Welfare and territorial specialization: a position for the debate

Putting citizens in the centre of the planning processes was remarked due to the economic crisis, the 'place­based' approach promoted by EU New Cohesion Policy, the inclusiveness of local development policies, the participation processes and the efforts in pursuing bottom­up processes. As the practices of the territorial government consider local communities as priorities the satisfaction of citizens’ basic needs appears to be a precondition for the growth of local territorial systems. We would be able to define a standards level of such basic need, peculiar in a balanced view of the marginal areas in Europe. In such view we propose to discuss the issue of refining approaches to the evaluation and design of effective local systems based on sustainable levels in quality of life. We prefer to discuss a concept of "territorial welfare" rather than "urban welfare", because we are interested in analysing the components that contribute to define an adequate living standards ­ quality of life ­ in "low­density" areas. We consider those areas where the supply of equipments and spaces for collective interest, essential public services (education, health, etc.), leisure and cultural opportunities should be considered under the assessment of people effective opportunity to use them. In low density areas such opportunity is mainly represented by measure of individual and collective accessibility to services that is in competition with economic sustainability and requires to search for an optimal compromise. Faced with the renewed attention to the city as an economic engine, we propose the following research question: what is the ‘fuel’ of such city?. Starting from J. Jacobs (1986) we identify the city as the place where the surplus of agricultural production and than the industrial production generate the proliferation of service supply. We remark our focus on rural areas, seen as components of a poly­centric model in which local specializations ­ often smoothly marked by traditional geography ­ can play a driver role in the design of development strategies to be implemented within the framework of the New Cohesion Policy 2014 ­2020 instruments. The debate aims to collect new perspectives for the research applying analytic tools, programs and projects in emblematic contexts in order to compare approaches and methodologies and to refine tools and analysis procedures driving the decision process. Conclusions and operative contributions regards improvement of programming practices for structural and strategic planning, intended as ‘ex­ante conditionality’ for the implementation of New European Cohesion Policy.