Keywords

8.1 Limits in Urban Planning Theories and Practices in Conditions of Disorder

This chapter examines the comparison between successful planning processes in two cities in Sicily. Their successes are relevant in a wider environment of the failure and inefficiency of planning. This suggests reading them through the trading zone approach, especially considering the effectiveness of these initiatives – according to Galison’s point of view – within the ‘thickness of the established culture’, characterized by norms of domination, individualism, and ‘particularism’ (Gambettax 1988, 1996; Pizzorno 1991; Putnam 2002).

The widely documented failures of urban and development planning processes in Southern Italy demonstrate the limited utility of current planning theories to actual urban problems in this territory.

Although certain phenomena may be qualified as extreme, given the extraordinary power of organized crime (OC) on urban dynamics of these regions, the cases illustrated here may help us to understand some of the broader limits of communicative planning: the asymmetry of power, lack of social capital, conditions of mistrust, and discordant value systems among people are particularly crucial in these regions.

In a context historically occupied by regional organized crime (the Sicilian Mafia1), the regulation system is usually bent to private interests (Cremaschi 2007). Urban planning regulations and practices are frequently geared to protect private interests, even if illegal. In this political climate, the general public is rendered sceptical of the legitimacy of government and technical powers and comes to doubt the presence of an intact institutional value system.

As indicated by recent researches (Donolo 2001; Cremaschi 2008; De Leo 2008a, b, 2009, 2010, 2011a, b), criminal organizations in these areas often influence the design and implementation of urban public policies.

This process is not a marginal phenomenon but rather the society’s organizing norm, complete with its social detriment and effects on the practices of urban and territorial planning. The result is a stagnant and depressed state of affairs regarding public spaces and general living conditions, since the public sector has minimal ability to change or improve the quality of life in the cities.

These conditions bring new questions to current planning theories (Mazza et al. 1996; Friedmann 2003; Sanyal 2005; Balducci and Bertolini 2007; Thomas 2007) and paradigms (Faludi 1982; Innes 1995; Allmendinger and Tewdwr-Jones 2002) as we know them.

Indeed, existing theories and practices – ranging from the traditional to the collaborative (Healey 1997; Innes and Booher 2005; Innes et al. 2007; Forester 1999) and to the more radical (Alinsky 1971; Grabow and Heskin 1973; Friedmann 1987, 1999; Sandercock 1998; Hartman 2002; Douglass and Friedmann 1998) – all seem ill-equipped to explain such ‘extreme conditions’, primarily because they do not account for the role of illicit and informal power structures 2 (both visible and invisible) as part of the planning process (from decision making to implementation, and so on).

The term ‘extreme conditions’ refers here to conditions in which organized crime, corruption, and ‘disorder’ are structurally concentrated; conditions experienced mostly in poor and underdeveloped locations (neighbourhoods, cities, and regions) are in fact present in both advanced and less developed countries.

Research into developing countries has elucidated a number of useful issues (Roy 2006, 2009, 2011; Wacquant 2008; AlSayyad and Roy 2003; Rotker 2002; Caldeira and Holston 1999), even if it is evident that planning theories have not yet clearly addressed such ‘extreme conditions’ outside the scope of total poverty or in conditions lacking a sociopolitical structure, but which entail perverse forms of development and weak or corrupted institutions.

In this framework, planning theories must also reckon with a different set of implications for some of the crucial aspects of the broader disciplinary debate – for instance, urban governance and institutional transformation (Beauregard 2005; Healey 2005; Moulaert 2005).

On the one hand, the exploration of the contradictions between formal and social regulations is very limited, and theories show the strain of planning systems when regulatory systems are under pressure and not particularly developed. On the other hand, the survey of the literature pinpoints a significant underestimation of the relationships between urban practices and criminal/illicit and informal power structures, despite significant evidence, empirical and nonempirical, about the important role played by them within the planning processes.

In areas with a strong presence of criminal organizations, these powers are able to bend the system to support real estate profits (Schneider 2004; Schneider and Schneider 2001), or other various purposes; illegal building (‘abusivismo’) and political patronizing (‘clientelismo’) are frequent and evident in many parts. The facets of power garnered by these organizations include the ability:

  • To defend and promote private interests (especially those that are their own, but not exclusively), therein jeopardizing and marginalizing the public arena.

  • To delegitimate the public power (of politicians and technicians) by hook (corruption), by crook (violence/intimidation), or simply by preserving the inertia.

