Rule of law e città: l’atipicità dei provvedimenti amministrativi per l’innovazione

Currently, there is an inadequacy of the public instrument and a weakened public direction which act as a factual element of the crisis of the rule of law. The paper will consider, in particular, the administrative urban planning function, part of the broader italian constitutional diction “territorial government”, which is reserved to the shared competence of State and the Regions. Cities are today drivers of digital, economic and social innovation and vehicles of integration. This role acquired by urban reality finds obstacles and contradictions in the bureaucratic and administrative tools and procedures that characterise city planning. More and more often, urban administrative law has to regulate bottom-up phenomena without referring to an excessive use of instruments, in violation of the principle of efficiency. In this sense, the aim of the paper is to demonstrate how the role of the rule of law (ROL) in the administrative function of governing the territory is still fully central today: although the essence of the ROL is expressed in a more immediately comprehensible way in the statement of the general principles of a legal system (such as impartiality or non-discrimination), which become the interpretative paradigm of any legal provision, on the contrary, some examples of the application of the ROL as a tool of efficiency should be considered. The so-called urban planning law of “fourth generation” is entering in a real phase of experimentation, using, however, atypical forms and making full use of the wide range of possibilities that the P.A. has always had at its disposal: the capacity of common law (art. 1, c. 1bis, law. no. 241/1990).