Town Planning Schemes online
The Italian source RAPu
Rete Archivi Piani urbanistici

Fabrizio Bottini

Master plan schemes are dispersed in many different places, often in a bad state of conservation, seldom catalogued. Researchers, professionals, students are compelled to study second-hand documents, scattered information, small pieces of the original whole. So everybody has to confront with the dispersal of planning knowledge, and this inevitably has a negative influence on daily planning practices.
In the first half of the Nineties, an experiment began, on the 'historical' Italian town planning schemes, that is to say those drawn in the national industrial era, starting from the first Planning connected Act (1865).
The program, started by Triennale di Milano and supported by some Universities, ranged from the cataloguing of planning, to document's reproduction and divulgation's, both computer and paper-based.

A research method has been put into operation and experimented on many Italian chief cities:
a) Historical study;
b) Cataloguing;
c) Gathering information about the proprietor Archive;
d) Drawing of a research report;
e) Document's reproduction.
This approach has proved a good standard, also according to public administrations responsible of Archives, who have supported the creation of a new series of books, named 'Preprints', where the research reports take a more popular shape.

A selection of the photo and computer-based reproductions is now available on the web (RAPu Rete Archivi Piani urbanistici), so to appreciate the standard of the whole program and the quality of the document reproductions, together with the scientific and cultural potential of these materials, and the need of their increase in value and divulgation.
The site will be updated with new information and reproductions as soon as the results of new researches will be available.