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Political Government and Governance. Strategic Planning and the Reshaping

of Political Capacity in Turin

Article  in  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research · September 2002

DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.00394 · Source: RePEc

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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Volume 26.3 September 2002 477–93

Political Government and Governance:

Strategic Planning and the Reshaping
of Political Capacity in Turin*

GILLES PINSON

Do the logics of public government still have a role in the processes of urban governance?
What are the logics of leadership, of the institutionalization of a social and political
territory, and of the legitimation of actors? What are the logics involved in organizing
networks that can be developed by the institutions of urban government, in a context of
governance characterized by new relations between state and cities, by the increasingly
horizontal nature of relations between actors and institutions in public policy, by change
in traditional modes of public intervention, by urban competition and by the increasingly
strong and legitimate presence of economic actors in urban policy-making?
The case of Turin’s Strategic Plan demonstrates that political forms of regulation do
not dissolve in governance, but are modified by entering into various combinations with
other forms of regulation. New accommodations between forms of regulation by political
institutions and other modes of regulation — market, network, community — can give the
activities of local public institutions an importance that they did not previously have.
This article will first attempt to reintroduce the issue of government into the debate
on governance. This means recognizing one specific feature of political regulation, in a
context where other modes of regulation are finding growing legitimacy in the
governance strategies of cities. Political regulation is changing in its modalities and
making explicit accommodations to other modes of regulation, which in turn makes it
necessary to redefine the role of the public institutions of urban government. The case of
Turin’s Strategic Plan will then be presented as an example of these modifications to
political regulation. Within the context of this plan, the municipal institution is playing an
active role in the process of diversification of modes of regulation and, in doing so, is
regaining a more central role in the processes of governance, helping to construct the city
as a fully-integrated political space and society.

Governing in a context of governance

In this section, an attempt will be made to demonstrate that it is possible to think about
forms of political regulation in an analytical perspective centred on the concept of
governance.
* Translated from French by Karen George. The editors are pleased to publish this article, which won joint
first prize, together with Antoine Pécoud’s article in this issue, in the FURS (Foundation for Urban and
Regional Research) Essay Competition 2000 for the best essay on urban and regional themes by young authors.

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002. Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
478 Gilles Pinson

Government and governance

Government and governance should not be regarded as opposed (Borraz and Le Galès,
2000). The term ‘government’ classically refers either to the collegiate body that
exercises an executive function or to the activities of aggregating demands and interests
and of directing society — activities carried out by a political entity that is recognized as
legitimate (Leca, 1996). In the second instance, government is seen as a process, or else
as the result of activity aimed at producing order and giving direction to a political
community. However, the idea remains that this result is essentially the outcome of
activity by public institutions.
The term ‘governance’, on the other hand, refers to a broader range of processes
which contribute to the aggregation of interests and demands and to the coordination of
social activities. The reappearance of this concept is closely linked to the diagnosis of a
crisis of governability (Mayntz, 1993) in contemporary societies. Faced with this
diagnosis, governance presents itself less as an explanatory concept than as a research
programme. Within a perspective that borrows from political economy and from
institutional economics, as well as from economic sociology and political sociology, it
interprets the reshaping of the state and of political government as aspects of a more
general movement — relating to the spheres of political, economic and social activity —
in which modes of coordinating collective action and of integrating individuals and
groups into this collective action are changing. Classically, the political institutions use
public policies as an essential tool for coordinating and integrating actors. Changes
affecting the construction of public policies are, therefore, an essential aspect of any
change in political-institutional forms of regulation. This position leads to the hypothesis
that these political-institutional forms of regulation are being reshaped, not weakened.
The spread of market or network forms of regulation in the field of public policy is not
inevitably synonymous with a disappearance of directive activities by the authorities: it is
probably more a case of redefining modes of expression of political authority. Theoretical
work that attempts to define governance does not deny the part played by the political
authorities in regulating social actions: rather, it is inviting us to rethink the nature of a
political authority confronted by social bodies and by the alternative modes of
coordination that have acquired additional legitimacy.

Governance and historical interlude

Governance is also an approach that is trying to account for changes in modes of
governing societies in a specific historical context marked by a process of redefining the
territorial scales of integration, representation and identification — a process taking place
under the pressure of three phenomena: globalization, the European integration project
and the reshaping of the state. Work on governance thus involves testing the hypothesis
that the political bond is being created at new institutional and territorial scales, alongside
that of the national state. A second hypothesis is that — in this redistribution game — the
modalities of coordinating social activities and, consequently, the modes of creating the
political and social bond are being altered (Balme, 1996). Since the modes of construction
of public policies are an essential aspect of relations between state and society — and of
their reproduction — the examination of European, regional or urban policies can prove
crucially useful in any discussion of the state-society relations around which these
territories are institutionalizing. It also seems to be the case that, at the sub- and
supranational levels, public policies, in borrowing increasingly from the scale and scope
of collective action, are transforming public authority’s modes of affirmation.
This historical interlude is bringing two kinds of consequences. The first is the
reshaping or the consolidation of new centres, new scales of integration, capable of
providing an identity, of aggregating interests, of building coalitions for local

