No need for implementation plans for skyscrapers. Thus the Lombardy Regional Administrative Court refutes the Public Prosecutor's Office
Municipalities can thus approve projects using ordinary permits
by Andrea Di Leo and Giuseppe Latour
2' min read
Key points
2' min read
implementation plans are not always obligatory. Municipalities can approve projects, such as the infamous skyscrapers from the investigations of recent months in Milan, without using these urban planning instruments, but simply by resorting to ordinary permits, if certain conditions are met.
The Lombardy Regional Administrative Court (TAR), with sentence 2747/2025, burst onto the news these days, contradicting one of the principles from which the Milan Public Prosecutor's Office moved, moreover analysing precisely the case of one of the construction sites at the centre of the investigations (Urban jungle in Via Razza, 5). And even if administrative justice does not have a direct influence on criminal justice, the decision gives the measure of how complex and subject to interpretation this matter is today.
Technically, we are talking about the applicability or otherwise, in the case of the construction of buildings higher than 25 metres, of the obligation of the implementation plan, provided for by the 1942 town planning law: this is an instrument whose definition can take up to years. The Municipality of Milan, in all its latest projects, has taken the path of simplification, through the use, contested by the Public Prosecutor's Office in the first line of enquiry, of the simple Scia alternative to the building permit.
The orientation of the Tar
.The Tar's decision stems from an appeal by a condominium against the building permits that had given the go-ahead for the construction of the building. Among the (numerous) objections, reported in the ruling, was the obligation to have an implementation plan for buildings taller than 25 metres.
The Regional Administrative Court, setting a very significant precedent for the Municipality of Milan, rejected these observations, recalling the jurisprudential orientation according to which the obligation of plans is excluded "in the presence of an area that is already completely urbanised, when the factual situation shows a complete building up of the area, such as to make it incompatible with an implementation plan". The area affected by the project (close to Milan's Central Station) already has its own urban conformation and, therefore, a plan is not necessary for such an intervention.
