The fires of the last few weeks in the Center region once again drew our attention to the harsh reality of our “great country in the interior”.
Our deadly sins in terms of territorial cohesion are well known: deprived and desertified rural areas, island and mountain areas, congested metropolitan areas, run-down urban areas, declining industrial areas, border areas, etc.
Thirty years after Portugal joined the European Communities, territorial cohesion policy is increasingly imaginative, but nevertheless, longstanding structural problems remain and, above all, do not resist the discontinuation of public policies over a long period. . Portugal is a good example of this stop and go.
Suddenly, and after a few years of austerity, hope is reborn once more. This time, the technological and digital revolution is so exponential that we may be on the verge of decreeing the abolition of space and distance.
Mobility, speed, universality, ubiquity, would be a measure of this technological acceleration. This time, in the XNUMXst century, it is the combination of new technologies (NBIC) and distributed digital networks (RDD) that puts us in line with collective intelligence and territorial equity.
In fact, in a country so small and so well served by transport routes, and with the generalized access of the younger generations to digital technologies, the problem of “valuing the interior” must necessarily be thought about and equated in other parameters.
Are we wrong to think of new problems with old concepts?
1. The NBIC constellation
The technological constellation formed by nanotechnologies (N), biotechnologies (B), computer industries (I) and cognitive sciences (C) will have a devastating impact on the life sciences and human health, the food industries and the world Natural.
The increase in electronic and digital interfaces with human communication and neuroscience will transport us to unknown worlds, to the universe of robotics and post-humanism.
NBICs will also be an essential part of cyberspace, where we will all have access to everyone and we will all have access to everything. With NIBC we will be “augmented citizens”, post-humans, lords of the universe and we will have, say, the intelligence of enlightened multitudes.
With NBIC we will be the homo connexus, connected and-anything, tele-anything or on-anything. Anywhere, regardless of the “non-place” where we are.
In the face of such exuberance, it remains to be said that the crisis of the human and social sciences, today, is the countervalue of this apparent success of the NBIC. As happened at the beginning of the 1th century, with the XNUMXst industrial revolution and the emergence of the human and social sciences, NBIC technologies will very quickly force us to reinvent the constellation of human and social sciences of the first half of the XNUMXst century under pity of plunging into a long, interminable night made up of fear, violence and obscurantism.
And as for these new “NBIC territories”, where will they be and how will they be?
On the one hand, we will have "augmented beings", full of microchips, constantly traveling in cyberspace, on the other, territories surrounded by sensors on all sides, permanently watched and watching us at all times. In this vertigo, it is very likely that speed eliminates distance, but also an important part of the “invisible territories”.
Admittedly, broadband and information highways can contribute to greater territorial equity. Municipal initiatives related to spaces of coworking and fablab they can also contribute to more territorial equity, as well as the public incentives of the cohesion policy that stimulate research centers to create start-up locations.
It is true, all of this, in its own way, contributes to "the death of distance", but also to the melancholy and withering of the interior territories for the simple reason that they do not reach a critical urbanism that allows them to counteract the movements in towards the coast.
I believe, however, that, in such a small country, the coastal and inland territories will be, rather, different functionalities of the same territory, according to another typology of territories that are increasingly intertwined: professional territories, residential territories, territories transition, recreational territories, therapeutic and retreat territories, reserve territories, sanctuary territories, etc.
2. Distributed Digital Networks (RDD)
Distributed digital networks will be the promise of the great isotropic illusion. Unlike centralized networks that reproduce hierarchical and vertical power, distributed digital networks are “relationships without power”, lateral and collaborative, without an ordering center.
The RDD are part of the so-called “primary internet” or citizens' internet, through which the economy of collaborative common goods will be practiced, an economy without intermediaries in which producers are also consumers and vice versa.
The companies start-ups that creating technological platforms and respective applications will be the main agent of these distributed digital networks and here imagination has no limits.
the spaces of coworking, the fablab, the incubators and research centers will be the privileged places to give birth to these DDRs, but the vast majority are in a rudimentary and artisanal phase, needing a new generation of public and/or private investment.