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Political government and governance in Turin 479

development and of placing new territorial props firmly around stabilized modes of
governance (Le Galès, 1995). This new situation could be described as multi-level
governance (Marks et al, 1996), but it is also worth stressing the institutional battles that
punctuate this process of redistribution of authority between territorial levels. Formal and
functional sovereignty cannot be divided ad infinitum; therefore, the view can be taken
that some centres — cities, regions — will assert themselves more than others, depending
on their national contexts. The second type of consequence relates to the fact that changes
in scale of government are not taking place in the presence of constant modalities of
relations between state and society, modes of coordination of social activities, or ways of
imparting direction to a political community.
‘Work on governance’ thus includes analysis of the new forms of coordination that
these changes of scale entail. In fact, the very concept of ‘governance’ refers to a new
way of understanding public policy as collective action, as the combination of
cooperative and competitive games between actors and organizations, and as a set of
constraints on inventing modalities for collectively constructing problems, objectives and
ways of going about things. In parallel, work on governance also relates to the reshaping
of a capacity to integrate networks for the development and implementation of public
policies and to give meaning to the plurality of cooperative and competitive mechanisms
that constitute public policy in a territory. What is sought is not so much an institutional
centrality reconstructed at the local level (reproducing line for line the centrality of the
state at national level), but more, some new ways in which a political authority can
reconstruct a nodal position (Hood, 1983). ‘Nodality’ refers less to the capacity to initiate
and control processes for producing public policies than to the capacity to bring together a
plurality of actors as partners in governing the dynamics, to get them to work together, to
identify the relevant actors and to mobilize them (Duran and Thoenig, 1996).
Governance hypothesizes the reconstruction of a given order at another territorial
scale, and so it should not be seen as opposed to government. We still need to examine the
participation of political institutions in this reconstruction. Thus, asking the government
question in a governance context means examining the way in which urban governments
situate their own activity within this increasingly complex context of combinations of
modes of regulation. The meaning of governance used here recognizes the specific nature
of political forms of regulation, but takes as its starting point an acknowledgement of the
position in which the actors redefining these regulations in a changing context find
themselves.

Governance and regulation

Work on governance looks at concrete modalities and forms of territorialization of the
process of reconstructing a given order. Taking their inspiration from the literature of
geography, economic sociology and institutional economics (Bagnasco and Trigilia,
1988; North, 1990; Amin, 1994; Veltz, 1996; Benko and Lipietz, 2000), which deal with
changes to the economy, relations between firms and between economy and territory,
writers on governance have formulated the hypothesis that this social order is based on an
extending combination of elements of political, economic and social regulation (Le Galès,
1998). Traditional views of the social order see it as proceeding from a single cause:
either the state or the economic infrastructure. Another approach that has inspired
literature on governance — the political economy approach — conceives of the
construction of the social order in terms of a combination of diverse modes of regulation
(Lange and Regini, 1989).
Governance moves beyond perspectives that over-value the role of political steering
activities in the construction of the social order, to reconsider this order as a dynamic
combination of diverse modes of regulation: state, market, networks, associations,
communities. New scales of production of the political and social bond are creating

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480 Gilles Pinson

linkages between these modes of regulation in a different way from the national state.
Initiatives to promote urban and territorial identities — like strategic planning or city
marketing, for example — should not be seen solely as simple propaganda or territorial
‘merchandizing’ tools or as signs that market logics are replacing state logics in territorial
policies. These policies may bring about a ‘recombination’ of modes of local regulation.
This ‘recombination’ may leave more room for self-organizational dynamics, for civil
societies and for community forms of regulation, but it may also strengthen the nodality
of public institutions, which might then become catalysts for non-institutional forms of
coordination of social activities. A logic of government may thus survive, but expressed
less in terms of control and of centrality in processes than in terms of nodality.

Governance and the role of urban government

In order to conceive of the role that urban government may play in the processes of urban
governance, we might take as a starting-point the analytical distinction between
‘exchangist-aggregative’ and ‘institutional-integrative’ types of government (March and
Olsen, 1990; Leca, 1996). The exchangist-aggregative perspective views the construction
of public policies as a process with a high degree of interaction between actors. In this
configuration, government aggregates collective preferences through specific instances of
negotiation and mediation between constituted coalitions and interests. In the institutional-
integrative perspective, the government derives legitimacy from a more external,
‘educational’ role and imposes visions of a desirable future and appropriate behavioural
norms. The political system acts as trustee of shared aims and values, and the institutions
derive legitimacy from stating them, relatively autonomously, in public policies.
Work on governance attempts to bring these two perspectives together in order to
identify the likely profile of urban government in the mechanisms of governance (Borraz
and Le Galès, 2000). It could be hypothesized that, in European cities, governance
constitutes a new type of political regulation, consisting of institutionalized collective action
(Duran and Thoenig, 1996). In their strategies for the construction and consolidation of
political territories, urban governments tend to promote settings or opportunities for collec-
tive action of an interactive, negotiated type. The aim of such consultation and contract
practices is to move away from situations that block decision-making, but the actors also see
them as presenting possibilities for generating choices that will be more efficient because
they have been made jointly (Bobbio, 2000). Moreover, interactions in the framework of
territorial policies may help to develop relational goods between actors, to territorialize
interests and, in the end, to produce social and political integration. Thus, negotiation can
also be a governance strategy at the disposal of urban government, and political regulation
can intervene to structure exchanges in the frame of this negotiation. Negotiated policies can
thus increase the nodality of the public institutions of urban government.
The logics of government can be deployed in governance by contextualizing these
interactions. Urban government may re-situate exchanges in the context of a territory and
its history, on the one hand, and in relation to global dynamics, on the other, and thus may
structure settings for exchange and collective action. To mobilize local society around a
plan to internationalize a city and its economy enables, for example, the structuring of
social interactions around the idea that the territory has specific resources that are likely to
be increased in value within the perspective of international positioning. The government
directs interactions towards rediscovering links between the local economy and the
territory, bonds of cooperation that contribute to the performance of this economy. Public
institutions then become nodal actors in updating the territory’s resources in terms of
relations between actors, relations of trust, modes of coordination and the instrumentaliza-
tion of these elements in a process that will produce a territorialized social order.
Re-situating political forms of regulation within a combination of different types of
regulation means going beyond a normative concept of government, where government

