Both obvious and hiddent ties exist that lead to the presence of electric power stations in any one area, also determining their location. Rules and standards exist that, explicit or not, form an integral part of the laws and customs of that area and which affect all decision-making parties in that area in the actions that they decide upon.

Planning permissions for a territory rely on a set of rules and established practices, and constitute an essential tool for settling the conflicts that inevitably arise between the area’s legal and administrative order and its various political, economic, technical and scientific bodies. Electrical power stations are one obvious example of this.

IN DEPTH

POWER PLANTS AND TERRITORY

‘Territory’ is a Latin word. The master ( dominus ) of the house (domus), exerts his rule (dominium) over a piece of land (terra) marked out by boundaries and subject to his jurisdiction. In t his way a piece of ‘land’ became territorium, or ‘territory’, a place circumscribed by limits, subject to governance that is not anarchic but either based on a single enforced rule or regulated by some form of law.

There are both clear and invisible ties between the very fact of the distribution of natural resources and political and economic decisions, leading to the presence of electric power stations on the territory, and determining their location, level of technology and rules of management. These powerful ties are developed in continuous interaction with the logic of the boundaries and related to its legal dimension that in the course of history has transformed land and space into a ‘territory’.


TERRITORY AND PLANNING

Thus, as the years have gone by, the question arose how to balance the inevitable conflict between institutional forms of positive law, rooted in territories delimited by borders, and the flows outside the frontiers generated by technical and economic forces and financial institutions, and regulated by mainly private agreements and treaties. Territorial planning is one of the potentially most effective tools produced by the modern world. Its aim is to reach a reasonable balance and to guarantee the standard of living in an area, without giving up the main high-tech and market economy advantages.

The idea of territorial planning is an effective tool that, once also activated at local relations network level, can be used to generate alliances between parities that formerly refused all communication between them, and to settle the inevitable conflicts both between legal prescriptive systems governing a territory’s regulation on different scales and the diverging interests of social, political, economic, financial, technical and scientific parties who plan and bring about their projects in one or more areas.


PLANNING AND TOURISM

These territorial transformations have led to an understanding that the most advanced studies in touristic field and recent project realisations have by now achieved a steady place that assuring sustainable growth of the tourism phenomenon and its integration into dynamics of intelligent territorial planning.


‘THE ENERGY WAY” WEBSITE’S AIM

Both the National Law 135/2001 and Lombardy’s regional law 8/2004 have set up the Local Tourist Systems aimed at integrating these resources into territorial and comunication networks.

The new approach allows local bodies to be connected to a unitary model of the tourist offer, centered on the city, that can accommodate city-dwellers and any visitors such as tourists. The realisation of this approach requires qualified professional people: intellectuals who are able to develop opportunities made possible by new laws, and professional people, either self-employed or working for public administrations and for welcoming facilities such as hotels, incoming travel agencies and tour operators, restaurants, transport services, bodies promoting regional products, and so on.

It is also important to draw attention to the interdependence of tourism with other local administrations; this is especially true of the links between cultural and ecological assets and local systems of economic production. The renewal of the local tourist offer has been mostly ‘bottom-up’, coming through an an interaction between experts of all kinds and the interested tour operators, using communication methods that disseminate information, thereby enabling a wider collaboration between local stakeholders. Examples include study and advanced research centres such as the course on Sciences of Tourism and Local Communities run by the Milan Bicocca University of Studies. This university has also offered to collaborate in the project “The Energy Way”, which now forms a cultural and scientific arena for the political players and technical experts who are busy setting up new tenders for marketing territorial tourism.