommendations to properly promote this new territorial layer (“wide area”) within a multi-governance framework which can be quite difficult to interpret. These recommendations stem directly from the Friuli Venezia Giulia specific case but can be considered of general scope.