Processes of adaptation and creation of a Territorial Governance. The experience of the cities of Benevento and Salerno (Campania Region, Italy)”

During the last years the geographical approach to the discussion on the spatial and functional transformations of the urban areas is focused, at first, on the birth of «new spatial hierarchies» and, then, overcoming them, giving rise to a reading of the contemporary urban spaces according to the proper characters of a “polycentrism” linked to a redistribution of the policy actions, of the functions and of the residences, that invests the territories at different geographical scales.This has happened under the pressure of a difficult process of adaptation of the management system of the Italian structural politics to the Multi-level Governance (MLT) model of the regional politics of the UE. With the experience of the "new planning" and the affirming of a self-determination principle of the public choices to local level, the effects of two processes of reform have multiplied on the whole national territory. They are: the empowerment of the Regions that become the fulcrum of the territorial re-balancing policies, and the decentralization of the expense competences, with particular regard to the government expenditure in public capital spending.According to such model of local governance, the aim of this paper is that to analyze, particularly, the case of two “middle City” of Campania region: Benevento and Salerno. In the first case (Benevento) we want remark the multilevel model of territorial governance adopted by Benevento in relationship to its specific function of “middle City” of the inland areas of Campania region. In the second case (Salerno) we take in examination all the urban planning tools, realized until now by the city of Salerno as a “middle City” of the coastal area.The objective of this paper is also to reconstruct the processes of transformation of the two Cities, in their forms, in their functions, in their connections) and finally in their planning policy that the two cities act as stimulus to a general process of urban regeneration, facing to sustain internal processes of cohesion and development but, also, external processes of ri-balancing in a new urban asset in a “plural Campania”.