For planners, the main problem is that outside of a framework of a public interest and legitimacy, it appears that ‘urban planning is nothing’, since planning theories and their application are unable to promote better living conditions for cities and citizens in extreme conditions of this sort.

However, in apparent defiance of these very problems, two distinct but equally remarkable urban programmes presented the opportunity to manifest a different reality, defining rules, projects, and new behaviours. These initiatives transformed cities in ways that must be understood fully if similarly positive processes are to be sponsored in other urban contexts. By understanding the mechanisms of these two programmes, we may be better equipped to create successful strategies and encourage favourable outcomes in other contested conditions.

8.2 Successful Thin Stories: Contrasts to the ‘Thickness’ of the Established Culture

The Urban-Italia Bagheria Program and the whole design and approval process of the General Town Planning Scheme (PRG) of Villabate were successfully conducted in two municipalities within a region historically managed by the Mafia. These cases represent a positive discontinuity when compared with the traditional abuses and common bad territory government. Indeed, here the planning tools and processes applied in these initiatives were able to change the two cities, both from physical and social points of view.

Both municipalities stalled (twice) when their members resigned due to Mafia infiltrations and were then replaced by a special temporary commission with extraordinary powers in planning matters (called Extraordinary Commission).

Undoubtedly, the period of external Extraordinary Commission offers a unique environment of stability and certainty, often simplified compared with ordinary conditions: commissioners give clear guidelines for specific technical problems, often related to plans and planning practices. As part of the activities under the commission, those relating to urban planning can go through the revision or preparation of an ‘urban programme’ or a master plan, with or without the real ability to concretely change or improve the quality of life in a certain place.

Change can be temporary (for the duration of the Extraordinary Commission) or longer lasting. Of course, to make ‘change’ happen, it is not sufficient to draw up a plan: as the two cases show us, it is necessary to define practices, new ways of working, new tools, and new institutions (even temporary ones) able to change interpersonal relations, through the design of standards, rules, and spaces.

It is necessary, then, to ask what has worked and what has made it possible, in both cases, to define a path of unprecedented change for these areas.

The trading zone approach offers interesting ideas to understand who and what has been done through trading.

Specifically, this case-studies comparison explores how the concepts and tools applied ‘in that specific site, in that specific time’ (Galison 1999) (a) affected trading between the different subjects involved in a changing process and (b) constructed a previously non-existent ‘common sense’ with tangible effects on the physical spaces and the public sphere, all things regarded as the most significant results of these planning processes as a whole.

This chapter tries to deal with these questions in order to understand if the trading zone approach – useful when used in conflict-laden situations qualified by discordant interests – could help us to improve planning practices in contexts in which organized crime plays a very relevant role, especially in terms of a distortion of interests.

This role of organized crime is strong not only in terms of corruption but also in the reproduction of a particularistic and opportunistic habitus, which is clearly opposed to urban transformation and to good territorial government.

If corruption is (or should be) a concern of the general judiciary and police departments, then proper plans for each context and an effective implementation of urban and regional planning processes are clearly the responsibility of planners. This could be done in several ways. The success of a planning process depends upon appropriately identified goals and effective practices leading to the desired transformation. Of course, there is always the strong influence of the political framework (whether a support or a barrier to the specific action planning and governance of the territory), but there are different options for managing the challenge of each type of context.3

A brief description of the two cases will highlight significant similarities and differences.

8.2.1 Bagheria and Villabate: An Overview

Bagheria has implemented an urban programme of integrated actions that designed physical interventions, sponsoring the reclamation of public and private buildings, the renovation of several city squares, and the promotion of cultural and public events related to resources and urban traditions and territory.

In particular, the programme was able to activate a network of ‘unexpected’ subjects that have gradually been managing the challenges proposed by the Urban-Italia Program. This happened, above all, during the second phase of implementation (2004–2008) and through a significant renewal of practices, languages, and styles.

At the beginning of this process – with local institutions discredited by two Extraordinary Commissions for Mafia infiltrations in less than a decade – there were only discouraged people, adrift from institutions, with entrepreneurs rendered evanescent and distracted, and a very weak administrative and technical apparatus. Clearly, these were not ‘optimal conditions’ to trigger collaboration between citizens and institutions – a process that is indispensable for the implementation of an urban regeneration process, as proposed by the programme.

