Speaker
Description
Introduction
Logistics has become one of the main forces reshaping peripheral territories in Italy, where the sector accounts for over 8% of GDP and about 1.4 million jobs. For planning, logistics nodes are a typical wicked problem. Investments are long-lived and land-consuming; flows and tenants change with global supply-chain strategies; funding arrives in windows that do not match planning cycles; and responsibilities are spread across European, national, regional, metropolitan and municipal levels. Planning is asked to steer a process whose key decisions are often taken elsewhere.
Our earlier work on Pomezia–Santa Palomba, on the southern fringe of the Rome metropolitan area, showed that territorial capital operates primarily as an attraction factor rather than a platform for negotiation. Land availability, connectivity, and limited regulatory leverage make the area desirable to logistics and, at the same time, embed vulnerability to extractive dynamics (Compagnucci, Myshko and Perrot, 2026). That work identified institutional fragmentation as the mediating condition, but it left two planning questions open: how this fragmentation generates uncertainty for planners, authorities and residents, and what planning can do with that uncertainty beyond diagnosing it.
This paper argues that uncertainty in logistics-led development is not only an external condition to be forecast. It is partly produced by planning arrangements themselves, through unadopted plans, instruments without binding force and overlapping perimeters, and it is distributed unevenly. Authorities and operators manage it through options and exit, while residents absorb it in daily life. The argument first locates where uncertainty emerges and whose experience enters planning; it then shows how markets, rules, and local decisions turn it into uneven affordability and access. Finally, this work considers which responses are feasible and legitimate and who remains exposed through a typology of planning uncertainties linked to territorial capital.
Conceptual framework
Strategic and adaptive approaches hold that uncertainty cannot be eliminated but can be navigated by being selective, keeping options open and linking decisions to learning (Albrechts, 2004; Rauws, 2017), while relational and collaborative approaches stress the arenas in which diverse knowledge is mobilised (Healey, 2007; Innes and Booher, 2010). Uncertainty opens space for experimentation, but only where institutions can hold options open, connect experiments to binding decisions and distribute risks legitimately.
Logistics-led development gives this debate a concrete object. Logistics is a territorial phenomenon that follows a locational logic of land, accessibility and permissive regulation, and reorganises places once it is embedded (Hesse, 2008; Coe, 2020; Charters-Gabanek et al., 2024). Territorial capital, understood as the tangible and intangible assets that shape a place's capacity to convert external pressures into endogenous development (Camagni and Capello, 2013), was used in our earlier work through five components: labour, human capital, land use, institutional capacity and symbolic capital. Here it serves as a map of where uncertainty lands.
What happens to that uncertainty depends on bargaining and power. Where governance is weak, the capacity to discipline capital flows and negotiate territorial returns is reduced (Peck and Theodore, 2010), and large operators confront small municipalities that compete rather than coordinate (Raimbault, 2022; Nefs and Daamen, 2023; Brenner, 2004). Power also shapes which knowledge counts in planning (Flyvbjerg, 1998), and territorial stigma lowers the threshold for displacing costs onto places already marked as marginal (Wacquant, 2007; Baumann and Yacobi, 2022; de Souza, 2021).
These strands come together in a single lens that distinguishes four planning uncertainties cutting across the territorial capital components. Informational uncertainty concerns what will be built, by whom and with which employment practices; procedural-institutional uncertainty concerns which plan, instrument or authority is decisive; distributive uncertainty concerns who bears costs and who receives returns; and temporal uncertainty concerns funding windows, unadopted plans and successive projects whose cumulative effect is unknown. These broadly correspond to uncertainty about the environment, decision areas and values in the strategic choice tradition. Institutional capacity is the hinge: where it is strong, uncertainty can be navigated and sometimes used to experiment. But where it is weak and fragmented, uncertainty is displaced downwards to the actors with the least leverage. Recognition then decides whose uncertainty counts as a planning problem.
Methodology
The paper builds on the case-study design of our earlier work and adds a planning-oriented analytical step. The empirical base is the Local Labour System of Pomezia (13 municipalities) plus the adjacent urban zone of Santa Palomba, which belongs to Rome but is functionally embedded in the local system through shared rail and freight infrastructure on the TEN-T network. Evidence combines descriptive statistics on employment, income, education, soil consumption, accessibility and institutional quality, with qualitative interviewing. The qualitative evidence consists of 17 semi-structured interviews between November 2024 and October 2025 with logistics managers, real-estate actors, a corridor representative and sectoral and local experts; two fieldwork visits with company tours; and documentary evidence on corporate communication and planning instruments.
The analytical extension proceeds in three connected steps. Planning instruments at European, national, regional, metropolitan and municipal levels are first classified by scale, object, status and binding force, to identify where decisions are actually taken.
The limits of the research design include limitations of a single case, aggregate indicators, and fewer interviews with residents and civic associations than with logistics operators. Everyday experience is therefore reconstructed through local experts, observation and indicators rather than through resident surveys.
Results and discussion
Uncertainty emerges in the case first as a problem of information and of competence. The hub's architecture, based on leasing, third-party logistics and multi-tier subcontracting, creates long chains of responsibility. The largest property developer interviewed explained that tenants are selected on credit assessments and that employment and sustainability practices are not monitored once space is leased, so that no actor has full visibility over who works in the hub and under what conditions. Temporary-agency employment rose from below 2% in 2016 to 5.3% in 2022, consistent with accounts of subcontracting and turnover. At the same time, the planning architecture leaves the decisive authority unclear. The 2022 ScanMed workplan has no local regulatory force, the national General Transport and Logistics Plan has been under revision since 2022, the metropolitan freight plan contains no binding land-use or inter-municipal provisions, and the Simplified Logistics Zone (ZLS), covering 49 municipalities, concerns administrative simplification and firm-level incentives. Santa Palomba is planned by Rome while belonging functionally to the Pomezia system. A local expert described the result as "pieces not matching into a puzzle", and corridor and sector representatives reported limited awareness of the governance architecture.