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Political government and governance in Turin 481

tends to be represented as an autonomous sphere. Government cannot be reduced to the

action produced by a political, purely proactive stance. The distinctive input of
institutions into the processes of urban governance should be recognized, but we should
also look into the evolution of this input in a context of redefinition and redistribution of
political authority. If we pick up again the distinction mentioned above, integration of
thinking on government into ‘work on governance’ enables us to move beyond a view of
local politics either as proactive — the unilateral capacity to impart direction (the
‘institutional-integrative’ approach) — or purely as a game of interactions — in which
public institutions are seen as relatively undifferentiated actors (the ‘exchangist-
aggregative’ approach).
We can hypothesize, with Olivier Borraz, that government is not a given, a stabilized
substance embodied in institutions, but more a ‘construct’, a ‘set of processes and
mechanisms whose main task is to manage problems that arise locally’ (Borraz, 1998: 18).
In this process of construction, urban government has an essential role in the emergence of
a common interest in taking action and in the construction of the local, as a scale at which
individual and collective interests are perceived or even as an institution regulating the
actors’ behaviour. Through this action, the territory-institution becomes the entity capable
both of legitimizing certain behaviours and of activating processes of cooperation and
dynamics of collective action that will strengthen it. The case of Turin is particularly
representative of this explicit desire to institutionalize the city as an integrating social unit
that also regulates individual and group behaviour. The municipal institution is in the front
line of these processes, while still seeking to behave discreetly in order to leave room for
the social mechanisms of construction and reproduction of this territorial order.
Government might then be defined as the set of processes tending to institutionalize the
political, ethical and territorial frames that stabilize exchanges in a governance context.
Local public institutions play a prominent role in activating similar structuring processes.

The project between governance and government

The interest of urban projects and city projects as objects of analysis is that they bring us
face to face with the negotiated, aggregative aspect of governance and, simultaneously,
with its institutional, integrative aspect. The territorial project allows us to perceive
linkages between the analysis of new logics of public policy — fragmentation, vagueness
of objectives, importance of action-based identities — and the issue of the redistribution of
authority between territorial levels. Project-oriented public policy has appeared in various
forms in France and in Italy: in France, Politique de la Ville, Contrats de Villes at both city
and conurbation levels, area projects; in Italy, territorial pacts, programme agreements,
strategic urban planning approaches (Laino and Padovani, 2000). These approaches have in
common a desire to reduce uncertainty in public policy through processes of collective
construction of diagnostics and policy objectives. The negotiation of objectives allows a
stabilization of cooperative games. The use of voluntary agreement rather than hierarchical
authority enables the building of an operational consensus and greater mobilization of
resources. The use of interactivity and iteration reflects the evolution of a form of public
policy where debate on the means of action has contaminated debate on its ends, leading to
lack of certainty about the latter (Duran, 1999).
The project is equally affected by changing relations between national centres and
peripheries. It draws on a concept of territorial policies that emanates not from a centre
transmitting meaning and generating the functional integration of territories into a national
economic whole, but from the territories themselves and their initiatives. We are seeing ‘an
increasing delegation of responsibilities for territorial planning to local authorities. There is
therefore no longer any project other than a local project carried forward by a municipality,
a conurbation, an area or a region’ (Béhar and Estèbe, 1999: 88). This reshaping of local
territories seems to be reducing the domination of societies by local public institutions.

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482 Gilles Pinson

Urban governments seem to be ‘stimulating’ integration of actors through new modes of

consensus-building and through cognitive harmonization strategies. The project draws on
this capacity to integrate and perpetuate coalitions of actors and institutions through the
multiplication of interactions involved in a given action.
Thus, making the project our object of analysis enables us to examine some features
of redeployment of the ‘logics of government’ in cities, understood as the capacity of
public institutions to produce — in interaction with other actors and institutions — a
territorialized social order. Analysis of projects points up linkages between the
exchangist-aggregative and the institutional-integrative perspectives, the study of
collective action processes and the study of how a policy direction is established. Cities
may be interesting cases of territories becoming institutionalized through the
development of activities and processes that are negotiated between actors but also
structured by a political leadership. A large number of urban policies in the spheres of
planning or development aim to increase the value of the urban territory as a social space,
a space of networks, of social and economic exchanges, a space for the expression of self-
organization dynamics. These exchanges are reproduced over time, and so they
institutionalize the relations of trust and cooperation that territorialize the strategies of
actors and social groups.

Turin’s Strategic Plan

In the case of Turin, this new type of institutional activity is taking shape through
structuring, territorializing and perpetuating interactions in the context of interactive
processes that are building urban collective action. Turin’s political authorities have the
ambition of regaining a capacity for government of processes; but this capacity is to be
situated within a strategy of extended governance, and involves non-political actors.
Urban government is attempting to structure settings for interactions: although its
presence in those settings is euphemized, they enable it to effect change in relations
between the city’s territory and the economic and social actors. The empowerment of
civil society in a context of interactions — a context where actors and groups discover
common interests, structured by their common belonging to the territory — is leading to a
renewed capacity for government. Thus, a mode of regulation of behaviour is being
constructed around a revalidated institution: the territory-community.

From ‘subordination in conflict’ to ‘soft guidance in consensus’

The Torino Internazionale Strategic Plan has several objectives: to map out a route
towards internationalization of the city, through enhancing its own resources; to develop
an organizational capacity for the city, by collectively building a shared vision of its
future; and to state this shared vision through a plurality of concrete operations in various
sectors. The plan began life as a plan to promote the city as a tourist destination; however,
promoting tourism rapidly led Turin to question whether it could integrate into the global
context after a century of ‘FIAT-dependence’, during which the city’s physical, social and
economic development was determined by the vehicle manufacturer’s growth rate and
strategies. The unpredictability of FIAT’s strategies and the possibility that some of its
functions will be relocated1 has required local actors to develop strategies for economic
conversion or for diversification.
1 The threat of this possibility has been rekindled by the announcement, on 13 March 2000, of a strategic
industrial alliance with General Motors, the world’s largest vehicle manufacturing group. The Detroit
group seems to be in a dominant position in the alliance, since it has gained a share of some 20% of FIAT
Auto’s capital in return for just 5.1% of GM. Indeed, the Agnellis seem to have their hands tied, since GM
has a purchase option on the remaining 80% if the Turin dynasty decides to sell FIAT Auto.

