Law 1150 replaced the old building plan for built-up areas with the piano regolatore generale covering the entire municipal territory, and added territorial coordination plans above it and detailed piani particolareggiati below. It introduced zoning, the building licence and expropriation for planning purposes, and made the PRG compulsory for municipalities on a ministerial list. Passed in the last year of the Fascist regime, it was applied almost entirely after 1945 and remains the backbone of Italian planning law. The two decisive amendments came later: the legge ponte of 1967, which tied building permission to plan compliance, and the 1968 decree fixing national planning standards.
It made the comune the planning authority and the PRG the instrument through which Italy's postwar building boom was licensed — or, in the many municipalities that had no approved plan for decades, not controlled at all. Its unresolved treatment of development rights and compensation for planning restrictions produced generations of constitutional litigation and the chronic abusivismo of the Italian periphery and coast.
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