This paper analyses the relationship between deconcentration processes, planning policies, and governance in the metropolitan area of Rome, Italy, from 1991 to 2001. It points out that Rome does not have an explicit policy either in favor of or against deconcentration and that the public authorities are not in fact aware of the problem. Deconcentration is mainly driven by market forces and business location decisions. These decisions are strongly influenced by material factors such as accessibility, land availability, and real estate prices, as well as immaterial factors such as the natural, cultural, and social environment. Public players can take action to influence these factors. Even though Italy has a very strictly regulated planning system, there has traditionally been a high degree of freedom in actual behaviors. 1. Introduction This paper deals with the economic deconcentration that took place in Rome in the 1991 to 2001 period and its relation to planning policies and the Italian governance system. The paper is organized as follows. The first part details the concept of economic deconcentration and previous studies on the subject and illustrates the research methodology. It subsequently analyzes urban policies in Italy and identifies and analyzes national, regional, subregional, and local policies relevant to deconcentration. The paper then focuses on the implications of deconcentration for Rome. Economic deconcentration can be defined as the movement of economic activity from cores towards suburbs in metropolitan areas. It can be measured through the relative changes in the number of jobs and companies for each economic sector and each subarea over a given period of time. The issue of economic deconcentration has been examined within the European project SELMA: Spatial Deconcentration of Economic Land Use and Quality of Life in European Metropolitan Areas (http://selma.rtdproject.net/). The SELMA project—in which the authors of this paper were involved—was carried out by universities and research institutes in Italy, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Israel, The Netherlands, Spain, and the UK. SELMA analyzed the nature and extent of employment deconcentration in fourteen metropolitan areas in Europe (the phenomenon had previously been studied in the 1990s in several American metropolitan regions). Economic and residential deconcentration processes interact and are likely to contribute to the phenomenon of sprawl, which has varying economic, social, and environmental effects depending on the situation of each urban settlement. Sprawl has been
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