Environment and Urbanization in Modern Italy

HISTORY OF THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

Martin V. Melosi and Joel A. Tarr, Editors

ENVIRONMENT AND URBANIZATION IN MODERN ITALY

FEDERICO PAOLINI

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2020, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

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Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4593-2

ISBN 10: 0-8229-4593-2

Cover photo: Acqua alta floods in Piazza San Marco, Wolfgang Moroder. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Cover design: Joel W. Coggins

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8725-3 (electronic)

CONTENTS

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

Introduction

PART I: NATURAL RESOURCES AND THEIR USES

1: The Economic and Environmental Impacts of Biomass, Solar, and Mini-Wind Power Plants: The World, Italy, and Tuscany

2: The Environmental Impact of Urbanization and Industrialization in the Greater Florence Area, 1945–2011

3: Florence and Its Waters: Water Management Policies in a Central Italian City, 1944–1980

4: Industries, Tourism, and the Environment: A Case Study of Tuscany’s Central-Southern Coast

PART II: MOBILITY AND THE ENVIRONMENT

5: The Environmental Impact of the Car on Italian Cities, 1950–1974

6: Transportation and the Environment in Italy, 1944–2006

7: Cars and Emissions Regulation in Italy, 1950–2008

PART III: POLITICS

8: Environmental Knowledge, Urban Planning, and Political Decisions in Italy from 1850 to the Present

9: The Parabola of Italian Environmentalism: From the Centrality of Associationism to the Success of NIMBY Localism

10: Popular Initiative Movements and the Commons: Promotion of an Alternative Economic Model or Defense of the Particular?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACRONYMS & ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

From the second half of the 1940s, when postwar reconstruction began in Italy, there were essentially three driving forces of environmental change. The first was apparent in the uncontrollable process of urban sprawl, fueled by considerable migratory flows from the countryside and southern regions toward the cities where large-scale productive activities were beginning to amass. The main consequence of demographic growth was an urban expansion model—following an explosion in building favored by a cartel of interests that united builders, real estate professionals, landowners, and the investment banks—characterized by the overseeing of scheduled settlements, by an infrastructural system tilted toward road networks, and by the lack of public services (e.g., greenspaces, public facilities). This model was repeated in all the cities that were spreading like wildfire, creating new urban areas built in a disorderly manner on portions of land set among industrial premises and inhabited chiefly by factory workers and their families.¹

The second driving force of environmental change was unruly industrial development, which was tolerated since it was seen as the necessary tribute to be paid to progress and modernization. The paradigm of modernization was understood as the path of exit from the rural condition, experienced as a condition of material scarcity in a static, restricted and introverted social and cultural context.² Precisely this paradigm rendered possible a system of industrial relations that hinged on a social contract in which enterprises were allowed to liberally exploit natural resources in exchange for supplying employment, the economic resources indispensable to freeing oneself from poverty. The signatories of the social contract (enterprises, workers, citizens, policy makers, institutions) did not at all consider any possible negative consequences of such a development model, which is to say the degenerative metabolism by which industries and urban centers appropriated resources in their entirety (waterways, sources of energy, raw materials, the land) and returned them in the form of degraded metabolites (biologically dead stretches of waters, polluted soil, air tainted by the emissions from houses, factories, and the means of transportation). The endurance of the social contract was made substantially possible by collective repression of the environmental damages, which were also clearly visible and, above all, continually denounced by scientists. Repression of environmental problems, then, was not fed by scarce collective consciousness or the absence of information, but rather by awareness that the benefits produced by this development model—in the eyes of the great majority of citizens and of political and economic policy makers—far outweighed the disadvantages.³

