Territorial Government Reforms at the Time of Financial Crisis: The Dawn of Metropolitan Cities in Italy

Abstract

The Italian system of local government has experienced a series of fundamental innovations during the last decade. Although Italy’s territorial government has moved from a light to a stronger decentralization, the Country has been embedded in an endless transition process. The last few years have witnessed a hectic period of draft constitutional amendments whose results remain to be seen. On 1st Jan. 2015 a new institution, the metropolitan city, took its place among the Italian territorial authorities. Despite its incorporation in the Italian Constitution since 2001, the metropolitan city only become a reality only when the national government carried out process of reform and transformation of Italian territorial government by transforming ten large cities and into metropolitan cities and depriving other intermediate governments (regions and provinces) of their fundamental competencies. This paper critically reviews the activation of metropolitan cities and the reshuffle of Italian territorial authorities made by the ‘Delrio’ Law. It stresses the way in which this reform marks the shift towards a new phase of the Italian regionalism, which is dominated both by a dynamic of re-centralizing intergovernmental relations and by the resulting loss for provincial and regional governments.

Keywords: Metropolitan Cities, Territorial Government, Regionalism, Intermediate Local Authorities, Italian Constitutional Court