Different approaches can be experimented with to enhance the urban and environmental quality of manufacturing areas. In recent years, in Italy, some local governments produced guidelines and research projects to explore the possibility of recovering suburban industrial sites in which a clear lack of quality design produced identity loss and general decay. Planning and design criteria concerning these areas deal with diverse issues: urban morphology, energy-saving supply, waste management, sewage and water treatment, insertion of new services, and qualified public areas. All these criteria face fundamental items but are difficult to be managed at the same time within a single project because of the high cost of such a multi-purpose urban policy, especially when applied to small-budget areas such as small industrial ones.

Recent experiences made in some urban areas of the Emilia-Romagna region are trying to operate so as to enhance the design and the environmental quality of small and medium-size crafts areas, acting mostly on open space rehabilitation and management. This should prelude, according to these regional urban policies, to a wider strategy of deeper renewal, referred to a complete range of instruments in the ecologic redesign. Such perspectives are at the moment suffering the shortage of economic public and private resources and this fact caused the arrest of any public-private-partnership project, the premise of any further urban renewal enterprises.