The second half of the 1960s saw the first manifestations of a third powerful driving force of environmental change: mass consumption. Failure to perceive that individual use of the environment generates a collective damage lay at the heart of the proliferation of the most common styles of consumption, such as the use of motor vehicles (which emit harmful substances that contribute to pollution of urban air and are partially responsible for the greenhouse effect) and the purchase of prepackaged goods (which contribute to the exponential increase in solid waste, whose disposal may generate metabolites dangerous to human health, such as dioxins).⁴ Not all collective models of consumption are of a hedonistic nature—take the example of chemical products that can improve harvest yields or eliminate garden-infesting weeds—but they have played a role of fundamental importance in the onset of environmental crises, especially in urban areas.⁵ Industrial production has in fact the aim of satisfying individual and collective needs; in market economy societies the quantity and quality of goods to be produced are determined by consumers’ choices which, for all that they are influenced by sociocultural and psychological motivations (fueled, for example, by advertising), are chiefly induced by motives of a utilitarian nature. The examples are numerous: the car (whose success was essentially determined by improvement in the freedom of personal movement, not comparable to any means of public transportation); the washing machine (whose fortune was due to the enormous consumer buy-in, freeing them from the slavery of washing by hand); prepackaged food products (which meant quickly prepared meals at limited costs), and also plastic materials, which made it possible to produce objects that rapidly became widely used.

As Jared Diamond has efficiently shown, the history of humanity offers numerous examples of environmental crises caused by collective behaviors and lifestyles of societies that were unable to measure the impact of their actions on the environment.⁶ On a par with the Danes in Greenland and the inhabitants of Easter Island, the postwar society repressed the environmental damage it was causing because it evidently saw the advantages produced by the development model as being far greater than the disadvantage of living in an ecosystem deeply modified by anthropic activities responsible for a growing environmental deterioration. Working in the factory, traveling by car, buying in supermarkets, living in newly built housing outside the old town centers, taking part in the rituals of consumer society (e.g., Saturday afternoon shopping, weekend trips, summer holidays at the seaside or in the mountains) were activities with a higher social value in comparison to the possibility of living in a more salubrious and less degraded ecosystem.

In this situation, up to the mid-1970s the necessary conditions for tackling environmental problems with serious protectionist and rehabilitation interventions were lacking. The whole country was paralyzed by the paradigm of modernization: the rhetorical imperatives were to modernize infrastructures and lifestyles in order to bring Italy into the assembly of industrialized and developed nations. Collective adherence to the development model was almost total. Generalized consent contributed to repression of the damages that economic growth and urbanization were inflicting on the environment; the material advantages were so evident and coveted that environmental damages were considered a modest tribute to pay for progress.

The context began to change, very slowly, only around the mid-1970s when the environmental crisis became evident and the need to supply a remedy could no longer be put off. This was made possible by the concurrence of the first industrial restructuring, following a slowing down of the economy caused by the oil crisis of 1973–1974. The first companies that closed down or relocated factories built in the new suburbs—or, attracted by favorable financing, opened new premises far from the big central-northern cities, thus emptying great portions of urban areas—were an early sign of the clear transformations brought about by a development model based on the twofold term industrialization/urbanization. Those who were left unemployed, residents who found themselves obliged to live next to the now lifeless industrial pachyderms, also began to become aware of the environmental damages produced by development. The first rehabilitation policies were set in motion at both national and local levels at this time. The interventions, however, were rarely incisive and continued to be vigorously obstructed by pressure groups, such as the unions of industrialists. We need only consider, for example, the events of Law No. 319 on waterways: the law was first emptied of content and then the application of its regulations was continuously put off until, almost twenty years later, the European Commission (EC) forced Italy to get in line with its directives.⁷

That said, the knotty question of the attitudes of workers and trade unions must be faced. It is entirely too easy—and demagogic—to place the blame for delayed implementation of environmental policies exclusively on the bosses, which, far more frequently than one might think, coincided with those of the workers. Companies certainly tried in every way (licit and illicit) to delay application of the (few) regulations that existed, and very likely also concealed the danger of certain work processes from the workers. But for decades the workers themselves had subordinated the safeguarding of their health and the environment to the guarantee of a job; this is demonstrated by the people of Prato, who were proud to see the waters of the Bisenzio River change color because those unnatural shades meant work and well-being. But there were also quarrels between citizens who protested about the smells and fumes produced by the factories and the workers who feared losing their occupations because of those protests.

