Different Twins? Multi-Level Politics and the Spatial Reconfiguration of Urban Policies in Italy

Since the 1990s, the system of subnational governments in Italy has witnessed different waves of reforms, tackling the regional, provincial and municipal governments. Both the introduction of the direct election of the mayor (1993) and decentralisation (1996, 2001) increased the political and administrative responsibilities of city governments. However, local governments’ expenditure has been increasingly constrained in the aftermath of the public debt crisis. Our paper engages with the question of the spatial reconfiguration of urban policies in multilevel systems in the sectors of urban regeneration, water supply, and housing. Empirically, the paper analyses different examples of spatial reconfiguration through the study of Northern, Central and Southern cities (8 cases). Given the identical institutional setting (at least for ordinary Regions), their study is an interesting case of spatial variation in public policies. In fact, these urban policies are, one the one hand, structured by a loose legislative framework at the national level and, on the other hand, imply relevant political responsibilities without financial capacities at the local level. The paper argues that in this configuration of “accountable but poor” city governments, the variation of policy goals and instruments is explained by the politics of intergovernmental relations. The influence of politics refers both to the vertical dimension – the capacity of local politicians to obtain financial resources from the State and the Regions - and to the horizontal dimension – the establishment of networked relations across administrative boundaries at the local level. In this multi-level political space, political affiliation of mayors matters, but local parties are just one among other channels through which resources for policies are collected, thus signalling a change in the Italian Centre-Periphery relations as described by Tarrow in the Seventies.