Reframing Large Transport Infrastructure Plans: A Study on European Corridors with a Focus on North-eastern Italy

The European Union is promoting and investing in large transportation infrastructure plans and programmes to enhance transnational accessibility and territorial competitiveness. However, the recent crisis has shed a new light on the planning and programming of these infrastructures. Competition for scarce resources and more sensible public demands force decision-makers to better argue and deliver decisions and projects. Italy provides an exemplary case of poor planning and policy-making deriving from limited visions combined with only tactical and reactive politics. For decades, public authorities and project promoters have fostered a huge project of high-speed rail development, without appropriate consideration of territorial conditions, community demands or downside scenarios, whilst benefit overestimation has long hindered investments in other possible strategic infrastructures and policies. The current recognition of the Baltic–Adriatic as essential among European corridors provides the occasion to rebalance discrepancies and reframe plans in Italy. The proposed approach aims to reconsider infrastructure planning as a ‘wicked problem’ implying not absolute, but more or less good solutions depending on contextual and feasibility conditions and to promote visions based on vertical and horizontal subsidiarity, where cities and regions should play a strategic role as key stakeholders in the spatial macroscopic transformations.