The first real break came in the second half of the 1980s, simultaneously with the creation of the Ministry of the Environment and the victory of environmental petitions in the 1987 referendum on the civil use of nuclear power. These first significant changes in the attitude with which environmental problems were tackled gradually became increasingly incisive in the course of the 1990s, for two reasons: First, the great numbers of adherents achieved by the environmental movement after the accident at Chernobyl contributed to the subsequent electoral results obtained by the Green Party, which gained the Ministry of the Environment in center-left coalitions. Second, European treaties, by constructing a more solid and efficacious corpus of legislation, obliged reluctant countries such as Italy to produce regulations in line with European directives. In brief, the hetero-management of the EC played a role of fundamental importance that forced the European Union (EU) signatories—even the recalcitrant Mediterranean countries—to take care of their environmental problems within an ecosystem framework they had previously ignored.

There was a third cause, resting outside the purview of political and institutional decision makers: the rapid deindustrialization already begun during the late 1980s and then accelerated in the course of the 1990s. Progressive industrial desertification favored operations of environmental rehabilitation and made application of the regulations much easier. In short, a significant part of environmental improvements should be ascribed not to environmental policies but to the fact that the factories were moved elsewhere, exporting to other places the environmental problems that had previously afflicted Italian urban areas.

In this context the book (which brings together texts written from 2004 to 2016) seeks to delineate a path of research that lies within the vein of relationships between urban areas and the environment.⁸ Environment and Urbanization in Modern Italy concentrates on the twentieth century and particularly on its last five decades, when the intensification of urbanization and industrialization led to a massive increase in the exploitation of natural resources.

PART I

NATURAL RESOURCES AND THEIR USES

There are two primary reasons for studying certain areas of Tuscany (a region in central Italy). The first concerns the urban development prerogatives of a region which was rapidly transforming from countryside, villages, and small to medium-size towns into a highly industrial area immersed in a profoundly urbanized rural context. The second regards the nature of the industrial development model, characterized by a clear predominance of small to medium-size businesses. It is precisely this aspect which makes study of the Tuscan case interesting because it allows us to verify how the advent of the environmental crisis is not traceable simply to the presence of great industrial complexes but to a more complex series of factors.

Investigating a case such as Tuscany, one is dissuaded from falling back on interpretations that tend to emphasize the role of industry and consequently explain the environmental crisis as a result of multiform interactions between urban metabolisms (flows of materials that enter cities and emerge as manufactured products or waste), exploited natural resources, and cultural attitudes (styles of consumption, residents’ relationship with the natural environment).¹ Because it stands outside the geographical perimeter comprising the Genoa-Milan-Turin industrial triangle and the Po Valley as far as Bologna, the hub of urban and industrial development over the second half of the twentieth century, Tuscany is an incisive case study for investigating the crisis of urban government in the decades of accelerated development: that combination of dynamics which Martin Melosi has aptly defined as the urban crisis in the age of ecology.²

Tuscany, a link between northern and southern Italy, embodies the characteristics of the country’s history of urban environment, precisely as they have been categorized by Simone Neri Serneri and Gabriella Corona:³ a relatively high population density distributed very differently among plains and hilly areas (the former much less extensive but far more populous); rapid and intense development, albeit in an economic framework featuring a prevalence of small and medium-size businesses; the presence of ongoing conflict between local government planning policies and interest groups intent on defending their specific advantages; a rapid acceleration in urbanization within a picture distinguished by widespread wildcat building in urban areas, where residential property shares space with industry; intense conflict between towns and those rural areas whose natural resources (water first and foremost) have been exploited to the exclusive advantage of urban areas.