One of the most significant practical strategies was to facilitate access for all – equally and without distinction (thereby defying the existing culture of ‘special favours’) – to information resources, by means of communication campaigns, adult workshops, initiatives in schools, the promotion of cultural events, and the opening of public spaces for interaction and confrontation (the UrbanCenter and UrbanPoint). Similarly, the introduction of several simple but clear rules for access to public funds (to be allocated, e.g. for the restoration of the facades in the inner city) served to facilitate trade and generate a newly shared and relevant culture of regulation.

In addition to the information and communication activities sponsored by its urban programmes, the Urban-Italia Bagheria Program has built a sort of common language and ‘culture of well-doing’, consisting of clear, transparent, and simple slogans promoting the embracing of citizenship and exhortations to ‘live in the municipality’4. Significantly, the revision of the initial slogan ‘RESTART FROM THE VILLAS’ to the second phase mantra ‘LET’S RESTART FROM THE VILLAS’ and later, the adoption of the dictum ‘THE BAGHERIA WE HAVE WITHIN US’ illustrated and inspired a culture of ‘giving back to the city’ through public initiatives in public areas. This process has newly defined the physical spaces and social opportunities for urban renewal in a broader sense.

In particular, the UrbanCenter has become the meeting place for groups of women and young people (previously unknown to each other), as well as the site of a ‘Time Bank’, an initiative inextricably linked to the assumption that people can live better by convening and exchanging what they have.

In recent years, Bagheria has breathed an air of renewal and transformation, invigorated by a revamped general appearance and a different way of experiencing the city and its spaces. The city discovered that it can be other than what it had always been: a city of houses with beautiful interiors but ugly exteriors, in a culture of disregard for the face of the public world. The city no longer needed to be a place without rules, governed only by the ‘rule of the jungle’, where the strongest did whatever she/he wanted, creating stagnancy for the collective, while the government fluctuated between a period of Extraordinary Commission and a state of regular election.

In Villabate, the town council was dissolved (for the second time) in early 2004 due to Mafia infiltration, amidst the development and adoption of a commercial plan that provided a huge shopping centre within a big urban area of about 15 ha. It was a project of disproportionate dimensions, even by the dimensions of large-scale plans, completely indifferent to the concrete urban dynamics and, last but not least, reported as the target of preferential investment of local criminal organizations by the DIA (Direzione Investigativa Antimafia – Antimafia Investigative Direction). The opposition to this project, strongly backed by the Mafia, pointed out the following problematic inconsistencies and disregard for technical regulations:

  • The cacophonous overlap between different tools of urban destinations, all in force at the same time.

  • The inappropriate size of the development, given its purported function

  • The absence of a regional planning framework supported by inter-institutional consensus.5

  • Since taking office, the technicians of the Second Extraordinary Commission produced a series of tools and planning practices with high technical profiles, such as the following:

  • Speed: in the ‘exceptional’ time of 5 years, there developed a process that began with the revision of the PRG (town planning scheme) and came to the approval of nearly all the instruments provided for executive planning (PPE).

  • Rigour and transparency of all procedural steps and sequences, within the motivations to support the process of law for each planning instrument.

  • Everyday Government, on time: with regard for certain rules and punctuality, compliance as an important effort that allows no distraction or carelessness.

  • These developments built a new relationship of trust between citizens and offices, based on clear rules for all, expedient action (when possible), and patient and unambiguous explanations of the reasons for denials (when they occurred).

At the end of the mandate of the Extraordinary Commission and subsequently, with the newly elected administration, Villabate ended up with an approved new PRG, Executive Requirements, and adoption of variations of the larger productive area (PIP), as well as the completion of a building amnesty program: a very important result in this context but also in the wider sense, because the extra power of the Mafia is fuelled by the lack of territorial government.

This renewed political and cultural environment created the conditions for constructing new buildings legitimately and efficiently. In this context, the role of offices at all levels is crucial: the respective ability of various parties to understand and support these processes is requisite for the promise of a new urban culture (Bazzi 2010).

8.2.2 Good News from the Cases: Opening a Space of Negotiation

One of the important elements of success of these cases is the fact that the two planners were able to plan and then implement an urban programme and a master plan.

In this framework, the most important actions in both programmes were the following:

  • Improving the budget, quality, and collective appropriation of public goods, common spaces, and commons.

  • The definition of new rules and procedures entailing simple and clear processes of urban renewal and urban development.

  • Transparency and public communication of decisions by public officials and offices directly involved in the management plan/programme.

