First Trials of Regional Planning

The regional planning trials that characterized the postwar decades prior to the creation of the Regions in 1970 developed in three stages. In the early fifties, measures were enacted to address particular conditions of difficulty; subsequently, during the fifties and sixties an attempt was made to use the 1954 ‘Vanoni Plan’ in order to draft the first hypotheses of indicative planning; later, in the second half of the sixties, programming documents aiming to identify and overcome the structural deficiencies of the regional economies were composed in each of the regions. In this third stage, the role played by central government was fundamental. The different attempts at regional planning produced important consequences in various fields. They contributed decisively to the birth of the Regions, promoting more precise knowledge of the different regional conditions; in addition, they enriched economic analysis with the use of new tools and concepts (‘external economies’ and ‘industrial areas’), and introduced new forms of intervention in the economy. Several eminent economists, such as Giacomo Becattini, Innocenzo Gasparini, Siro Lombardini, played an important role in these developments.