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Political government and governance in Turin 483

The Strategic Plan has emerged in a specific context marked by the crisis of Italian
political parties at the local and national level, following the Tangentopoli enquiries into
corruption scandals, by the crisis of the Italian state, which has fuelled — among other
things — secessionist movements like the Northern Leagues, and by a strong legitimation
of civil societies at the local level. Valentino Castellani, Mayor of Turin since 1993,
himself has a background in civil society.2 When the 1993 municipal elections were
approaching, corruption scandals threw the parties into total disarray, and civil society
stepped into the vacuum that remained. A movement was created around the Chamber of
Commerce, the University and the Catholic voluntary sector, in the aim of putting
forward a candidate for the municipal elections. This was Valentino Castellani, who was
elected on 20 June 1993.
Castellani and his team have tried to institute a new style of government for the city.
Turin had been ‘ruled’ by confrontation between FIAT and the representatives of the
working class: the omnipresence of Fordist major industry and its hierarchical forms of
organization had tended to make industrial conflict the basic mode of regulation for social
relations in the city (Bagnasco, 1986). The result of this was a weakening of the power of
the municipality, partly because it intervened little in the regulation of industrial conflicts
and partly because it had little influence over FIAT’s decision-making. Turin’s political
municipal authorities had never been able to frame and manage the town-planning and
social impacts of FIAT’s expansion. Diego Novelli, Communist Mayor from 1975 to
1985, had been able to establish an ambitious welfare policy that was successful precisely
because it occupied an area shunned by FIAT. For a long time, left-wing municipal
majorities situated their action alongside or in opposition to economic power, without
ever really being able to exert any pressure on its choices. A tradition of strong industrial
conflicts prevented the municipal authority from bringing together the parties in a truly
political space to construct a project.
Town planning provides a good illustration of this ‘blocked’ situation. The Italian
Left has always seen town planning as the most legitimate way to constrain capitalist
logics, since it should enable them to impose a political rationality on strong special
interests — and with the backing of the scientific rationality of the town planners. From
1976, Novelli’s council threw itself into revising the Piano Regolatore Generale (General
Regulatory Plan);3 but the representation of strong economic interests inside the
municipal council blocked all its initiatives, and the futility of trying to constrain planning
subsequently gave way to a more pragmatic, opportunistic approach. After 1985, the
Communist council was succeeded by a series of five-party coalitions dominated by
socialists, and any vague impulses towards controlling urban change were abandoned.
More pragmatic action on specific projects being carried out by private-sector actors was
preferred. A ‘project-by-project’ approach to town planning, favoured by numerous
closures of industrial sites, was established, and very little attention was paid to building
an overall territorial vision.4
The pragmatic approach did not solve Turin’s problem — the absence of
transparency in the strategies of the city’s strong economic interests and the difficulty
of bringing these interests in as partners in building a collective project. The era of the
five-party councils (1985–93) saw a proliferation of projects, but they were not integrated

2 Valentino Castellani was, at the time he was elected, Professor of Physics at Turin Polytechnic, the city’s
prestigious engineering college. Although he is an active member of associative circles on the Christian
and Social Left in Turin, Castellani has neither real institutional experience nor political visibility, since he
had been a member of the PSI (Italian Socialist Party) for only two years in the early 1970s and had not
held any political office before his election.
3 This, the main document governing urban planning in Italy, lays down constraints on land use and
building at the scale of the municipality.
4 In the mid-1980s, the territory of the Municipality of Turin included no less than two million square
metres of derelict industrial sites, of which more than half belonged to the FIAT group.

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484 Gilles Pinson

into an overall strategy for positioning and planning the city. The way in which FIAT
managed the conversion of its historic Lingotto factory, entirely at its own discretion,
provides an illustration of this (Bobbio, 1990).
Through the Strategic Plan, Castellani and his supporters are attempting to go beyond
the strategy of confrontation with strong special interests, the constraints placed on town
planning by the Communist councils, and the integral pragmatism of the five-party
councils. By using the theme of internationalization, they are aiming to bring urban actors
out of a somewhat secretive, conflict-ridden culture, to create a space for dialogue on the
future of Turin, and to transform relations between civil society and the public
administration, which have been marked by mistrust. This means reinventing a role for
the administration — that of reducing the costs of cooperation and introducing trust. The
municipality must become the instigator of diversification in modes of regulation. The
council intends to replace overarching unilateral and hierarchical relations — where
authority was embodied by FIAT or by the political institution — with a plurality of
relations of cooperation, where there are dynamics of trust and a common identity.

