Antonio G. Calafati, UPM- Faculty of Economics "Giorgio Fià"
Department of Economics
, Ancona, Italy
Cities in nuce in Italy (assigned to theme
The territorial organisation of the economic process in Italy in recent decades has been profoundly marked by what may be called ‘territorial coalescence’: the formation of patterns of ‘thick’ territorial interdependence encompassing a certain number of contiguous cities/towns. The ‘local spatial/relational densities’ which have been the outcome of this process are referred to, in the Italian discourse on local development, as ‘local systems’. A ‘local system’ is a very general category: it may refer to a ‘metropolitan area’ – a common category – or to a ‘network of small towns/villages’ – a less common territorial configuration, but one that is of special importance in ‘remote’ Italian territories (Apennines, Alps). The emergence of these two quite different types of territorial structures are both the outcome of processes of territorial coalescence. Yet, as it is argued in the paper, very often, in Italy, territorial coalescence has given rise to territorial configurations which have the nature of ‘cities’. From one side there is the common phenomenon of medium-sized cities that by expanding and becoming more complex have incorporated a number of contiguous towns. This phenomenon has led to new ‘urban systems’ but not yet to a ri-configuration of the spatial articulation of the Italian political system. But there is a further very common territorial configuration generated by territorial coalescence, on which the paper focuses, which is equally important to understand the Italian trajectory of economic development but that has not received much attention in the literature: sets of contiguous towns that have merged into a single urban system, assuming by dimension and structure the nature of a ‘city’. In Italy there is nowadays a large number of urban system which have the feature of being composed by a number of contiguous towns which were autonomous units in the Fifties and that now are only part of the same urban system. These types of local systems are not institutional facts: they do not have a correspondent level of regulation – a feature that is constitutive of the concept of ‘city’. Yet, they are cities because they function as cities in all other ways. They are systems which have the dimension/scale of cities, the social structure of cities (variety, complexity, identity, etc.), the potential of cities (learning and innovation potential, international orientation, etc.). Their appearance has deeply changed the development potential of many Italian regions. By looking closely to the territorial structure of one of the Italian regions where the process of territorial coalescence has been more marked – namely, Marches (a region located in central Italy) – the paper discusses the spatial, social and economic organisation and potential development trajectories of these new cities. Finally, the paper discusses the implications of the inconsistency between the ‘space of self-organisation’ and the ‘space of political regulation’.
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