The “old material economy” reported agglomeration economies and positive externalities as the fundamental instruments to create an ecosystem favorable to business growth and regional economic development. Infrastructure and material equipment were part of this favorable ecosystem, almost always with public investment in so-called non-tradable goods.
Today, however, the “new immaterial economy” is not enough to have online communities created by spontaneous generation in spaces of coworking ou fablab municipal authorities. this is the version fashion of the problem at hand and that public policies for territorial cohesion often feed, with occasional incentives, without visible or apparent success.
The start-up generated in incubators and accelerators, like solitary runners in search of a safe track that guarantees them a minimum of sustainability.
In fact, there is an abysmal difference between the comfort of a community-managed digital network online and the discomfort of a real problem managed by a community offline, not to mention the quality of the actor-network that manages the distributed digital network.
Most importantly, it is important to say that DDR needs not only a supportive digital ecosystem, but also a broader understanding of its target community. In these terms, RDD will not be distributed, it will be just another seller of illusions with no real impact on existing problems.
3. Online communities, 4.0 agriculture and human occupation of the interior
It is inevitable, the technological dazzle is such that we will have to go through the “virtual interior” before realizing that the whole process of converting communities is very complex and sometimes even painful online in communities offline.
I mean, we're going to have to go through a learning process to finally understand what the best combination of “virtuality and reality” is.
And as for agriculture and the valorization of the interior, here are some examples taken from the precision technologies of the agricultural company 4.0:
– Remote irrigation management.
– Monitoring of cultures from aerial images obtained with drones.
– Surveillance cameras in stables and barns.
– Milking and feeding robots.
– Chips in animals to monitor their life cycle.
– Robots to carry out the work in the vineyard.
– Autonomous vehicles such as agricultural machines and tractors.
– The sensing of the forest (the eyes and ears of trees).
– Thermal cameras (the night eyes of firefighters).
– Images by drone areas with the greatest accumulation of scrub.
– Robots to do the firefighting.
– Collection and processing of raw information: date e cloud computing.
-Computational models for the development of intervention scenarios.
– Creation of applications in smartphones for use by farmers and firefighters.
- Artificial intelligence (machine learning) for various simulations.
These examples show that in the “next incarnation” the rural world will be unrecognizable, as the “internet of things” will be present from precision agriculture to preventive forestry.
But 4.0 precision agriculture will be just one of the vectors, perhaps the most exuberant, present in the rural world. From now on, we will be immersed in the paradigm of mobility and network and visitation economies.
Furthermore, in a country as small as Portugal, served by good transport and communication infrastructure, the main problem is not “repopulation and stock population" of low-density areas, but rather the virtuous organization of mobility and population flow, that is, the imaginative and efficient assembly of a network economy and visitation in the territory, conceived as a collaborative network-territory based on services itinerant and multipurpose that social media technology can very well imagine and assemble.
Final grade
For all that is said, some of the dominant intellectual categories and ideas that have governed us in recent decades no longer make any sense, for example: the social stigma attached to the countryside, the sacrifice of rural extension on the altar of chemical-mechanical mercantilism, the monocultural and over-specialized productivism, the urban-rural dichotomy, the progress identified with the exodus and urbanization, the disqualification of social capital in the deep rural area, and the arrogant and conservative academicism of higher education institutions, all of which are the source of numerous misunderstandings.
I believe that, in the near future, in what I call the “2nd rurality”, the most important innovation will be the emergence of the collaborative society and the sharing economy based on a wide variety of networks and technological and social platforms.
In the 2nd rurality, “the coming neo-rurals” will have a fundamental role there and will make the countryside almost unrecognizable as we know it today.
Community-accompanied agriculture (CAA) and community and grouped management of villages and towns will be a reality, the sharing economy and good practices of the circular economy will also be a reality in the face of idle, under-employed and forgotten resources, finally, the patrimonialization of archaeological and historical resources and their moderate touristification will also be a reality.
It won't be the best of all worlds, but it will definitely be a better world.
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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