The project-based approach helps to structure settings for exchanges

The process of strategic planning for Torino Internazionale includes two dimensions, or
two scales of project (see Figure 1). The first dimension is that of the meta-project, which
involves creating a common cognitive frame for the different actors, through interactive
diagnosis and interpretation of the territory, and then setting major directions and
guidelines for the development of the territory. This meta-project is fairly precise in
guiding projects run by the city’s different constituent elements, yet flexible enough to be
adapted to contextual developments and to opportunities. This meta-project is broken
down into a series of operational projects, and this is the second dimension or second
scale of the project. These projects enable strategic orientations to be put into operation,
but their implementation also enables the meta-project to be amended. In implementing
these projects, the actors confront unforeseen constraints and new opportunities. As these
constraints and opportunities surface, the meta-project has to be developed, and this
makes it a living, adaptable tool. The interactions and iterations that have punctuated
construction of the meta-project and implementation of operational projects have
succeeded in developing Turin’s organizational capacity and in promoting interacquain-
tance and mutual recognition between actors. The central idea here is to use the lateral
effects of developing the Strategic Plan — in terms of creating networks of relations — to
enable the city to ‘act as a system’.
In May 1998, the Forum for Development, which came together around the Mayor
and consisted of some thirty people representing civil society, launched the Strategic Plan
development process — the meta-project. Universities and research bodies were called on
to diagnose Turin’s situation. Taking this diagnosis as a starting-point, the second phase
was to set up subject working groups, calling mainly on representatives of civil society.
New working groups took charge of defining both strategic lines and concrete actions,
and were also tasked with ‘improving or creating networks of cooperation or information
and possibilities for dialogue between operators’ (Torino Internazionale, 2000: 28). A
series of overlapping responsibilities for the working groups and a scientific committee
made up of local university academics, people from outside the city and council members
enabled proposals to be refined gradually. Six strategic lines were finally laid out and 84
concrete actions were identified, with indications as to who would carry out the project,
the resources to be mobilized and the time involved in realizing it (see Figure 2). The plan
was signed on 29 February 2000 by the Mayors of the various municipalities in the Turin
conurbation, the President of the Province and all the constituent elements of local society
(employers’ associations, trade unions, local chambers of commerce and industry,
banking foundations, universities, religious institutions, public sector agencies etc.). The

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Political government and governance in Turin 485

Scale: Torino Internazionale Metropolitan Winter 2006 Olympic

Meta-project Conference Games Organizing
(bodies (intermunicipal consultation Committee
guaranteeing Torino Internazionale structure responsible for
compliance Association ensuring continuity in
(political body which acts political agreement
with collectively as trustee of the contract betweenTurin's various
devised main set up between the municipalities)
principles and signatories)
with the
agreement Torino Internazionale
between the Agency
different parties (technical body responsible
involved for follow-up of projects
and for proposing new (Applies to
directions for the plan) both scales
Scale:
Micro-projects
(spaces for Public-private
stating, testing 84 projects partnerships
and negotiating
main principles)

Figure 1 Turin’s Strategic Plan

implementation of the 84 actions will be entrusted to different signatory bodies, under the
coordination of the Torino Internazionale Association, a political body constituted on 9
May 2000 to act as trustee of the moral contract established between the parties, and the
Torino Internazionale Agency, a technical body responsible for following-up projects and
cooperation issues.
The 84 actions relate to the project’s operational aspects — they are operational
micro-projects. This is the real meaning of ‘project-making’ — building a working
consensus capable of speeding up the sequence of decision-making, and of linking the
definition of strategic objectives to a systematic effort at identifying financial resources
and those who will carry out the projects. The need to speed up urban policy-making
processes has become stronger since Turin was awarded the 2006 Winter Olympics. This
event is seen as a chance to make up for the city’s backwardness as far as infrastructures
are concerned.
However, the striking thing about Torino Internazionale is that it is not a traditional
planning process, in which experts and/or politicians bring peripheral actors under their
control and insert them into a predetermined, material strategy. It is notable that the whole
process is relatively vague. The project approach focuses attention on ‘the realms of the
concrete’ (Duran, 1999). In order to face up to urban competition and to the challenge of
2006, it is necessary to mobilize the community of urban actors as operators who will
implement the plan. In fact, the nature of the strategies produced hardly matters: the
process of building them has offered the chance to produce a working consensus and to
consolidate the collective city-actor. The objective is clear — to make Turin into an
active community — but this objective may be made concrete in varying ways. One
illustration of this was the way the work involved went beyond the tourist issue and was
extended into a debate on the post- or neo-industrial future of Turin. From an orthodox
point of view, a plan is conceived as a tool for public forecasting and regulation, and
consequently might be expected to work towards ‘closure’, through the production of a
stable, relatively precise image of the desirable city. In this case, however, the definition
of ‘desirable’ is up for negotiation, and a plan can be an open framework that is subject to
frequent updating. Torino Internazionale is not a closed plan: on the contrary, it is subject

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486 Gilles Pinson

6 Lines of Strategy 20 Objectives 84 Actions

(examples)

To integrate the – To develop international – A standardized, integrated communication

metropolitan cooperation networks plan for the international promotion of Turin
area into the – To facilitate access toTurin – Privatization and expansion of –- and im-
international – To improve mobility within proved access to –- Torino-Caselle airport
system the city – Participation in the creation of theTurin-Milan
and Turin-Lyon sections of the high-speed
railway
– Construction of an underground rail network
linking the various Turin mainline stations
(project underway)
– Construction of a metro line between
Collegno and Lingotto via Porta Nuova
(project underway)

To construct – To create new forms of – To institute a Metropolitan Conference

metropolitan governance (completed)
government – To construct services – To constitute theTorino Internazionale
for the metropolitan area Association to monitor the strategic plan
(completed)
– To create a Metropolitan Transport Agency
(completed)

To develop – To strengthen a university – To build new university sites (project partly

training and centre of international
research as level and appeal
strategic – To foster the development
resources of research in tandem
with economic initiatives
– To promote vocational
training and work-training
integration
underway)
– Enlargement of the Polytechnic
– To involve research centres in international
collaboration networks
– To establish links between research and
business
– To create two business incubators within the
city's two universities

