The country has growing portions of its territory in a state of need that seem more like real “reclusive territories”.
I am referring to entire municipalities with no economic activity worthy of the name, with a completely aged population and, above all, without a horizon of hope for the near or distant future.
We are in the fifth programming exercise of the European Structural Funds and nobody seems to be wondering why regional and territorial asymmetries have worsened in almost thirty years of local, rural and regional investment.
Every time “a period of adjustment” occurs, we return, for reasons of deficit or public debt, to a devaluation of the territory's assets and a strong depreciation of the investments made in the meantime.
This will be our main problem, now and in the future, that is, the destruction of the productive fabric whenever there is a period of adjustment.
Indeed, there will be no territorial development policy, with its usual discontinuities, that will resist the stop-and-go macroeconomic adjustment policy. Above all, I am thinking of that immense sea that is the “great country of the interior”, of these remote rural home councils that grow every day, starved of hope and enterprising people.
Gone are the promises of the 1st rurality, now it is a question of preparing the territorial intelligence of the 2nd rurality towards what I designate as the “network territories of the 2nd rurality”.
I present below a series of examples, which are just as many social configurations of network territories, a kind of "interior architecture" of a region, which can and should serve to form, little by little, a relatively critical reading grid. a necessary territorial development strategy.
For this, we need a major effort in territorial planning, programming, planning and implementation, now that there is so much talk about Intermunicipal Communities (CIM), and to put into practice a general philosophy of development contracts for network territories under construction, it is certain that territorial development will always be conditioned by the quality of the regional policy pursued and, even more, by the superior quality of the macroeconomic policy pursued within the European framework.
Given the low density of the interior territories, we are obliged to create economies of agglomeration and visitation networks, through what I call the creation of a “territorial collective intelligence”.
Network territories and actor-network are a very interesting methodology for this purpose (Covas, 2014). I present below an indicative list of potential network territories that can be approached for this purpose.
The inland network territories
1) An urban area or a network of cities, in articulation with producer and consumer clubs, a local development association and an agrarian college, for example, propose to design a local food system (SAL), based on the peri-urban agriculture and through a network of short circuits, with a view to organizing local trade in local food products.
At the same time, the partnership takes the opportunity to requalify the system of green spaces and corridors, using, for example, social gardens, water lines and multifunctional woods, with a view to articulating urban areas, rural areas and natural areas ;
2) A natural park comprising one or more landscape units, together with the park's producers club or the park's environmental association, plus the set of villages that make up the park, the region's local development association and the polytechnic school or the nearest university propose to modernize the park's local production system (SPL), creating a specific agroecology, a geographical indication of provenance (IGP) and a new strategy for visiting the park through marketing. more daring and imaginative territorial; we thus moved from the local “system of products” to the “products of the local productive system”;
3) A tourist development, a fishing community, a protected landscape area, a town hall, a local development association and a higher school propose to upgrade several tourist developments and an adjacent beach and create a market niche and a new space quality public for accessible, therapeutic and recreational tourism (health and well-being tourism), based, for example, on a small agglomeration of therapeutic, creative and cultural activities created for this purpose;
4) A group of riverside villages, in the area of influence of a lake, a reservoir, a dam or watershed, tour operators, associations and/or clubs of agroforestry producers, water resources administrations, a higher school propose to launch a creative and integrated agro-tourism and rural tourism strategy that includes the participation and experience of visitors in traditional agro-rural practices;
5) A group of villages specialized in a particular sector or product, the wine-growing villages of the Alto Douro, for example, a World Heritage Site, associates with tourist enterprises, associations or clubs of producers, a higher school, the more representative cultural associations, with a view to designing a joint strategy for visiting and valuing the material and immaterial heritage of that sub-region;
6) A group of agricultural cooperatives or farmers associations, a food distribution company or supermarket chain, an association of municipalities in the same area, an agrarian college or university, join together with a view to designing a joint strategy for agroecological modernization and commercial for a sub-region that was the object of large public investments and that urgently needs to be relaunched (Alqueva and Cova da Beira, for example);
