Why, o malia, does Piano’s Redevelopment of the Suburbs meet with unanimous acclaim? The question becomes intriguing if we add: why have the dramatic alarms and appeals about the suburbs themselves, invoked by generations of urban planners, sociologists and engineers, been neglected by the political debate for decades and relegated to technical and specialist matters?

There are many answers. The most obvious: the authoritativeness of the proposer, the very special forum of the senatorial seat, the time ripe to make the issue politically comprehensible. But these answers, while valid, are not enough to explain the tone of approval, the enthusiasm and participation that seem to be spreading.

Could it be that we like to hear a project discourse, the proposal of a collective way of doing things, instead of the umpteenth cry about wrongdoings, the invocation of moratoriums, bans and blockades?
Could it be that it reawakens the dream of being able to give back to the city places for a society that respects public space, considered a common good without much proclamation, where children are taught not to throw candy wrappers in the street?

Could it be that we like to feel that a range of actions, especially small ones, without archistars, aimed primarily at the pleasantness, accessibility, dignity of urban spaces, in general committing little to public finances and a lot to voluntary work and local management skills, are possible?

Could it be that the use of country aunt terms, such as mending, fertilisation, conjures up the illusion that we can deal with the problem with our ordinary goodwill and skills, with domestic, everyday practices, now obsolete but recoverable in some handbook for the good citizen, such as that of advice for the good housewife?
Probably the gentle and judicious seduction of Piano’s programme springs from a mixture of these aspects, it moves from the pleasant nostalgia of the quiet strength and normal and widespread hope that permeated the post-war and boom years, when everyone felt called upon to give and receive their contribution to and from an industrious and pacified society.

Piano seems capable of animating citizens of goodwill, of stimulating them to active planning behaviour, to remove the depression that snakes through Italy in the year 2000. It is a pleasing departure, above all because it does not agitate a utopian and grandiose vision, but resorts to the low profile of operational proposals to keep them within everyone’s reach, to build a presumption of autonomous capacities even where the strength really is very modest and short-lived.

Of course, it is precisely in the risk of boasting effects that can be achieved with little that lies the point of fragility of the whole design. The crux is summed up in Calvino’s stupendous summary at the beginning of issue 1 of Periferie, the manifesto of Piano’s project: there are fragments of happy cities that continually take shape and vanish, hidden in unhappy cities.

The suburbs were not made to make people live well, to produce happiness, it is evident. But no one has noticed, perhaps because the new neighbourhoods have been presented as warehouses of houses, and houses have been presented as machines for living well, equipped with comfort, space, services. For many years, what is around houses (what we call in technical terms a ‘city’) has been neglected. If a cunning entrepreneur managed by trickery not to make greenery and parking spaces around his house, nobody noticed: the housing was sold like any other. But if the bathroom (or rather: the bathrooms) in the house had less-than-luxurious tiles or lacked space for a super-equipped kitchen, then the market downgraded the house to a lower rank.

For at least two generations, the taste, the pleasure of living, and the sense of identity have shifted inside dwellings, whereas before it was the neighbourhood, the street and the outlook that counted. The totalising use of the private car has reduced common space to the shortest possible stretches between parking and destination. The pleasure of strolling, of direct contact between people and with the spaces of unexpected encounters, of daily curiosity, has practically disappeared: a pleasure that survives in the Indian reserve of historic centres, pedestrianised and embellished to look like shopping centres (natural, the law defines them!). Lacking these pleasures, the sense of civic responsibility generated by a sense of belonging to a defined and known area disappears in the suburbs, where it is worth being careful not to ruin the furnishings and to keep clean, as with the floors of one’s own home.

On the other hand, the turnover of residents, often in search of a better location, tends to make them never become inhabitants, i.e. complacent with the habits of customary urban behaviour. And those who are passing through make no effort to beautify the shelter that houses them. On the contrary, if he is treated badly, he takes it out on things, with a form of territorial Luddism that is now epidemic in the metropolitan suburbs.

Thus the poorly made city has generated a fragmented and unhappy society, far less powerful and capable of acting collectively than it was 50 years ago. This is the risk: that the blob of the periphery (and the autistic society that resides there) swallows up the thousands of timely and delicate initiatives that we hope will develop on the impulse of the enthusiasm triggered by Piano’s programme.

Faced with this serious danger, an innovative instrumentation of territorial government is needed, not just the willingness to open one’s wallet as one would when faced with an interesting volunteer project.

The government boasts of finding 200 million for this type of initiative on the periphery. This is an innovation compared to the funding desert of recent years, when only a few European projects brought some investment to our cities. But the investment will only make sense if the funds are constant, widely distributed (e.g. over 100 cases per year), and are not considered by local administrations as a drop in the ocean of maintenance needs of cities in crisis.

Herein lies the real crux: how can investments of fractions of a million act as a multiplier and prevent the re-absorption of local initiatives, when carrying out any urban regeneration project costs many tens of millions and often remains an island incapable of generating effects all around? There is a lack of a frame of reference to identify the focal points on which to intervene, because, as the karate master does, one must achieve maximum disruptive results with modest but concentrated forces.

In spite of his name, Piano prides himself on being a craftsman planner, who approaches each theme to be developed creatively but concretely and ad hoc. This matrix leads him to distrust any strategic, framing, plan-making approach. When he prepares a large-scale project he calls it a fresco (as in Genoa), drawing it according to a visionary approach that also relies on images to convey sociological, psychological, political content.

It is an approach that certainly attracts fans even among those in charge of land management, who are fed up with plans that give rules unconnected with places and are concerned with retaining rather than promoting. But certainly today, in the face of this Periphery-Golia challenge, the project-David di Piano cannot miss the mark. It needs an understanding of the giant’s corpus that will lead to the precise centring of the plexuses that allow the effects of the interventions to be amplified. And in this direction, the sensitivity and techniques (also craftsmanship, but of another craft) of those involved in planning (urban, strategic, landscape) could be invaluable.

Paolo Castelnovi, a former professor of landscape planning and design at the Turin Polytechnic and now president of the Landscapefor Association, begins with this article a monthly column on the themes of territory and landscape. The Plan proposal provides the starting point for a reflection that will continue in future issues. The focus is on the problems of landscape management triggered by the prospects for action of metropolitan cities and the crisis of intermediate levels of territorial government (the provinces are just the latest in a series of failed institutions).