To promote – To develop the innovative – To upgrade`technology districts'by setting up

enterprise and potential of the production
employment system
– To create conditions
favourable to the
development of new
enterprise
– To promote local
development and active
employment policies
shared services in the fields of training,
quality assurance and the environment
– To create a structure for technology transfer
– To develop an aerospace centre around the
Alenia company
– To develop an Internet Exchange at the
Environment Park (partially completed)
– To develop an Information and Communica-
tion Technology centre around the Telecom
Italia and Motorola research centres
– To develop an insurance and financial
services centre
– To create a new body to assist business start-
up activity
– To support the 'territorial pacts' launched by
the Province of Turin

to frequent updating. The primary objective of urban planning no longer seems to be the
legal allocation of land: the first Castellani council took up the five-party councils’ plan
for the Piano Regolatore Generale, and, after some amendments, this was adopted. The
main issue for municipal government now lies elsewhere, in the shared general vision that
enables consensus-building and the perpetuation of a capacity for collective action. The

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Political government and governance in Turin 487

6 Lines of Strategy 20 Objectives 84 Actions

(examples)

To promote – To enhance and develop
Turin as a the city's cultural heritage
city of culture, – To coordinate cultural
tourism, activities and to schedule
commerce events of international
and sport standing
– To develop the tourist
industry
– To positionTurin/Piedmont
in the national and
international tourist markets
– To support growth and
innovation of the region's
commercial network
– To promote sport
– To use the 2006 Winter
Olympic Games as a driver
for development and
international promotion
– To rethink the city's system of museums and
relocate the Egyptian Museum
– To promote Turin as a `Cinema City' centred
around the National Cinema Museum in the
Mole Antonelliana (under way)
– To improve and develop hotel facilities for the
2006 Winter Olympic Games
– To develop conference activities related to the
automotive industry and to food and drink
– To develop tourist activities linked to sport
– To build an Olympic village to contribute to
urban regeneration
– To build new sports infrastructures

To improve the – New `centres'providing focal – To regenerate depressed and/or outlying

quality of the city points for local facilities;
urban renewal and social
integration as a strategy
for spreading prosperity,
cohesion and urban
regeneration
– Local Agenda 21,
sustainable development
and environmental innovation
as the guide and foundation
for the city's strategies
districts on the model of the `Special Project
for Peripheral Areas' (under way)
– To develop`centres'of urban development and
local identity in outlying districts
– To create an Urban Centre (underway)
– To promoteTurin as a centre of excellence in the
non-profit sector and to attract the European
Third-Sector Authority to locate in the city
– To reclaim the city's rivers and riverbanks
(underway)
– To revive public spaces

Figure 2 Phase 2 of Turin’s Strategic Plan

Strategic Plan does not represent a very precise material vision: the concrete modalities
through which the major orientations are put into operation are to be negotiated with the
operators. Moreover, the Strategic Plan has not been published in graphic form, and it is
not legally enforceable on third parties.
Torino Internazionale operates as a meta-project, a cognitive frame for the concrete
practices of the actors involved in carrying out concrete projects. But it can operate as
such only if the vision that it carries is owned by the urban actors. This ownership is
guaranteed by the participation of these actors in the collective process of building the
meta-project. On the other hand, the meta-project can act as a cognitive frame only if it is
flexible and open enough to absorb changes in economic circumstances. The shared,
consensual nature of the strategies matters more than their ‘scientific’ nature. Faced with
overall constraints and with firms’ strategies that are difficult to forecast, territorial
strategies cannot be the product of deductive cogitations: they must, of necessity,
‘emerge’ incrementally. The plan’s instigators have taken the view that political
authorities in cities can no longer impose strategic substance. Instead, they must create
the conditions for wider participation in the construction of relatively vague strategies.
The sharing of the project is more important than its content — and that represents the
exchangist-aggregative aspect of governance.

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488 Gilles Pinson

However, this vagueness — whether of strategies or of overall project process — is

only relative, since we also need to take into account the institutional-integrative aspect of
governance. The public institutions of government have the capacity to frame this
vagueness within a setting that they have structured in order to allow exchanges to take
place. Torino Internazionale is ostensibly presented as the city’s project and not that of
the municipal administration; nevertheless, it is the municipality that is imposing the city
as a point of convergence of interests, as a scale of organization in the face of global
challenges. The municipality has structured the collective work of the project around the
watchword that, in order to be effective in territorial competition, a city must act as a
collective actor, and those who are part of this must strengthen the ties that bind them.
The actors have been led to discover such ties and made aware that their activities are
embedded in the fabric of relationships that comprise the city. From this point of view,
the use of the wealth of literature on the local economy and society, produced by the
universities, has been extremely important. The involvement of university academics in
the diagnostic phase enabled a picture to be disseminated of sectors of excellence in the
local economy as sectors rooted both in an age-old industrial and occupational culture and
in existing networks of cooperation between economic actors.
According to Giuseppe Dematteis, a member of the Torino Internazionale Scientific
Committee, the activity of ‘project-making’ consists of ‘constructing interpretative
representations of local contexts in their relations with global dynamics’ (Dematteis,
1995: 9). Involvement in the interactive planning of the future of a territory allows
behavioural norms and rules for interactions to be constructed at the scale of this
territorial context. In this case, the activity of government consists of structuring a setting
for interactions. The agreements then made within this setting link the actors together and
create territorialized norms of reciprocity. These links and norms institutionalize the
city’s territory as a context, and this becomes the scale at which norms of reciprocity
operate.
In the context of Torino Internazionale, the theme of internationalization and facing
up to the global has allowed the territory’s identity to be updated and has enabled the
discovery that the city’s competitive advantages had previously been linked to the density
of relations between actors within the production system. From this point of view, it is
interesting to look at the example of the collective re-reading to which the Turin
economic system has been subject. In the last decade, with transformation of the
production system, increasing flexibility of hierarchies inside firms and increased
subcontractor autonomy, a certain pluralism has been able to flourish in Turin, following
decades of bureaucratic and hierarchical organization (Bagnasco, 1990). New forms of
cooperation between businesses have appeared. The vehicle manufacturing industry, in
particular, has begun to function more flexibly and move closer to district-style
organizational forms. The diffuse nature of the technical culture involved in mechanical
engineering and metallurgy, the relations of cooperation/competition, the presence of
intelligent functions (management, design) all constitute a territorialized social capital
that the Strategic Plan has aimed to make evident to all local actors. Torino Internazionale
has enabled all the actors to recognize this evolution and to build a consensus around neo-
industrial strategies, in contrast to the post-industrial development perspectives dominant
in the 1980s. The Strategic Plan translates this into actions that aim to structure district-
type relations within production subsystems (shared services in the spheres of training,
quality assurance, technology transfer).
The local economy has been reinterpreted as a mechanism rooted in a specific social
formation. The territory has become a competitive advantage: it is recognized as a
catalyst for relationships and forms of cooperation, and it is reinterpreted as a set of
relational goods that are reproduced over time. Torino Internazionale intends to spread
this relational view and to break with the previously dominant idea of a Turin totally
dominated by FIAT’s instrumental relationship to the territory — of a city functioning

