LIBRI DI ANTONIO G. CALAFATI

Uno sguardo all’evoluzione strutturale recente delle città della Terza Italia, quella centrale, con lo scopo di identificare le strutture che determineranno le traiettorie di crescita e di sviluppo future. Obiettivo del testo è contribuire a definire un meta-modello per individuare le traiettorie potenziali di sviluppo delle città – e le politiche di regolazione – in una fase di profondo cambiamento dei fattori di competizione territoriale.

Macro-Regions, Local Systems and Cities: Conceptualisation of Territory in Italy since 1950 - (Paper first received, April 2009; in final form, July 2009) How to conceptualise the territory has been a controversial issue in Italy both because of the variety of the scientific research programmes seeking to explain territorial performances and because of the extent to which the territorial organisation of the economic process has changed in the past five decades. The paper primarily discusses how the Italian territory has been conceptualised since the 1950s, relating changing conceptualisations, on the one hand, to theoretical shifts and, on the other, to the need to capture the rapidly and profoundly changing territorial organisation of the Italian economy. The paper also argues that the introduction and use of the concept of ‘local system’ have raised two fundamental scientific questions which have still to be properly addressed - and are now prominent on the research agenda.

Keywords: territory, cities, local development, regional disparities, Italy

JEL Classification: R11, O18

The city as a progressive system: structural evolution and economic development. By moving from the theory of ‘progressive systems’ and assigning to the causal relationship ‘structure-performances’ a key role this paper outlines a methodological perspective to study the economic development of cities. The proposed perspective leads to shift the scientific focus of urban economics to the identification of the ‘structure’ and the analysis of the ‘structural evolution’ of cities. Moreover, being cities as any other complex system an ‘open system’, its structural evolution has to be evaluated with regard to its changing ‘environment’. To study the development trajectory of city means, therefore, to study the evolution of its structure, which is the emerging outcome of the interplay of a constellation of adjustment mechanisms, each with its own rationale, which have to be examined with a substantive rather than a formal approach.

Without full awareness of the practical implications and methodological difficulties, conservation policies have been given significant priority in Italy in the past decade. Considering the extraordinary cultural and ecological value of Italian landscapes, this role assigned to conservation policies is not unwarranted. Yet if conservation policies are to be effective, they must be given a conceptual basis appropriate to the nature of the disequilibria with which they are intended to cope. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for conservation policies in protected territories where both cultural capital and natural capital are subject to conservation - as is the case of most national (and regional) natural parks in Italy. It argues that in protected territories where human landscapes are important part of local capital, conservation policies ought to be conceptualised as development policies. Constraining property rights on local resources - which is the conventional conception of conservation policies - should be set in the context of a more broadly encompassing approach in which the policy domain of conservation policies is the development trajectories of the local systems concerned.