The case of Tuscany is also interesting because it confirms another reflection common in Italian historiography, namely that the environmental question, as Salvatore Adorno and Simone Neri Serneri have written,⁴ emerged only in the course of the 1970s, when the industrialization model established in the aftermath of the Second World War had fallen deeply into crisis. As in the rest of Italy—characterized by mature-technology industrial districts consisting of hundreds of medium-size and small businesses (often very small)—the environmental question in Tuscany emerged between the late 1970s and early 1980s, and its result was a paper environmentalism, because environmental policies were chiefly a rhetorical device and little else, as much at the national as the local level. While institutions and political forces made a great display of environmental rhetoric on the communications front, at the formal level their actions sought to delay the application of legislative regulations capable of kick-starting environmental rehabilitation. Having long studied the Tuscan case,⁵ one has a strong sensation that institutional vagueness in the environmental policies sector was not at all displeasing to the political parties: in a word, one gets the clear impression that environmental commitment had the function of silencing the functionaries and offices assigned to studying ecological problems, as well as those minority sectors of science and society that had begun to speak out about the ecological crisis brought on by postwar development. Environmental rhetoric, in brief, assumed the function of communications maquillage directed at public opinion, while formal actions were still solidly centered around questions of work and production, to which ecological issues were irremediably subordinated.

The four essays comprising this first part (chapters 1–4) are dedicated to the uses of natural resources. The first, which deals with the development of renewable energies, shows how even in a region like Tuscany—which has been seeking for decades to reconvert its economy by investing in renewable energy, experiential tourism, and quality agriculture—it is very difficult to apply an economic model capable of freeing itself from fossil fuels. The second and third chapters tackle resource management in the context of the region’s main urban area (Florence-Prato). For all that the essays are not exhaustive, they do represent an attempt to show how one of the chief interpretive keys of environmental transformations is that of conflict. In Tuscany, as in other Italian urban areas,⁶ the construction and organization of the region are seen to be the complex outcome of cooperation and competition among the interests of industry, citizens, various economic players, the cities themselves, their minor satellite towns, and the rural areas at the margins of modernization processes. Chapter 4 looks at the coast, where economic development and environmental transformations have been driven by tourism and by certain industrial sites in areas suitably equipped with water resources and seaports. In full awareness of the paucity of historiographical research and reflection in this field, the essay sets itself the task of first focusing on a sector of investigation (industrial development of coastal areas and, more generally, of high landscape value sites) whose study could be very useful in the analysis and measurement of conflicts triggered by the presence of heritage sites in areas selected for the building of large industrial plants. Adorno and Neri Serneri have in fact written that the environmental movement in Italy has a pronounced humanistic imprint, and this has led to thinking of the environment not in terms of ecosystem but essentially as a landscape (i.e., a cultural representation of the natural world).⁷ To understand this characteristic trait of Italian environmentalism—still deeply rooted today—one would need to go into depth on the interactions between Fordist industrialization, environmental imbalance, and growth processes based on tourism and agriculture, not to mention the reconversion projects following the deindustrialization that took place from the end of the 1980s through the 1990s.

CHAPTER 1

THE ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF BIOMASS, SOLAR AND MINI-WIND POWER PLANTS

THE WORLD, ITALY, AND TUSCANY

In the initial years of the twenty-first century, the production and consumption of energy are still firmly characterized by a predominant use of fossil-based energy sources. According to assessments made by the World Resources Institute, in 2001 the global consumption of energy was distributed as: 79.5% fossil fuels, 10.4% solid biomass, 6.9% nuclear, 2.2% hydroelectric, and 0.7% other renewables. In Europe energy consumption was characterized by a higher use of fossil fuels (84.2%) and nuclear (10.5%), which relegates the percentage of renewables to a mere 4.7% (2.4% hydroelectric, 2.0% solid biomasses, 0.3% other renewables).¹ In 2004 only 0.51% of world energy was derived from solar or wind.²

