The European Union is promoting and investing in large transportation infrastructure
plans and programmes to enhance transnational accessibility and territorial competitiveness.
However, the recent crisis has shed a new light on the planning and programming of these
infrastructures. Competition for scarce resources and more sensible public demands force
decision-makers to better argue and deliver decisions and projects. Italy provides an exemplary
case of poor planning and policy-making deriving from limited visions combined with only
tactical and reactive politics. For decades, public authorities and project promoters have fostered
a huge project of high-speed rail development, without appropriate consideration of territorial
conditions, community demands or downside scenarios, whilst benefit overestimation has long
hindered investments in other possible strategic infrastructures and policies. The current
recognition of the Baltic–Adriatic as essential among European corridors provides the occasion
to rebalance discrepancies and reframe plans in Italy. The proposed approach aims to reconsider
infrastructure planning as a ‘wicked problem’ implying not absolute, but more or less good
solutions depending on contextual and feasibility conditions and to promote visions based on
vertical and horizontal subsidiarity, where cities and regions should play a strategic role as key
stakeholders in the spatial macroscopic transformations.