7) One or more Forest Intervention Zones (ZIF), associations or clubs of forest producers, game reserves, protected landscape areas and special protection zones, agroforestry companies, a college, the human communities involved associate to establish an agro-forestry (SAF) or agro-forestry system, with a view to creating an integrated intervention strategy that ranges from the prevention and recovery of burned areas to the construction of agro-forestry-pastoral systems with their full basket of products of the forest;
8) A research center in the area of biodiversity, functional ecology and ecosystem rehabilitation, a park or nature reserve, an agro-forestry association, rural tourism companies, companies in the area of thermalism, propose to create a program action-research, with a view to preserving biodiversity and local endemisms, improving the supply of relevant ecosystem services and the commercial enhancement of these biodiverse assets, through the launch of tourist, cultural and scientific services;
9) A grouping of local development associations, in association with a university or polytechnic school, a professional agricultural school, a park or nature reserve and a group of mountain villages, nature and village tourism operators, propose to launch a mountain village community development program;
10) A business group in the area of thermal and mineral waters, a protected landscape area, an environmental or local development association, a polytechnic college, the cooperative or local association of producers, the villages and towns in the area of influence of the project, propose to create a kind of "sanctuary, amenity or exemplary ecosystem", which is a place for learning and visiting good agroecological practices where you can observe and learn: the diversity of agriculture as art, technique and aesthetics of the rural landscape , landscape ecology and habitat rehabilitation, conservation economics, low carbon and renewable energy, functional architecture associated with bioconstruction and bioclimatization, etc.;
11) In the field of social action, through the configuration of an associative, community and/or voluntary project, of socio-community itinerancy, which brings together, for example, unions, Private Institutions of Social Solidarity (IPSS), the Employment Institute and Professional Training (IEFP) and an association or group of long-term unemployed that has been set up for this purpose within the scope of each employment centre;
12) In the field of provision of environmental and ecosystem services, through the design of a territorial convention for the protection of natural resources and the provision of ecosystem services, which are essential for the well-being and quality of life, which together, for example, a hydrographic basin administration, irrigation producers and the intermediation of an association of irrigators, with a view to improving water quality and the provision of riverside amenities;
13) In the field of collective action and the provision of common services, through the design of various condominium formulas, be it a rural space to manage a land bank, a vacant space, an agro-industrial space, a cooperative territory, a periurban park, having with a view, for example, to reduce the moral hazard implied by the practice of freerider;
14) But we could also mention other territories in critical condition in need of urgent intervention and "social network": urban ghettos, pendular territories, territories of second residence in rural areas, tourist territories suffering from seasonal stress, decaying industrial areas, areas untidy forests, neglected watersheds, etc.
Final grade
In each and every case, it is therefore necessary to ask what is the best formula for “collective action and social innovation” that can and should be promoted and which network actor is best suited for this purpose.
From this “typological disorder”, we wanted to draw only one teaching of a general order, namely, that, in all cases, the social construction of a network-territory appeals to three orders of arrangement.
Firstly, a "conventional arrangement", that is, the terms of a convention or agreement between partners who wish to undertake a network territory for the construction of their future, secondly, an "operational arrangement" on necessary processes and procedures the constitution of an actor-network, finally, a “local productive arrangement”, in the form of a local productive system (SPL) or a local food system (SAL), which are an innovative and mobilizing arrangement for local communities .
Two lines of work of great interest to these network territories (TR) are the “resident mission groups” that we have already used in Projeto Querença, and the approach called embassador place branding, based on “Ambassadors of the Territory”, who lend their prestige and notoriety to the partnership and projection of the local network.
For the rest, the two approaches can be developed together. The hypotheses are all open, why not give it a try?
Author António Covas is a full professor at the University of Algarve and a PhD in European Affairs from the Free University of Brussels
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