The Difficult Relationship between Land Use Planning and Transport Planning: Evidences from the City of Turin, Italy

Although their strict interrelationship is widely recognized, transports and land uses are still rarely planned in a really coordinated way in urban areas. Different reasons can be individuated for this poor integration: some of them are linked to educational and institutional factors and to specific characters of planning tools, and are particularly relevant in the Italian context; but there are also “substantive” reasons due to differences in the intrinsic characters of transports and land uses. The paper investigates these substantive difficulties of plans integration, with reference to the case of Turin: the Municipal physical development plan of this Italian city identifies three main “axes” of urban transformation, strictly based on new transport infrastructures. The analysis of the realization process of these three corridors show how and why integration and coordination of land use and transport planning can turn out to be quite complex and difficult to reach, also when they are explicitly pursued by planners.