Accessibility and Spatial Conditions in Northern Italian Metropolitan Areas: Considerations for Governance After Ten Years of Metropolitan Cities

In a context of environmental and socio-economic challenges, metropolitan areas represent a fundamental territorial scale for addressing cohesion, competitiveness, and sustainability, key priorities in European territorial development. Accessibility to services is crucial, as it reflects the right to full citizenship, particularly in territories where attractive urban centres coexist with peripheral areas. Balancing these dynamics is a major challenge for metropolitan governance and planning, especially in Italy, where Metropolitan Cities (MCs) have been institutionalised for over a decade. This paper examines spatial structure, accessibility, and governance through a comparative analysis of three Italian MCs in the Po Valley macro-region, a polycentric system along the Mediterranean Corridor of the Trans-European Transport Network. Despite overall interconnections, the MCs display different settlement and accessibility patterns. The Metropolitan City of Turin is selected as a case study for its territorial diversity, metropolitan-mountainous character, misalignment between administrative and functional boundaries, and accessibility limitations. The research examines current planning instruments and governance-government arrangements of the case study in addressing these challenges. Findings, framed within the decadal review of Italian MCs, emphasise the need for greater coordination between plans, policies and programmes, combined with strengthened inter-municipal collaboration and territorial representation, to support a multi-level governance framework capable of coherent, effective, and balanced metropolitan development.