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Political government and governance in Turin 489

hierarchically. The territory of Turin is, on the contrary, revealing itself as rich in
relations of cooperation and trust. Torino Internazionale intends to promote the territory
as a mode of regulation that is both alternative and complementary to the market and to
hierarchical organization. The exchangist, interactive approach of the project aims to
stabilize relations of trust between actors. The collective construction of issues and the
confrontation of the local and the global are helping to develop awareness of various
forms of interdependence. Highlighting the territory’s competitive advantages promotes a
shared view of the territory as social capital: the bonds created and the consensus built
enable the strengthening of cooperative ties.

Government: structuring a territory-institution

In the case of Turin, the institutionalization of a territory and of a political capacity is
coming about through the consolidation of bonds within local society. The value of
Torino Internazionale lies above all in its lateral effects. The Strategic Plan legitimizes
social networks and multilateral relations as constituent elements of the city. The themes
of relationships and self-organization are omnipresent in discourse on the project, and are
directly inspired by local development theories (De Rita and Bonomi, 1998). The territory
is being institutionalized through networks of cooperation and the collective production
of projects by the social actors. Without these seeds of self-organization, a political
institution alone could not produce a political territory and a capacity for government. In
the case of Turin, the objective is not to reproduce bilateral relations between the social
and economic actors and the municipal institution, putting the municipality at the centre
of the mechanism of governance in the place previously occupied by FIAT. Rather, it is
to reinforce the pluralization process in local society. The interactive, iterative formula
for constructing specific projects and the discretion of the municipality in the process are
explained by this overriding desire to institutionalize a territory-community.
The attempt to construct community forms of regulation is especially visible in the
efforts of the instigators of Torino Internazionale to convince the actors that competitive
advantages are organized territorially. These advantages are essentially connected with
the organization of the actors and the wealth of the relations that unite them. Efforts are
being made to get away from a representation of relations between actors uniquely
structured by class conflict or the hierarchical relationship between principal (FIAT) and
agent (subcontractor), and to lead the actors to share an alternative picture of Turin: as a
city in which their relationships are based equally on reciprocity and the feeling of
belonging to the local community. Turin, at the height of class conflict, tended to close in
on itself and no longer thought about its relationship to the outside world.5 The theme of
internationalization has therefore been adopted by Castellani and his supporters in order
to bring the city out of a system of social relations imposed by the omnipresence of
Fordist major industry and to build community awareness in the face of territorial
otherness. The objective is to transform Turin into a ‘milieu’ (Governa, 1997) with an
identity, specific modes of regulation and a capacity for self-reproduction. The milieu is a
dialectic between the potential and the actual; the milieu becomes aware of itself through
its confrontation with the global. The interactive, iterative process of the Strategic Plan
enables these community forms of regulation to be updated and developed.
Through validating ‘project-making’ by the social and economic actors, the
municipal institution aims to territorialize the social actors’ strategies. Project processes
are aimed at giving Turin the image of a specific social formation with an accumulated
technical culture and know-how, the combination of which cannot be reproduced. The
territory of Turin has accumulated a ‘specific know-how, which is created and consumed
locally, and which circulates in the form of contextual knowledge, accessible only to
5 This inspired Bagnasco (1988) to liken Turin to a bureaucracy.

