Oltre il Covid, politiche ecologiche territoriali per aree interne e dintorni. Uno sguardo in-between su territori marginali e fragili, verso nuovi progetti di coesione

In Italy, the management of Covid emergency has contributed to awaken debate on the relations between peripheral and marginal territories on the one hand, and denser and more dynamic urban situations hardly hit by the pandemic on the other. The risk of some speeches is that of an easy withdraw on an emergency and extraordinary approach, whereas the so-called internal areas take on the role of shelter for the urban and metropolitan populations that are most exposed to health warnings. However, the rekindling of the spotlight on the roles and opportunities for fragile areas invites to think about a possible recalibration of the target contexts for the next season of cohesion policies. After a short but fertile phase of implementation of programs and projects (the reference is to the Italian Strategy for Inner Areas – SNAI, but not only), a more careful evaluation of the achieved results, of their lights and shadows, must certainly be developed. The issues mentioned in the paper can perhaps help to carry out such a complex operation. A first aspect concerns the widening of the field of action beyond both the metropolitan areas and those that are most impoverished, in order to focus attention on the many intermediate territories marked by environmental concerns, infrastructural gaps, social and economic fragility, lack of services, institutional criticalities. Observing these territories from an in-between perspective – which distances itself both from the urban-centric and neo-colonialist visions of some pandemic discourses, and from those focused on the praise of the slowness and marginality of localist rhetoric – opens the way to a rethinking of cohesion policies as territorial ecological policies, and to a review of the place-based approach towards the construction of new and fair alliances between territories with different conditions of centrality and marginality.