Democratic Renewal, Urban Planning and Civil Society: The Regeneration of Bagnoli, Naples

Antonio Bassolino's election as mayor of Naples in 1993 coincided with the final closure of the Italsider steelworks at Bagnoli. The new left administration saw urban regeneration as a unique opportunity to mark the beginning of a new era. The distinctive traits of the Bagnoli master plan were: in terms of procedures, traditional command-and-control planning tools and a rejection of a governance approach; in terms of content, a grand environmentalist vision. This paper explores Neapolitan ‘exceptionalism’ in urban planning during the Bassolino administration and those of his successors, with a view to assessing whether it can provide the European left with an alternative model to the currently dominant ‘city entrepreneurialism’ and whether and how it has successfully addressed the tension between efficient planning and democratic legitimacy.