Rigenerazione urbana, politiche di sicurezza e governo del territorio: quale ruolo per la cittadinanza?

In the latest years, planning law has become increasingly complicated and the competent authorities have progressively assumed a role of mediators between different interests and groups of stakeholders. Moreover, as it is quite clear in the regional legislation, the participation by the citizens in the spatial planning and programming procedures has grown in importance. At the same time, the concept of urban security has developed toward a notion which includes the possible involvement of the private parties. However, in this field it is not possible to implement the legal instruments of participatory democracy in strict sense, since this would require a level of transparency and circulation of information that, when security issues are concerned, often cannot be allowed. Nonetheless, the local population may be involved in a different way. First, some tools may be used – thanks to the digital technologies and through the institutional websites – in order to obtain by the citizens information about the level of perceived or actual security in urban spaces. Second, the citizens can fruitfully intervene in the implementation of best practices for the co-design of urban space. In such perspective, some experimentations are very interesting: in the paper, the “free wall” and the “hall of fame wall” models (from a side) and the urban gardening model (from the other side) are analyzed. All these instruments may be important expression of horizontal subsidiarity.