Bridging the Gap between Decision Makers and Cities. Notes from Campania's Wastelands (Italy)

Today, Circular Economy theories are quite developed and start to impact on the industrial world. Considering waste as a resource, in fact, has become a useful argument in order to move from theory to practice. While experiences taking advantage of waste flows are underway, the transition to practice appears more difficult with respect to wastelands, that are at the core of the REPAiR project. The paper focus on how wastelands challenge the territorial governance, starting from the urban region of Naples. Here, like in the rest of Italy, a gap between policies and the city can be observed, that points out how chances for innovation, coming from local contexts, are often ignored by the institutions. Such a gap is made wider by the ongoing transition of Italy’ large cities from provinces to metropolitan cities, with the relative change of power balances, as well as by the current reorganization of the waste cycle in the Campania region. In the underway shift, the Campania region is prescribing rules that set up a construction of the problem which is far from the real answer to it; the municipalities are finding difficult to overcome local egoisms; the metropolitan city is excluded from the waste management and is still defining its own role. In this framework, it is urgent to transform the fragmented set of measures in a strategic vision collectively constructed. In so doing, we argue that both the activation of interinstitutional processes and the involvement of communities are indefeasible steps to transform wastelands into resources.