  • The involvement and empowerment of the people (especially youth) in the new procedures and sound reasons for the public interventions.

Through the PRG and the urban programme, the municipalities have been able to impose a number of regulatory restrictions that are generally not easily acceptable: for example, in Bagheria, it was decided that public funds for the recovery of the facades could be granted only for the facades of legally condoned or legally constructed buildings. In this way, in addition to the request of anti-mafia certificates for all construction companies involved in projects funded by the municipality, the new legislation has also produced the tangible effect of legalizing the buildings in the process of restoring them.

Different urban practices, a change in styles and procedures, and an exchange of balanced and benefits rules have produced important and unexpected effects that have helped change the city.

In addition, both the Urban-Italia Bagheria Program and the PRG of Villabate have had positive impacts on the institutions themselves as they have:

  1. (a)

    Prompted the town to take on new commitments, some of which are ordinary and simple, but which regard a large part of the community.

  2. (b)

    Renewed the public image of the city: Bagheria at local, national, and European level, thanks to the performance achieved in the implementation of the programme; Villabate on a local scale, with its uniquely regional effectiveness and the efficiency of ongoing work by the commissioners.

The urban programme and the implementation of the PRG have contributed to the qualification of public action and the assumption of codes of conduct to account for and balance various interests, in the pursuit of enlightened programming, with transparency and legality. Certainly the introduction of simple and clear planning rules functioned as a device that allowed trading in a different form of relationship between citizens and institutions and brought to fruition conditions that were previously unimaginable.

To understand how this was possible, we can think of planning activities and implementation as the outcome of an unprecedented state of collaboration, apparently born of a kind of truce. The truce, however, is not simply a product of the Extraordinary Commission: in most cases – even if, as in these cases, the Extraordinary Commission is due to reasons related to town planning activities – the process tends to produce little or no change. In fact, the Extraordinary Commissions often lead to stagnation and further inertia and not to the production of plans and projects, much less to any reliable and efficient implementation.

In these cases, the truce has concerned the definition of a different area of the relationship, as the result of a negotiation that simply was not possible before. It appears that bonds of trust were constructed in Bagheria, as we previously stated (De Leo 2008b; Cremaschi 2008), but the new-found trust came from an unexpected and unprecedented exchange area in this context. It is here that the cases seem to define the trading zone as yet unknown by the people and institutions, by no means a foregone conclusion in an area where public action tends only to preserve the status quo and the existing interests rather than incite any transformation process regarding the interaction and combination of subjects and interests.

As the trading zone approach suggests, this small set of concrete actions has served as a ‘boundary object’ (Star and Griesemer 1989; Galison 1997) within a specific ‘time of negotiation’ during the entire planning process. This is where the largest gap is, compared to other processes: the discontinuity lies in the relationship with inhabitants and in their traditional endorsement and common defence of vested interests; people rarely mobilized and involved in public events and participatory processes, due to an atavistic distrust of institutions, and in parallel confidential convergence of interests and benefits to the system of protections and guarantees that is afforded by organized crime.

For the sake of familiar relationships (especially in small towns or on the outskirts of bigger cities)6 or for the (better conditions offered for the) most efficient supplying of goods and services (including security) in some areas, organized crime is a concrete alternative 7, which moves in opposition to the relationship with the institutions and the visions proposed by the initiative of public programmes, especially those born under the Extraordinary Commissions, too often short-sighted and conservative.

The proposal for new types of institutions and a different vision of the city can attract the attention of the inhabitants, but only if it is possible to pave the way for the relationship, for the trading zone, indeed. Without this trading zone, there is no plan or project, however perfect and well communicated, that could be implemented to change the ongoing status quo. It clarified for us, once again, that the quality of the communicative project is necessary but not sufficient to guarantee the success of a planning process.

8.3 Through the Lens of the Trading Zone Approach

8.3.1 Trading Zone Is About Interests

The trading zone approach allows us to place under observation what has happened between the parties (citizenship and institutions) to allow plans and programmes to be successfully designed and implemented ( Balducci 2011; Mäntysalo et al. 2011).

In these unusual cases, it was not a question of inertial stasis (a sort of waiting for ‘better’ times to return in order for business to take place) according to the usual and widely accepted social norms of particularism and individualism. On the contrary, there was a swift call to action in the face of existing barriers. In this sense, it is limiting to think that the success of the cases is the effect only of the Extraordinary Commission, since they are not really able to change gear in terms of the renewal processes of government of the territory (Mete 2009).

