LANDSCAPE AND CULTURAL HERITAGE POLICIES IN EUROPE: Experiences for urban planning innovation in Italy

The landscape and cultural heritage policies offered by the European Landscape Convention and transposed in 2004 by the Italian Cultural Heritage and Landscape Code, marks new scenarios and offers numerous possibilities for intervention and design in urban and suburban space, through the holistic and social‐perspective approach, the subsidiarity, the dynamism, and the active protection. Italy, as a point of reference in European cultural heritage policies, is experimenting, slowly and often without a real awareness of the national state, policies of re‐centralization of urban planning tools and techniques, but through the innovations more easily diffused in the governments of the regional territories. In this context, this reflection on urban planning innovation in Italy is placed, by questioning the current planning tools by identifying possible lines of sustainable territorial development. To do this the case of the Apulia Region has been selected, which was the first to develop a Regional Landscape and Territorial Plan adapted to the European Landscape Convention and Law 42/2004 and offers an exemplary experience of a process that is also involving the other Italian regions and is also, spreading to the rest of Europe.