Planning the shrinking city. Some notes on reversibility in territorial government

The contemporary city is currently experiencing a transition between a phase of growth and expansion and one of stasis or decline in most of the urban contexts of economically developed countries. This transition is also connected to the urban shrinkage phenomenon which arose at the beginning of the century, due to the economic and demographic crisis, and is radically changing the consolidated city' shapes and uses. The aleatory nature of material and immaterial manifestations of an occurrence like urban shrinkage and the inadequacy of a planner's “tools”, when facing the challenge to work on the city at loss, leads to identify the flexibility of urban plans as one of the most suitable and structural response to this type of city's condition. In such a context, the contribution aims to investigate how reversibility in urban planning, it is intended not only as the change of an object’ state from its current state, but also as the possibility of the object's return to its prior state before a certain event occurred as in the case of "downgrading" from urban to non-urban uses.Through a comparative examination of the regional legislative framework, the article outlines the main aspects of reversibility of urban planning in the Italian context, eventually highlighting some attention points.