This was something stronger than any effect of the Extraordinary Commission where the aim was (only) to change (temporarily) the relationship between organized crime (temporarily paralysed given the prosecution or the simple tactic of survival) and the commissioned institutions with special powers. Both Villabate and Bagheria contain territories in which the entire social agenda depended on connivance with the Mafia. Bad governance and poor management of particularistic interests were customary.

Hence, in this case, it has been crucial for the possibility of a reduction – even temporary – of the distance and conflict among the common social fabric, with background and cognitive values structurally hostile to public action (directed for processing by a different design of spaces and public sphere) and the ‘new institution’ (transient/temporary, with no past and no future, renewed ostensibly to do well).

In this relationship, the cases’ success seems to be located. Particularly, through the lens of the trading zone approach, it is clear that the success of the urban plans depends upon the interruption of a condition of prevailing indifference, hostility, and substantial delegitimization of public institution activities.

This condition, of course, precludes not only shared objectives for an urban programme or development but also participation in the ‘project of change’ which can only be such if it can involve a large section of the population.

Therefore, the significant fact is that in both cases, an intense and rapid process of change ensued, involving a loss of control and power for the organized criminal body, in which the institution and the ‘social fabric’ actually cooperated for change, creating a situation which did not exist before, similar to a trading zone.

In these cases, a higher degree of irreconcilability and incompatibility of values and purpose is found, from a neo-institution (temporary and aimed to achieve special urban and regional interventions illuminated by legality and transparency) and a population largely hostile and culturally alien8 to public interest and intervention. The negotiation was thus conducted on a specific steep terrain of previously unimaginable interest, but one which has proved crucial (in general and in context) for adherence to the transformation programme: the public (or collective, according also with Tait 2011) interest.

In particular, in the cases under consideration, it was possible to trade:

  • Redefining the boundaries of the legitimacy of private interests: ‘it is not permissible to do anything that is not technically relevant’, ‘whatever is outside the rules is outside public funding, but following these procedures – the same for everyone – it is possible to regulate one’s position and obtain funding’, and so on.

  • Reintroducing through practices (the idea of) the public interest: redefining and rebuilding the public spaces of relationships and social life within urban tissues which developed autonomously, and unplanned; promoting cultural events well rooted in local traditions; providing training opportunities and ‘normality’ to the most vulnerable people; and also investing public funds for roads and sidewalks.

This process of negotiation remains, of course, strongly provisional in nature and could end up by gradually reabsorbing the results achieved through implementation: the closure of the Urban Center in Bagheria, which occurred after the end of the programme, is a clear evidence of this. In a similar state are all the degradation/disorder processes that attack the final outcomes of a transformation process by restoring the status quo. The effects are devastating since these demotions appear to produce not only physical effects, but general distrust and, again, the discrediting of public action.

8.3.2 A Slow Transition from ‘War’ to ‘Peace’

As has been pointed out, it is possible to think of these cases of success in difficult situations by using the theories of conflict resolution9. In this way, they appear as possible transitions from the ‘war’, or the uncertainty and instability, to the ‘peace’, the renewed action of the city government. Within this theory, it is assumed that this step is only possible through negotiation, clearly feasible even in a condition in which the interests, orientations, and values are not shared but are in conflict.

In this kind of conflict, it is not possible to immediately switch ‘from war to peace’, just as in our case it is not possible to go ‘to order from disorder’, but it happens during a slow process which is here read as a process of trading.

Certainly the contrast between the government (of the territory) and Mafias can be read as a permanent and, normally, low-intensity war10. In both cases, the planning process did not follow a traumatic disruptive event11 that disturbed the strong social orientation and was thus able to form the basis for new relations between citizens and institutions. We are not, therefore, in the presence of what Galison called ‘external forces that can drive participants into exchange’, but in a state of stasis. Although probably, in areas historically less compromised by the ‘mafia’ than these two, an Extraordinary Commission may in fact constitute a break or set the scene for new forms of agreement between the parties.

At the beginning of the described processes, the condition in which both cities found themselves was much closer to the acceptance of people living with bad governance without complaining, or asking for a new course; and breathing in the fatal belief that (politicians) are all equal and that no project will change anything, or nothing much will ever change.

It becomes crucial, then, to understand how it has been possible to emerge from this state of ‘war’ (in this case, more appropriately, of disorder and misrule in ordinary public affairs), and reach a different condition, at a different stage.

