With the Metropolitan City: Identity Needs and Strategic Opportunities Within

The Italian concept of metropolitan city is quite different from European realities in which cities were not set up ex ante, but over the years and until a natural legitimacy of their status, they gained identity thanks to a long cultural, geographical and administrative process. Metropolitan cities in Italy come from a craving for reform path of local authorities, well defined with Law Delrio promoting the transformation process of all the 86 Italian provinces. This law praiseworthy pointed to Italian cities as a priority issue to the integrated territorial development. One of the pillars of this reform is definitively the establishment of the first 10 Metropolitan cities, that is Turin, Milan, Venice, Genoa, Bologna, Florence, Bari, Rome Capital area (with special authority), Naples and Reggio Calabria (to be launched in 2016), with the replacement of the corresponding provincial administrations. Unlike provinces, metropolitan cities will have complex purposes, such as the general region planning including communication facilities, service and infrastructure networks, public services organization of general interest, traffic, mobility and economic development. The chance to have a new governance model had been long awaited, something suited to urban areas which not quite smoothly have to manage difficulties as transport, environmental quality, waste organization and management, mobility etc. all not related to the canonic administrative boundaries. Dealing with the main territorial matters in just one administrative decision-making center means, for these urban areas, to handle them completely in a conceptual and territorial way, but also it ensures efficiency and more facilities for the population even peripheral.This rising process throughout the country, especially in southern Italy, is based on the acknowledgement of its own identity, and concern the understanding and the approval of the new boundaries, seizing the opportunities derived from the new layout. Connecting places and territories it is obviously a great chance, but can take place only through those slow understanding processes of the unavoidable developments of urban, social and administrative transformation. As regards the province of Reggio Calabria, for example, it is a well-known fact that many hinterland municipalities have demographics under a thousand inhabitants due to a relentless drive of the population to the main cities and to the Northern Italy, which offers definitively more. Not to mention the European cities, where the effects of the economic crisis are not as obvious as in Italy. Therefore, the establishment of the metropolitan city despite the crisis, such as the one of the province of Reggio, can certainly be an opportunity for the revitalization and integrated development. It also entails the overcoming of the unsolved issues related to the mobility of municipalities’ interconnection that is a key point of the Metropolitan Agenda.