Municipal plans

If you are weighing up a purchase, the practical page is this one: what can be built on a plot. Here you will find where the data comes from and how we use it.

What we use

The mosaics of municipal plans that Regions and Provinces publish as open data: they gather the plan zones of every municipality as municipalities approve plans and amendments. The report reads them live from the publisher's service, so it is as up to date as the source.

In the other regions the section is not there: we checked region by region and they do not publish an open, up-to-date mosaic of their municipalities' plans (the Province of Trento has one, but it cannot be reached from outside).

How we use it

The report looks at the parcel (or the address point if there is no parcel) and says, with the share of the parcel:

• what the area is for the plan: already built-up area and its designated use (residential, industrial, offices...), zone A, B, C, D, E or F, transformation area, regeneration area, area for public facilities, agricultural area, private green area;
• the zone as the municipal plan names it (in Turin its code and name, to find it in the rules);
• whether it is in the historic centre, in an area of landscape value or under a constraint in the plan (in Bolzano for instance listed monuments or protected ensembles);
• in Lombardy also landscape sensitivity, from 1 to 5, the geological feasibility from the municipal study, from 1 to 4, and the buffer zones of roads, railways, cemeteries, sewage plants, wells, military easements and airports;
• the date of the plan (or of the council resolution, or of when the data was sent to the Region) and links to the municipal sheets or rules.

The rating is informative, and becomes "worth considering" only for what changes what can be done on the parcel: an area for planned public facilities (which usually means the municipality can expropriate it) or for public facilities where the mosaic does not say whether they already exist, class 4 geological feasibility, the buffer zones of cemeteries, sewage plants, wells and military easements. In those cases the buying guide adds the questions to ask the municipality or the surveyor.

Limits

• It is a summary: the precise rules (heights, volumes, distances, uses allowed) are in the rules of the municipal plan, which the mosaics do not contain.
• The binding document is the planning use certificate (certificato di destinazione urbanistica), required to sell land and worth requesting for a home too if you want to extend it or change its use.
• The edge of a plan area and that of the cadastral parcel never match perfectly: an area covering less than 2% of the parcel is not counted.
• Many plans leave roads and squares unzoned: an address that falls on the road may have no zone, and the section says so.
• If the source's service does not respond while the report is being prepared, the section says so and is completed by updating the report.

Official pages: Lombardy Region Geoportal, Veneto planning WebGIS, South Tyrol open data, Metropolitan City of Turin PRGC mosaic. See also Landscape, wildfires and noise.