Urban growth, economic structures and demographic dynamics: exploring the spatial mismatch between planned and actual land-use in a Mediterranean city

Recent urbanization led to a more evident distinction in historical inner cities, consolidated urban periphery and peri-urban areas. The resulting metropolitan structures are moulded by social, economic, cultural and political factors, fuelling unregulated–and often dispersed–urban expansion. In this context, spatial planning was increasingly asked to regulate complex processes of metropolitan development. Under the hypothesis that discontinuous urban expansion was associated with planning deregulation or poorly effective zoning procedures, the present study introduces an operational approach aimed at comparing actual and planned land-use at the metropolitan scale in the Large Urban Zone (LUZ) of Rome, Italy. Settlements developed on land with less stringent building constraints have resulted in the discontinuous urban expansion. Because of increased house demand and high pressure for services and infrastructures, discontinuous urbanization in Rome has frequently involved out-of-plan land–with partial regulatory constraints or with mixed/ambiguous land destination–in areas with growing population. Going beyond a descriptive analysis of urban morphologies, empirical exercises comparing actual and planned land-use provide basic information to design developmental policies containing discontinuous urbanization.