Urban Planning Doesn’t Exist: An Essay on Territorial Governance (English Edition)

Roberto Deriu has been repeating it for years, and every time he meets with the same half smile. It is not a provocation: it is a statement of fact. Urban planning does not exist as an autonomous science, because every plan merely gives form to decisions taken elsewhere — in the economy, in demography, in politics. It does not exist as an effective power, because plans always come after and, without consent, remain paper. Only one thing exists: bargaining. What exists is planning politics — that is, negotiation — not urban planning.

From this blunt thesis begins a journey across the centuries: the grid of the Greeks, when society stood still and the design could coincide with the city; the corrective utopia and the total plan of the twentieth century; the revolt of the sidewalk and the contemporary dissolution of the discipline. Down to the Italian laws, which prove by way of legislation — one derogation after another, one agreement after another — what history recounts. An appendix examines the case the author knows from the inside: Sardinia, the island whose special statute has made planning law an endemic species of its own.

In the end there remains what was there at the beginning, finally recognized: the politics that negotiates. Not a surrender, but the way a community decides for itself when no one can prevail alone. And in the governance of territory no one can prevail alone, ever.

An essay for administrators, mayors, planners curious or sceptical, students, and readers of civic and political nonfiction. With an annotated bibliography and an index of names.

Roberto Deriu is a politician, journalist and writer. His books include La democrazia rapita (1998), Scacco matto (2011), La pantera di Bultei (2018), Vincere in politica con la trattativa (2024), and Il principe della Repubblica (2026).

There’s also an Italian version; you can find it here!