These institutional gaps translate into uncertainty about who bears the costs and about what comes next. Soil consumption rose from 17.3% to 18.7% in the local system (Pomezia: 23.8% to 26.6%), faster than in the metropolitan city, and congestion and road deterioration are borne by communities and non-logistics activities. Velletri, Anzio, Genzano, Lanuvio and Nettuno absorb externalities without hosting the hub and fall outside the ZLS, while compensation elsewhere consists of amenities such as a car park, landscaping and tree planting, framed around the operator's own environmental performance. PNRR funds flow through sectoral instruments tied to corridor competitiveness, and a 600,000-tonne waste-to-energy plant and housing for about 1,000 families, roughly one kilometre away, are planned in Santa Palomba, which already hosts the Roncigliano landfill. Residents cannot anticipate what will be added next or on what terms.
The experiences that are most visible in planning are those of investors, operators and corridor competitiveness, while those of residents, workers in subcontracted tiers and neighbouring municipalities are overlooked. Santa Palomba shows this most sharply: its population has tripled since 2001, foreign residents reached 18.5% in 2018, the NEET rate was 17.9% in 2011, it is the only one of Rome's 155 urban zones without a cultural venue, and a local expert reported that the Borgo Sorano public-housing complex still relies on wells. Third-sector representatives report limited consultation in siting and expansion decisions, so that everyday exposure rarely enters appraisal.
Markets, rules and local decisions turn this uncertainty into uneven affordability and access, and the pattern depends on where local institutions hold leverage. Housing costs were not measured, so affordability is read here through land and property pressure, income and access to services. Land availability is the primary location criterion and prices per square metre increasingly shape the sector's property structure. Local authorities have comparatively strong leverage at this point, through land allocation, construction standards, infrastructure provision and maintenance, yet without brownfield-first rules or cumulative-impact assessment, markets favour greenfield conversion and the community carries the costs. Once space is leased, by contrast, authorities can do little to influence recruitment or working conditions. Average income per taxpayer stays at about three-quarters of the metropolitan level (78.1% in 2007 and 77.2% in 2023), the high-income tail shrinks locally (from 2.67% to 2.09% of taxpayers) while it expands in the metropolitan city (from 6.10% to 8.44%), tertiary attainment is 10.4% against 17.9%, and managerial functions are filled from elsewhere, often Rome. Road conditions, pedestrian safety and water connections depend on municipal decisions with limited budgets, and improvements follow the terminal's development rather than residents' needs. Sustainability is meanwhile communicated through certifications and self-sufficiency within each facility, mostly to financial audiences, and experts note that "only places with better images attract better players", which can justify unfavourable treatment.
Institutional capacity explains why leverage is used unevenly. The Municipal Administration Quality Index places the system at or below the distribution of logistics-hosting systems and below the national benchmark, especially in fiscal performance. Low capacity and narrow fiscal space allow operators to trade permitting speed against scrutiny, and interviewees reported a preference for well-connected developers in dealings with local authorities, which may widen outsourced activity while reducing authorities' regulatory reach.
The responses that appear feasible and legitimate start from the leverage local institutions already have, and are offered as analytical proposals grounded in the case, to be tested with practitioners. The first is to make uncertainty visible, by attaching monitoring conditions on employment and sustainability to land conversion and building permits and by applying cumulative-impact assessment at the functional scale, so that congestion and land take across municipal borders enter appraisal. The second is to bind decisions, turning voluntary amenities into negotiated compensation funds, impact thresholds, and brownfield-first rules, at the point where developers need public decisions. The third is to coordinate without adding layers, extending the metropolitan freight plan and the ZLS with inter-municipal revenue sharing and equity goals and using existing arenas such as the regional Stati Generali della Logistica rather than creating a new body that could deepen fragmentation. The fourth is to recognise residents' knowledge through consultation routines in which everyday exposure counts as evidence. These instruments could be trialled in a bounded perimeter, for instance by extending ZLS arrangements to municipalities that bear externalities, with monitoring and scheduled review. Legitimacy depends on who carries the risk of experimentation: trials that place further burdens on already stigmatised places such as Santa Palomba, without consent or visible return, would reproduce the sacrifice-zone logic. Operators, developers and corridor actors benefit from simplified procedures and low-cost land, whereas residents of peripheral zones, workers in subcontracted tiers and neighbouring municipalities remain exposed, and when uncertainty persists it tends to be normalised and deferred.
Conclusion
The case reframes institutional fragmentation as a source of planning uncertainty, a condition that authorities also face because they lack information on tenants and employment, binding plans and a clear allocation of competences. Second, it shows that uncertainty is distributed by leverage: institutions hold it at the point of land and property decisions and lose it after leasing, which suggests that the navigation of uncertainty should be designed around the decision points where planning still has a hold. Third, the case demonstrates that uncertainty opens space for experimentation only where institutions have the capacity to bind decisions, learn from trials, and distribute risks fairly. In weak institutional settings, it is more often displaced to residents than converted into opportunity.
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