The Metropolitan City of Florence is the Institution and the territory including the 41 Municipalities belonging to the Province of Florence.Starting from 2017 (DCM. n. 26 del 5.4.2017), such territory has been adopting a Strategic Plan.
The Strategic Plan for the Metropolitan City of Florence (PSM - Piano Strategico Metropolitano) is an operational planning tool, a sort of platform for the implementation of shared policies and projects and for the exercise of supra-local functions of the municipalities included in the reference territory. The PSM, starting right from its territory atlas, from its vision, strategies, actions and pilot projects - all timed in the short, medium and long term - has a very clear and simplified tactical task: to identify the junction areas around which to define a new metropolitan spatial planning.
The Florence PSM, the most important instrument activated in the national administrative reform in the last decade, consists in a strategic projection of the objectives and their achievement in a long time and an annual cadenced and ordered operation in three visions:
- universal accessibility, an indispensable condition for participation in social life and for the usability of spaces and services;
- the definition of widespread opportunities, activation of multiple and varied resources;
- lands of well-being, an innovation of the metropolitan area that enhances the rural territory as an integrated environment in which quality of life and eco-systemic balance are conceived as a whole.
The PSM offers development strategies to the territory and relevant stakeholders and updates about progresses and results achieved. The plan is a strategic tool aimed at defining development trajectories and represents a way to put to a good use CD-ETA results keeping alive its legacy.
The digitization topic and CD-ETA project were included in the PSM since its very first version, specifically in terms of best practice exploitability, not only within the plan itself, but so to favor the diffusion and usability of such results too, well beyond the plan outreaching targets. As a matter of fact, the updated version of the plan, to be issued once a year, includes and will include the CD-ETA outcomes, within the vision 2: “spread opportunities” - strategy 2.4 “integrated attractivity and promotion of metropolitan tourists products”. The main aim of such a measure consists to exploit the potentiality that lays inside digitized cultural assets for tourism and cultural purposes, i.e., promotion, protection, accessibility et al. The CD-ETA presence inside such a tool nudge relevant stakeholder, policy makers and citizens to the deepening of the project and its outcomes; subsequentlyto the regional policy instrument in order to find financial support to implement the solution of interest and there, once again, the project best practices can be reached and exploited. Overall, it can be considered a synergic action to enhance the project effects and broaden the target basin, with indirect effects on the policy instrument in terms of projects generation.
The action/change clearly sprung from CD-ETA, in fact without the project there would not have been the trigger and the contents to implement it. The project allowed to involve the MCF, first of all thanks to the general topic of digitization and then by the many contents, mainly the best practices, but also policies around Europe et al., generated by the project itself.
The high involvement of the Strategic Plan teams from the very beginning of the project, thanks also to the management and technical role played by FRI within both operative environments (CD-ETA and Metropolitan City of Florence) and the interconnection with further planning tools, e.g., the three-yearaction plan of the National Technological Cluster Smart Community Tech, were also success factors to achieve the overall result.
The implementation of such action was achieved by means of a multi-step process, where a key role was played by the strategic tool "Metropolitan City of Florence Strategic Plan (PSM)" itself.
The just mentioned strategic tool represents a receptacle with a constant wide audience (citizens included), which helped and will help in keeping the attention high in respect to the CD-ETA outcomes, best practices and legacy.
The very first step of the pathway was the interaction with the teams involved in the PSM, so to bring to their attention the importance of the CD-ETA outcomes and the intent to develop the action along with the Metropolitan City of Florence itself. Then the project was included in the PSM as a future trigger for the implementation of its experiences and practices. The updated plan, with the just mentioned reference, was developed during 2018 and approved on December the 19th 2018 and it was finally published just right after.
The link to the Strategic Plan for the Metropolitan City of Florence: http://pianostrategico.cittametropolitana.fi.it/
