NEW TENDENCIES OF ECONOMIC-GEOGRAPHIC EXPERIMENTATION: FROM ECONOMIC-FINANCIAL TOOLS TO SUSTAINABLE LOCAL TERRITORIAL DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

The experimentation in applying typical business techniques and methodologies to territory and its articulation is a topic that is gaining more and more importance in cultural and academic debates (Bencardino, Napolitano, 2003), but also in actual governmental action in territory, in view of the increasing weight that territorial development policies have assumed in economic and social growth processes at all administrative levels: from communal to provincial, regional to national. This experimentation was conceived with the goal of identifying, in a synthetic manner, the coherence between tools regarded as useful and to correctly apply those that have always been strictly business methodologies to the “product” territory. The experimentation in progress, not new in the international context but certainly in the national one, finds its justification partly from the increase in competition and partly from the raised awareness of the importance of satisfaction of various actors/clients of territory. Competition between territories and geographic areas into which they have been divided and managed (INU, 2003) is the triggering cause of an experimentation that sees in the dialogue and multidisciplinarity an unavoidable need for defining new territorial planning models that give value to geographic areas at varying degrees.