Metropolitan governance: a goal in search of a model

To effectively address the Venice city-region’s economic and environmental challenges would require changes to current governance practices and frameworks. Co-ordination, both within a single level of government and vertically between levels of government, is necessary to articulate a series of commonly defined policy objectives. Chapter 4 identifies and analyses the factors involved in the most appropriate and effective multilevel governance structure for the Venice city-region. A series of recommendations are proposed to strengthen the Venice city-region’s competitiveness, including tools and instruments for compact land use planning, strengthening planning for a polycentric metropolitan region (especially in such areas as transit, tourism management, and climate change action planning), and the adoption of a metropolitan spatial vision into the public policy process. Given the Venice city-region’s highly polycentric structure, “soft instruments”, i.e. voluntary partnerships and the creation of a metropolitan spatial vision, have immediate potential. The chapter proposes new governance arrangements to increase inter-sectoral co-ordination through performance standards and the facilitation of experimentation and pilot projects with area-wide policy co-ordination and service provision.