Gestione della risorsa suolo e politiche pubbliche: modelli a confronto

Land (and land use) management policies are a a key testbed for rethinking the boundaries of public law, public space and public institutions both at national and international level. Ever since land has played a truly central role within juridical experience and legal theory: key factor in National States’ history, in the evolution of legal and administrative systems, source of/for life, basis – and limit - of private property, field of law and justice. Starting from normatism approach, legal theory tried to escape from physicality, from land boundaries and localizations, moving towards an ideal place defined by norms. Some of these processes deeply affect land management policies: a new variable geometry for some institutional competences (i.e. land and urban planning); the uncoupling of property from property rights (so that property rights are displaced: i.e. building rights transfer); the creation of new markets in which building rights are purchased. Entering the abstract dimension of economic markets, even goods (in this case, common goods) discover a complex, dynamic, relational space. Far from being mere items, preexisting to law and to the right of property, they become thinkable in terms of products of laws and negotiation processes: such are multi-property, derivatives and administrative decisions too. Approaching to land/soil management policies, all these transformations can not be left aside. Land good asks for the same unitarity once being affirmed but for the sea. Therefore, the unitarity in question is of a new kind: plural, dynamic, relational, hardly concealable with both physical and legal boundaries (i.e., cathegories, lists of goods, competences). Soil compaction, erosion, pollution, sealing, acidification spill out of spatial and legal boundaries; the same is true for the main ecosystem functions provided by soil: food production; renewable materials’ production (i.e. timber); both below and above-ground biodiversity; filtering and moderating the flow of water to aquifers; removing contaminants and reducing the frequency and risk of flooding and drought; regulation of microclimate in compact urban environments, aesthetic functions through the landscape, recycling of organic wastes and products. Even human activities and functionings requiring land taking may have a transboundary or supernational / global (not meaning international) impact. The selection of environmental services and the management of soil uses (kind of use, limits, conditions…) depend on phenomena that can not be managed by the State nor at an international level, all implying new land take and at the same time the solution of global environmental challenges: population growth, migration and urban processes, nutrition, energy safety, petition for essential goods, sustainable development. Land (and land use) management challenges the legal theory and the not spatial (public) law, looking for new boundaries for the land and its nomos. The paper aims to discuss some theoric-normative scenarios, starting from the analysis of soil management approaches in place in UE, Ue member States and Extra UE Countries. Apart from similarities and differences among legal systems, the hard and problematic task is the key role played by urban planning decisions and planning authorities.