In this sense the trading zone approach offers some ideas to interpret the trading action that took place in the negotiations: it suggests that there was no abuse of power or the surrender of any of the parties involved in the conflict, but a partial adjustment that produced new conditions in which subjects and things arranged themselves for the changing.

8.4 Trading with Enemies?

The guiding principle is that A cannot convince B of A’s own values; A cannot forget what has been done to them or their family (in this case, for example, that B is someone who has had to deal with the Mafia, has been corrupted by the mafia, or has a relative in the mafia). Despite this, to allow government action it is as possible as it is necessary to find room for interaction. Therefore, it seems useful to understand how to find the common value, positive for both parties, that will allow change in the status quo, even if this may mean interacting with the enemy, with those who think differently but can be led to act jointly.

8.4.1 Who? The Crucial (and Impartial) Role of the Planner12

The relevant aspects which emerged from the case studies confirm the crucial role of the two planners, in this case two female urban planners, Dr. Marina Marino in Bagheria (with Maria Cristina Lecchi) and Agata Bazzi in Villabate. These have played the role of third party with regard to the commissioners or the elected mayors and have facilitated negotiations through their new practices and languages.

In detail, the cases are slightly different because:

  • Dr. Marina Marino, in Bagheria, a manager on temporary contract, has already had several roles in the recent history of the municipality and with the former Extraordinary Commission, as well as in the design of the urban programme: she has a programme to implement, designed by herself in conjunction with a group of expert colleagues and relatives closely involved in the action of urban transformation; moreover, with the funds of the Urban-Italia Program (extra, specially allocated funds for the municipality budget), she set up an efficient working team, especially through a symbiotic relationship with a communications expert, Maria Cristina Lecchi. She opened the Urban Center and coordinated a group of active young local people.

  • In Villabate, the architect Agata Bazzi was part of the second Extraordinary Commission, afterwards becoming technical manager for a full-time and indeterminate period; she worked with people within the institution and with an external consultant (Dr. Marina Marino) by changing the rules and procedures of Public Relations Office of the City/Technical Department. She has been available to all those who had doubts or concerns about the choices of the plan they were working on and opened the doors of all the offices, in the position of a technical expert who explains and listens without being intimidated or corrupted by anyone.

In both cases, however, the planners have acted in their own role as follows:

  • Technicians: hired directly by the Prefectures Committee on the basis of their qualifications and merits in the field in similar and neighbouring territories.

  • Outsiders: neither of them lives in Bagheria, which means that, theoretically, they have no strong local ties of kinship, and own no land in areas covered by the plans.

  • Temporaries: they were called to perform a task with a beginning and an end, so they do not have to spend the rest of their life there and were able to do what they were supposed to do, to the best of their abilities, even if Agata Bazzi remained at the end of the process as technical manager, thus able to follow through the details of implementation phases.

  • ‘Clean’ and on no-one’s covert payroll, arriving ex novo as part of the Extra­ordinary Commission.

  • Not politicians, ‘because in the end all politicians are the same’, but technicians, and therefore representing pure government action in the territory.

  • Not part of the police force either: the police, in this case, are the commissioners, with a specific job to carry out, and as such, outside the friend/enemy logic whereby, in this area, the police are not always friends.

8.4.2 How? Activation of Tactics of Reconciliation and Resolutions of Conflicts

In keeping with conflict situations, in these cases too, it is useful to think about the results achieved by negotiation in terms of reconciliation and resolution. In both processes, in fact, a kind of double level of reconciliation and resolution has been determined.

On the one hand, the reconciliation is obviously temporary from the point of view of social conditions and the general transformation of relationship dynamics: no miracle has happened, and it is not true that after these processes, the Mafia will no longer exist in local government. Its bulky presence is still reflected in relations between citizens, institutions, rules, and behaviours, which are not magically transformed into the final resolution of the conflict – insoluble conflict between public interest and the deeply rooted and widespread conviction of the uniqueness of private interests, whether legitimate or illegitimate. We have no illusions, of course. On this level, the maximum possible result (confirmed by the remarkable work of the two urban planners) seems to be the production of a temporary kind of trust between citizens and institutions, producing new codes of conduct.

These trading zones are achieved through a number of actions and objects/things introduced into the process as an ‘intersection of discursive and materials practices’ (Galison 1999, p. 7). Boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989; Galison 1997, 2010) differ in situation, role, and function, and are specifically used as useful items to shorten the distances that prevent the relationship, and in this way allow and encourage implementation.

