Development Theories and Infrastructural Planning: the Belluno Province

Currently, the English word “smart” has become commonly used in the field of urban and land planning as an adjective referring to an evolving “good”, or clever, know-how. It is a word that is usually applied to the process of qualitative urban and land planning, as opposed just to quantitative planning. Since the Conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the urban and planning (but also architectural) disciplines have been accompanied by terminologies that could somehow represent a better way of “carrying out” transformations, passing from an “ecological city” to a “sustainable city” and finally to a “smart city”. Each adjective represents a vision of the transformations: for example, an ecological city is a town with more public green areas, the sustainable city pays more attention to the preservation of physical and chemical parameters (air and water quality, etc.), and the smart city is more focused on the realization of efficient technologies. Actually, the above interpretations of transformation do not have a real meaning, as it is absolutely evident that the city and the territory, in compliance with the disciplinary statute, must be transformed by taking into consideration the human, biotic, and abiotic elements, i.e., they must have an environmental approach. The adjective environmental has been defined in the long-standing scientific research (Odum, Leopold, McHarg, Stainer, Nebbia, etc.) which, since the 1930s, has been developing the ability to utilize dynamically and synchronically the three levers that define sustainable development: the economic, the social, and the ecological (biotic and abiotic) levers. Following the historical periods and the geographical contexts, the use of the three levers may progressed at different speeds, while yet focusing attention on the feedback among the same levers. In the case study (Belluno province), the environmental (ecological, sustainable, smart) development depends on the infrastructural lever for inverting a phenomenon of social and economic decadence of a territory, also due to pervasive and aggressive competitive policies of the neighboring territories. In fact, in the province of Belluno, environmental development is conditioned by the priority use of the social and economic (primarily infrastructural) levers in the medium and long term. It is evident that this priority in the use of levers is accompanied by the ability to take the opportunities given by the high-quality ecological and landscape conditions existing in the Belluno province.