Urban Standards and Ecosystem Services: The Evolution of the Services Planning in Italy from Theory to Practice

Human well-being is determined by multiple factors related to health, social relations, safety, environment, landscape, cultural heritage, and quality of services. The Italian planning system provided a set of “urban standards”, in terms of threshold values of areas per inhabitant destined for public services and facilities. The application of urban standards, for a period of more than fifty years, did not result in a broad improvement of life quality in the urban areas. This paper discusses the issue of urban facilities in Italy in order to evaluate the opportunity to innovate traditional standards according to the environmental and ecological paradigm, focusing on the benefits provided to humans by natural ecosystems, the so-called ecosystem services (ESs). The paper investigates the evolution of the Italian planning practice through the introduction of quality standards and innovative tools able to meet the ever-changing social demand. The research aims to verify if the ES concept is really implemented in the Italian planning practice and if the ecosystem approach has a real impact on political decision-making. Using a comparative method, four case-studies of urban municipal plans are selected and analyzed in order to identify different approaches and possible fields of innovation. The research highlighted a lack of integration of ecosystem services approach in the land use decisions, although there is an in-depth survey on the state of conservation of ecological and environmental resources. The local experiments of qualitative standards represent an attempt to deal with specific ecological emergencies, namely flood risk, air, water, and soil pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Conclusions discuss, from an international perspective, the need to revise the traditional planning approach in the field of public services and facilities, taking into account the influence of ecosystem services on human well-being.