ITALY: London Architects Inspect 'Master Plan' For Florence

LONDON, Nov 24 (IPS) - Plans to transform the historic Italian city of Florence from its present traffic and tourist clogged nightmare into the dream city that grew to world fame in the Renaissance are presently on show in London.

The city that produced Dante, Giotto, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo is now looking for a new vision for the city's future in the 21st century.

But its problems are enormous -- 80,000 cars a day and seven million tourists a year converge on the historic city centre -- though so far efforts to turn things around have been marred by decades of post-war dispute between city centre traders, the tourist industry and political rows on the city council.

Now Alfredo Franchini, Florence's councillor for urban planning, has brought to London a new master plan, recently approved by the political authorities, produced by Marcello Vittorini.

His plans are currently on show at the Italian Institute in London's Belgrave Square.

Vittorini says he has tried to adopt the city planning lessons of the past that made Florence so distinctive while addressing the modern needs of the city by combining homes, workplaces and cultural and leisure activities -- and not seeking to divide the city into historic, business, leisure and residential zones.

As part of this plan many of the city's key services, city council buildings, libraries, sports facilities are to be more evenly spread throughout the city.

However the plan is not without its critics. Eva Buiatti, spokeswoman for the 'Lavori in Corso' (Work In Progress) action group on Florence town council, says the scheme does not go far enough to provide parks and open spaces.

In a letter to the London Financial Times newspaper Thursday, she claimed that some open areas initially slated for parkland development are now to be built over "in a town in which open and green spaces are as precious as historical monuments".

The problem for the city is in the numbers trying to get in daily. Florence's heart has a declining residential population of just 400,000 people, a figure expected to decline, while populations in the suburbs are rising.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service