Citizen Engagement for Sustainable Development of Port Cities: The Public Debate About Development Projects of Livorno Port

Abstract

The need to apply the paradigm of sustainable development appears clearly relevant in the port cities to heal the potential and real conflict between the port area and urban area and enhance the innovative potential of these margin areas.

The paper analyzes the process of public debate as a policy tool to raise awareness of the port development projects to the portual, local and territorial communities and to improve the sustainability performance of the urban system. The paper describes the first case of regional public debate organized to the meaning of the Tuscan regional law on participation, held in Livorno in 2016.

The aim of the paper is to describe multiple lessons that can be learned by the first experience of regional public debate in Tuscany, both in relation with French experiences of debat public, both to renforce the future use of public debate tool at a national scale in Italy.

Although not all the frictions are solved, the public debate tool allows improving the environmental sustainability of the projects, increasing and disseminating information on future projects, making monitoring of design and construction more transparent. In essence, this first experience described confirmed that the public debate tool could bring citizens nearest to institutions by increasing social cohesion of the communities involved.