In the cases examined, the boundary objects are not so much the plan or the urban programme itself (in Villabate, indeed, the previous plans allowed access to the mafia power and economy), but what they contain are as follows:

  • Clear rules.

  • Renewal of technical equipment.

  • Containment of the regular abuse of ‘the strongest’ (the Main Squares in Bagheria returned to public use, or in Villabate, the stop to the construction of an oversize and unreasonable commercial mall).

  • Rehabilitation of public and private places, in a sound balance between a wider rehabilitation of several small, single, private interests (the restoring of the facades of all the houses in the Bagheria inner city, as well as amnesties for all the illegally built houses of Villabate, granted through the correct procedures: a record) and the introduction of spaces (physical and social) for the public.

However, some effects come even closer to a resolution of conflict. This has to do with the implementation process: the restoration of the facades of the houses built illegally or without authorization, the release of squares from the parking areas controlled by local bullies in Bagheria, as well as the construction of new residential areas or the resolution of amnesty practices in Villabate; all these are tangible and positive real outcomes of a broad and deep negotiation process regarding the public interest that has allowed the implementation of such interventions. Obviously, the visibility of these actions makes temporary trust easier and in the long run may also contribute to a (painstaking) resolution.

The nature of the design and planning practices requires the ability to define courses of action with concrete results on which the failure of agreement implies a lack of effectiveness or duration of the effects of the actions (‘I won’t let you implement that project, using ostracism or intimidation, or just when you have finished it, then it will be destroyed, vandalized, or put to other incompatible uses or functions’).

In this sense, it is a more incremental vision of negotiation that aims to produce concrete and visible effects, very often able to amplify the intangible and symbolic results in terms of a change in relationships between citizens and institutions.

The combination of the level and duration of actions of ‘mere reconciliation’ with the quantity and quality of ‘concrete resolution’ actions through implementation activities characterizes different levels of effectiveness, differing in consistency from the overall changes in contexts usually marked by inertia and in-transformability.

So the logic of a combination of ‘discursive practices and materials partially but not completely shared’ is confirmed within a certain time, a ‘time slice’ (Galison again); this, however, may also be the effect of previous trading, imagining that an area of trading can be the basis for subsequent trading areas, in deferred time.

8.5 A Different Idea of Interaction

In such conditions, planners are called on to deal with subjects and methods within social systems profoundly influenced by organized crime (historically rooted in some areas) and to find an agreement that allows local government to act. It is necessary to work on ‘a set of coordinated local actions, enabled by the thinness of interpretation rather than the thickness of consensus’ (Galison 1997, p.10), more than on the general system of values and guidelines (e.g. what is ‘legal’ and what is not). Although these actions could gradually impact on the redefinition of the boundaries of legality/legitimacy of practices, the aim of the planner’s work should not be to correct, educate, or redeem opportunistic, speculative, or deviant behaviour in urban practices. What is needed is what was used successfully in Bagheria and Villabate, ‘a set of tools that is not a doctrine’ (Galison), to reduce the distance between public action and the complexity of interests that are an obstacle to planning activities and their effectiveness.

We cannot wait for the Mafia to be ‘definitely defeated’ in its control and management of the territories in order to free urban and development plans or programmes from the dangers of criminal powers, since in the meantime, in the absence of management, it would be strengthened13.

Similarly, it would not seem profitable to rely solely on the iron fist of the police for a strong or interim government with special powers; the latter then ceases to act as the government because it is outside the norm and often in the ‘state of exception’14 and is, in any case, susceptible to corruption.

On the contrary, it seems possible to do our job as planners by promoting trading through trading in the reconstruction of a system of social and spatial regulation.

While under no illusion whatsoever that we are all equal, good, and equally ­interested in participating in a process of positive transformation and shared space in which we live (a good project and communication campaign are not sufficient), it is possible to direct planning actions in a different direction: planning does not require the criminalization of the various components of society – which, incidentally, is not the planners’ job – but an area of significant agreement (on some aspects) must be found in order to achieve the objectives of the transformation of cities and territories. To do this, we have to take a substantially different dialogue as mode of interaction: one which will open up spaces of mediation with otherness (Trey 1992), which in these cases means the Mafia, or even strongly ‘criminogenic’ contexts (Garland 1997).

What do we do then: ‘trade with the enemy’, in order to plan and implement effectively?

