A return to life in small towns and outlying areas could offer a strategic opportunity for Italian post-pandemic economic recovery. Italy’s environmental and cultural heritage can become pivotal elements in the framework of long-term policies conceived in continuity with some ideas previously promoted at both national and local levels, with the aim of regulating the equilibrium between the economic development of cities, small towns and remote areas. Local communities can play an important role in generating growth and stimulating innovation by promoting projects within the broader scope of national recovery policies oriented at developing cities, rural areas and the tourism industry.
More generally, the issue is to close the gap between wealth and poverty that already exists globally due to the concentration of resources, energies and economies in some areas and not others.
Many participants wondered about the effects of digital connection, which calls for the dissociation of actions from physical presence in a place that has predominated during the pandemic emergency, and whether all this will be capable of inverting the global urban migration trend of recent decades. Alternatively, national investments will be needed to foster a more balanced development of outlying areas with a view to reducing the divide between depressed, under-developed areas and wealthy, over-populated ones by steering the construction of high quality infrastructure and hubs to locations outside urban areas.
Some observers felt that “smart land” would be a more effective label than “smart working”. No matter where one goes in the world, it is hard to find an example of a land as “smart” as Europe, and as Italy in particular. Indeed, Europe is a “continuous city”, an unbroken “urban sprawl”, so much so that almost no given location is more than an hour’s distance from some urban center. The antithesis to cities and countryside, both “fertile” anthropized organisms, is the desert, which is non-existent in Europe.
The attraction of country towns is something that the pandemic has moved back to the center of the public debate, especially in terms of the need to resort to “smart working” that, in turn, has rekindled interest in what is being called “south working”: a movement involving small towns in a sort of digital nomadism for the pleasure of living in extra-urban settings not far from major cities.
Reviving the countryside means intervening systemically at the level of culture, organization, infrastructure and adaptation of physical spaces but, even more significantly, political and economic efforts at rebooting society’s well-being.
We have to imagine a world that could well be redesigned thanks to the Next Generation funds. The concept of Smart Land effectively encapsulates a concept that does not pit the city against the countryside but efficiently integrates the potential and quality of both.