In 2005 renewable sources (including nuclear) represented 10.2% of global energy consumption according to OPEC, and 7.68% according to the Energy Information Administration of the US Department of Energy.³ World Energy Outlook 2008 of the International Energy Agency envisages the future of energy still dominated by fossil fuels:

In our Reference Scenario [policies and regulations adopted by mid-2008], world primary energy demand increases by an average of 1.6% per annum during the period between 2006 and 2030, increasing from 11,730 million tons of oil equivalent (toe) up to just over 17,010 million toe, with a growth of 45%. . . . In 2030, fossil fuels account for 80% of global primary energy mix, which is slightly lower than the current level. The oil continues to remain the predominant fuel, despite the demand for coal increases more than that of any other fuel in absolute terms. The percentage of world energy consumed in urban centers, estimated at 7,900 million toe in 2006, increased by two-thirds to almost three quarters in 2030.⁴

According to the International Energy Agency, however, renewable technologies are destined to become the second most important source for the generation of electric power after coal:

Excluding biomass, non-hydroelectric renewable sources such as wind, solar, geothermal and tidal grow overall more than any other source worldwide, at an average rate of 7.2% per annum for the period in question. Most of the increase occurs in the electricity sector. The percentage of non-hydroelectric renewables to total electricity production increases from 1% in 2006 to 4% in 2030. The production of hydroelectric power is growing, even though its share of electricity production fell by two percentage points to 14%. In OECD countries, the increase of renewable sources for generating electricity exceeds that of fossil fuels and nuclear power combined.⁵

Even the International Energy Outlook 2008 of the Energy Information Administration confirms the future sustained growth of renewables (2.1% per year between 2005 and 2030) and, for 2030, predicts a scenario that provides a world energy consumption still very dependent on fossil fuels (Graph 1.1). Hydropower and other renewables would grow from 923 megawatts (MW) in 2005 to 1,373 in 2030, with an average annual growth of 1.6% (+48.75% overall). In Europe the installed capacity would rise from 212 to 293 MW (+1.3% per annum, +37.73%).⁶

In Italy between 1995 and 2005 the availability of energy sources rose from 171,716 million tons oil equivalent (toe) in 1995 to 197,776 in 2005.⁷ The period in question was characterized by a progressive decrease in oil consumption and by a constant increase in natural gas consumption. In addition, energy policies have been characterized by an attempt to stimulate the development of renewable sources and to encourage energy saving measures. In 2005 the final consumption of energy amounted to 146,591 million toe: 69,219 oil (47.22%), 45,050 natural gas (30.73%), 25,866 electricity (17.65%), 4,629 solid fuels (3.16%), 1,827 renewables (1.25%). Of the 303,672 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity produced, 83.33% were of thermoelectric origin, 14.13% hydroelectric, 1.75% geothermal, 0.77% wind, and 0.02% solar. The gross production of electric power from renewable sources was: 72.28% hydroelectric, 12.34% biomass and waste, 10.67% geothermal, 4.69% wind, and 0.02% solar.

After a significant reduction of consumption during the final years of the twentieth century, the demand for energy in Tuscany—led by industry and transportation sectors—began to increase again in 2001, with a mean annual rate more than double that of the 1990s. In 2004 Tuscany’s final consumption amounted to 6.74% of the national, largely matching its composition, with a clear prevalence of fossil fuels, in particular oil and natural gas (Graph 1.2).⁸

Forecasts for the country in the Libro bianco per la valorizzazione energetica delle fonti rinnovabili (April 1999) gave as a target for the period 2008–2012 an increase in the use of energy from renewable sources up to about 20.3 million toe (Mtoe), as compared to 11.7 Mtoe recorded in 1997. In 2008–2012 electricity produced from renewables (16,744 Mtoe) was: 10,362 Mtoe hydroelectric, 3,916 biomass and waste, 1,294 geothermal, 1,100 wind, and 0,073 solar (Graph 1.3).⁹

The Unione Petrolifera speculates that between 2006 and 2020, there will be