The Design of Territorial Integrated Evaluation

Over the course of the twentieth century, theoretical and empirical research has approached the evaluation of retail urban policies mostly as a sector-focused question and has paid little attention to the territorial aspects connected with the processes of settlement (Wrigley, Coe and Currah, 2005). Especially in the Italian national context, the research (aside from few exemplary pioneering studies ) and the territorial governing practices have lacked any in-depth analyses of the territorial dynamics that retail activities put into motion. Rather, retail was mostly understood to be an object of study for economics. The integration between retail and ‘territory’ is the constituting principal of the first National Reform Decree. The decree takes an approach that is entirely different from the long-established treatment of retail policy as an issue involving only this sector. Instead, it shifts retail policy to a central position in the programming of territorial development. This reform introduced a new system of normative guidelines, constituted by a set of territorial criteria and put regional spatial policies in charge of defining the conditions and strategies of territorial development (Boylaud and Nicoletti, 2001; Evans-Cowley, 2005). The renewed system of regulations and procedures for regional planning placed the territorial dimension in the center of the process of reform. This territorial dimension became an element essential for addressing the dynamics of regional retail development. Several years later, this substantially innovative legislation was followed by the approval of a constitutional law that gave regional administrations exclusive competence in territorial retail planning.