Somewhere the city slows down and the country comes back. Features of a starting change of course in many italian urban fringes

The paper addresses an important topic within the process of reviewing the town planning approach into the Italian urban fringes: the relegation or retrocession of areas planned to be urbanized in areas for farming activity. The relevance of this topic consists in facing two of the main problems of rural peri‐urban areas, namely the scarcity and the fragmentation of agricultural land, caused by the urban‐sprawl policies occurred during the so called "the glorious thirty”, when these areas were conceived as a reserve for new urbanization. Nowadays this status is more and more questioned, according to the contradictory pathways of urban transition and the new priorities postulated by the sustainable planning. Following this trend this paper intends to argue to which extent a return to farming in peri‐urban areas can be helped out by an overall review of their land use. To this end, the paper presents the results of a survey conducted on a sample of 30 municipalities of small, medium and large scale, located in many Italian Regions, that are implementing planning operations in order to convert some peripheral areas from urban to agricultural uses. Referring to this sample the paper discusses the impact of the transition in place and the conditions under which it may be effective. It follows that the present process of re‐zoning buildable areas into farming areas, although still limited to local experiences and policies, is a large‐scaled phenomenon that deserves a major attention from the public planning agencies at urban and regional level. In fact, at these levels more important results might be achieved by reviewing some regulatory and technical tools of urban planning till now not enough exploited. In conclusion, the paper highlights how an 'other' urban planning is possible, indeed it is already being implemented, and provides some points of reference for the work that remains to be done.