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490 Gilles Pinson

someone operating in this territorial context’ (Dematteis, 1998: 8). The political effect of
the project is to ‘exhume’ the territory as a historically constituted community and to
attempt to eradicate the view that this territory is a neutral container for practices that
have their meaning at another — national or global — scale. The project approach
situates the activity of government both as the exhumation of historically constituted
characteristics of a territory/social formation and as instituting activity to organize the
updating of such endowments by activating exchanges between the social actors.
This structuring of the territory-institution is leading to the reconstruction of
government. However, in the context of the Strategic Plan, all the aspects relating to
formal political institutions have been subject to a lot less attention. The functioning of
the Working Group on Intermunicipal Cooperation was not ideal, and it was finally
decided to set up an association to bring municipalities together on a voluntary basis. In
reality, the political institutions are seen as places where the capacity of urban actors to
‘system-build’ is diluted and where the consensus built in the community is destroyed.
The more or less explicit isolation of Turin City Council from Torino Internazionale is an
illustration of this. Community forms of regulation are commensurate with consensus,
with a sharing that helps to highlight the things that bring actors and interests together.
The political institution, by contrast, functions on dissension. The cohesion of a system of
urban actors and the operational imperatives require interactions, renegotiations of
objectives, an iterative project process made up of trial-and-error — all of which are not
really compatible with sanction by voting and the division of the community of actors
into a majority and a minority.
Should we see this process of ‘institutional evasion’ as a sign of the death of the
political under the pressure of the disciplinary logics of globalization? Have government
and the political capacity to integrate disappeared in favour of the logic of exchanges and
vagueness? Are we seeing things pass beyond government defined by authority and by the
institutional monopoly of forms of mediation and regulation? From this point of view, the
Castellani strategy is explicit: to situate the municipality’s actions within an extended
system of governance, no longer to concentrate public policy in a few sectors where the
municipality can behave as the exclusive actor, but to become one actor instigating
development across a broader palette of sectors. It is no longer a matter of being central in
a few sectors but of being nodal in all sectors, of developing a capacity to organize
‘project-making’ by the city’s different actors. Municipal government activity is being
redefined, in a context of governance, as the promotion and strategic framing of the city’s
capacity for self-organization.
The desire to ‘empower’ Turin’s civil society is explicit. The Deputy Mayor in
charge of the Strategic Plan has indicated that ‘Torino Internazionale is not the municipal
administration’s programme but the city’s project’. The municipality’s desire to give way
to civil society reveals a specific mode of conceiving the process of institutionalizing a
territory and the role of the political actors in this process. In this mode, the construction
of a political territory does not come about mainly through interactions between political
operators engaged in relations of competition, but more through a process of increasing
density in the social weft of the territory. The territory, as institution, must pre-exist its
political institutionalization. This does not nullify the role of political institutions: they
can stimulate multilateral exchanges, which will produce norms of behaviour and
reciprocity. Government consists of providing the scale and the setting for this process of
social institutionalization. Paradoxically, in Turin, this concept of government, which
might be seen as reductive, seems to have restored a role to the municipal institution.
The question remains as to which social elements might have found expression in the
development of Torino Internazionale. Some observers have seen it as an operation to
harness the citizenship debate, mounted by a limited coterie of economic, political and
university elites. It is clear that the economic actors were the section most mobilized by
the initiative. More worryingly, some people have seen Torino Internazionale as a

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Political government and governance in Turin 491

process that has institutionalized a division between two collective action networks within
the city: on the one hand, a network of elites mobilized around economic development
issues and very involved in drawing up the plan — a network that brings together
employers’ associations, trade unions, some councillors and university academics; and,
on the other hand, a very large social action network, bringing together numerous
associations and institutions from the non-profit sector and the voluntary sector, which
has remained largely at the margins of the process. Whatever the case, it is clear that
Torino Internazionale is an elitist mobilization. In the opinions of all our interviewees, its
merit lay in introducing pluralism into the representation of these elites: the Strategic Plan
has helped to structure a pluralist network of representations of economic interests, and
this has brought Turin out of a system of regulation based on confrontation between FIAT
and the trade unions. Through Torino Internazionale, Castellani’s actions have broadly
helped to institute this pluralism in forms of representation of the economic world.
Politics in Turin has provided an institutional outlet for a process of pluralization of
local society. It has not designated legitimate interests, but has set up a mechanism to
support interacquaintance and inter-recognition between these different interests. This
mechanism has enabled the actors’ identity to be fashioned through the institution of a
framework of territorialized interactions. Thus, relationships have crystallized which
strengthen the nodality of public institutions without giving them a monopoly over
mediations. To paraphrase one observer of Turin society, a party to the Strategic Plan, we
might say that, although Torino Internazionale is the opposite of political in the absolute
sense, it signals the return of politics to Turin. Society is no longer constructed solely
from a political base; instead, the institutions initiate a process of self-institutionalization
of local society.

Conclusion
The case of Turin shows that, in a governance context, truly political forms of regulation
retain their specific features but alter in nature. Government is no longer defined by the
public institutions’ monopoly of mediations or by the coordination of social activities
through the exercise of authority. Government in governance is the set of processes
instigated by the public institutions of urban government to regulate the behaviour of
actors in a context in which various modes of regulation contribute to coordinating social
activities and producing the social order.
This new type of political regulation is making the best of the pluralism that seems
increasingly characteristic of the production of urban policies. Moreover, public
institutions are aiming to stimulate relations of exchange and social interaction in urban
collective action. These approaches enable the structuring of interactions and their
territorialization. Through Torino Internazionale, it can be seen that the project-based
approach enables the actors to be guided towards the rediscovery of ties that bind them to
the territory — with territory understood both as social formation and as space for
relations. Government in governance takes the form of a specific institutionalization
process — the ‘ascent of the territory’, that is, the updating of pre-political ties between
actors and the validation of relations of reciprocity, trust and informal cooperation as a
mode of regulation.
Community-type forms of regulation seem to be established. They structure a
territory-institution which regulates behaviour and provides both a common identity and a
place for the emergence of consensus and a shared vision. They organize the exhumation
of the territory’s pre-political social characteristics. In the case of Turin, urban
government is aiming to promote and structure local society’s capacity for self-
organization and so it is regaining a greater capacity for overall influence on the
governance of the city. A new political capacity is being constructed, on the initiative of

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492 Gilles Pinson

the municipality but through a validation of extra-political dynamics and modes of

regulation.
True, the pluralism that seems to be emerging is a stratified pluralism (Dahl, 1961;
Judge, 1995). Although a capacity for collective action seems to be re-forming within a
network that brings together economic, political and university elites, the price to be paid
is complete opacity of these aggregation processes and rupture with the networks of social
associationism and the non-profit sector. It is clear that the political leadership, by dint of
wanting to euphemize its intervention, has not been able to play an integrating role
between these two urban networks. Thus, it seems — at least in Turin — that the costs of
the logics of collective action, which are deployed in the strategic projects approach and
allow the rebuilding of coalition, are a certain democratic opacity and a growing
compartmentalization of urban society.

Gilles Pinson (Pinsong@aol.com), Centres de Recherches sur l’Action Politique en

Europe, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Rennes – University of Rennes I, 104, boulevard
de la Duchesse Anne, F-35000 Rennes, France.

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