In this sense, a direction of Galison’s (2004) which is basically consistent with ‘trading with enemies’ seems to be that of the Contractual Governance of Deviant Behaviour (Crawford 2003) or even restorative instead of retributive justice (Barton 2003).

All these approaches converge in the idea of a fundamentally different type of interaction. The assumption is that the difficult defeat of ‘evil’ cannot be a prerequisite of public action (since often it is far from completely alien to it); it is believed, indeed, that only the promotion of a positive course of initiatives in terms of a different relationship between individuals, groups, and institutions could provide essential background on which progressively to build the conditions for the implementation of durable social and physical renewal.

The orientation of recent critical research into urban governance from the point of view of chronic violence and organized crime looks at this hypothesis with interest because in areas of chronic violence, it is not realistic either to rely on the effectiveness of the opposition to ‘the enemy’ or for the planner to take the place of a criminal justice system, which is inevitably in a state of crisis in those very areas.

In this same logic, it is possible to agree with those who suggest focusing on the adoption of a framework of restorative rather than retributive justice which goes far beyond their use in the criminal justice system (Strang and Braithwaite 2001): remunerative justice aims at the punishment of deviant behaviour, restorative, at social balance.

What changes dramatically in restorative justice is the idea of public accountability in terms of collaboration for social harmony, with an emphasis on social regulations in general (Gerard 1996). Of course, in this different setting, the responsibility of planners also changes, since they work to strengthen the social fabric. In this logic, as we have seen in the case studies, our planners are more interested in ‘getting things right’ than imposing sanctions or punishment, while they are defining substantially renovated languages and behaviour as part of their techniques.

Unlike retributive justice that focuses on offences and deterrence, restorative justice uses informal processes of mediation and conflict reduction through negotiation (ibid.). This, of course, puts ‘planners into new relations of responsibility’ (Sager 2009). As a result (and not as ‘impossible and unreachable’ preconditions), this approach works basically to strengthen the capacity of civil society and establish it as the true resource for public action in conditions of disorder.

8.6 Endnotes

  1. 1.

    In Italy, organized crime is regionally based, with different names and rules in each region.

  2. 2.

    This is a kind of working definition by Diane and Daniela De Leo (Cfr. Davis 2012).

  3. 3.

    Every time, the planners have the opportunity to say ‘yes or no’ (Friedmann 2002).

  4. 4.

    ‘Municipality’ in Italian sounds like ‘in common’ or in a shared way.

  5. 5.

    Bazzi (2010) and Bazzi (2012).

  6. 6.

    Both are very close to Palermo.

  7. 7.

    Castells (2000) on organized crime as a ‘perverse alternative’

  8. 8.

    Compare with the ‘Alterity’ in Trey (1992) with a special thanks to Tore Sager that cited and sent me this reference.

  9. 9.

    In our very productive meeting in Boston, Larry Susskind suggested to me that I should consider conflict resolution theory for my cases (i.e. Israel and Palestine; Northern Ireland). Scholars of intractable policy disputes argue that stakeholders in intractable public policy disputes are often fighting not only because of their competing interests but also because their values, identities, and frames seem to be irreconcilable (Putnam and Wondolleck 2003; Kriesberg 2003; Schön and Rein 1994). When applied to these conflicts, ADR theory proposes that these more fundamental differences should be discussed and explored, but with the purpose of defining a practical problem that all parties can agree to work on. Usually these groups proceed with the understanding that the process will not seek to change any parties’ fundamental values’ (Forester 1988, 1999; Fuller 2006).

  10. 10.

    It is well known that criminal organizations prefer peace in the territories where they are, thus avoiding trouble and too many policemen on the ground.

  11. 11.

    For example, as the City of Palermo in the period after the ‘Falcone and Borsellino slaughters’, with the election of Leoluca Orlando, the new PRG process, and so on.

  12. 12.

    The planner’s role is relevant if we consider ‘the five golden rules’ of the conflict resolution of Larry Susskind, who states that planners are not the right people to be the mediator, although he does not say what their role should be.... (cf. Susskind and Cruikshank 1987).

  13. 13.

    Absence of PRG and urban plans is a common condition in municipalities infiltrated by the Mafia: where there are no (land-use) planning rules and everything has a price; the Mafia has the power to buy and govern at will.

  14. 14.

    Compare De Leo (2008a) for a ‘state of exception’ interpretation in contexts of the kind.