For a Soft Law of Contemporary Project: Food for Thought and a Manifesto

Abstract

This contribution starts with a survey on the reasons why the idea of planning is facing a crisis which is mainly linked to the effect of structural elements, such as the persistence of the hermeneutics of a ‘long present’—which often becomes an alibi through nostalgic or inertial visions—and superstructural factors, such as the frenzy of regulations and procedures of our ‘defensive bureaucracy’. As the pandemic is generating a new idea of future, partly out of enthusiasm and partly out of necessity, the concept of ‘Soft law’ is introduced as a new paradigm to turn the contemporary project into a device aiming at self-regulation, not new in itself but more and more necessary to stir things up in a field where everything is against planning. And the more so in a period when public debate is focussed on home planning, town planning and local planning again, and therefore, for a number of reasons, the achievement of outcomes cannot be avoided or concealed. Food for thought follows, besides a Manifesto for responsible and creative Local Governance, which lays the foundations for a disciplinary revision based on art. 118 of the Italian Constitution and aiming at applying the subsidiarity principle. The essay deals with some aspects of today’s Italian situation but tries to face the problem at an international level.

When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system.

—Ilya Prigogine