Practicing transformative planning: the territory-landscape plan as a catalyst for change

This paper advocates the need for transformative planning practices to cope with contemporary crises of climate change and intensifying economic inequality that regions, city-regions, and cities are increasingly confronted with. In-depth examination of planning processes is useful to grasp some crucial promises and problems of transformative planning and open up new possibilities for practice. Accordingly, the paper includes an investigation into the Territory-Landscape plan-making process developed in the Apulia region, Italy. This explicitly and intentionally aimed at promoting a radical discontinuity in regional planning culture and practice by changing the well-established relationship between territory-landscape protection and spatial planning. The process revealed that ‘landscape’ could function as a constructive picklock for proposing an alternative to the development-as-growth model firmly entrenched in the region, and envisioning desirable futures focused on the concept of ‘local self-sustainable development’. This implies subverting the hegemony of the ‘economic’ that has reduced dwellers to consumers, and the territory to a mere physical support for any kind of land transformation and urban development which exclude dwellers participation. Using the lens of transformative theory and building on an interpretive research approach that included also direct experience, the paper provides insights on changes in vision and concepts, discourses and practices, approach and instruments experienced in such a planning process. In conclusion, it reflects on lessons learned, and highlights some difficulties and contradictions with which the way towards transformative planning is paved for researchers engaged in turning their ideas into significant achievements in the real world.