In the wake of so much fire, allow me to quote, with all due respect, an excerpt from the letter of the mother of a five-year-old child who died in Pedrógão Grande and which was published in the Público newspaper on the 23rd of July:
“The state has failed. The Nation did not exist. But it didn't just fail in this tragedy. The state has been failing for decades. The State suffers from chronic blindness, it is sick with such a feeling of self-denial. It denies its status as a rural country, a proudly rural country and therefore rich. As a State, it is a cold, masculine, distant concept of an entity that imposes taxes and laws on its subjects, a cluster of supposedly hierarchical entities, with supposedly competent leaders, who supposedly should comply with and enforce a set of laws and rules that they are approved according to the station's political will. This is how Portugal is governed. No regime pacts and long-term vision. There was no strategy for the Territory when the money from the European Structural Funds was swollen. These were years of forgetting, emptying, neglecting the Interior, neglecting the Territory, Forestry and Agriculture”.
I. Fires from the interior and the interior of fires
In the wake of so much fire.
“Territories that burn don't exist”, or rather, “they only exist because they burn”. The invisibility of inland territories allows for almost anything, even almost total abandonment, as is now being shown.
“Since they do not exist” there is no exercise of territorial intelligibility on them that increases their internal consistency; one gets there almost always in a state of emergency and on the brink of the abyss, as has happened now.
On the other hand, faced with the great spectacle on television, the visibility of tragedy is only paralleled by the invisibility of abandonment. The intrusion is such that we are left with the feeling that the fire has broken out several times.
What is certain is that, in a country where almost everything depends on the Central State or the local State, “there is a lot that has to remain invisibility”, because there are simply not enough resources for everything.
And those who remain invisible are those who do not disturb the peacefulness of the established corporate and clientele system. The interior of the country is not part of this clientele system or is only marginally part of it, to “silence” some local baron with the loudest voice, and, therefore, also with greater access and political visibility.
Fires of this size have the serious inconvenience of bringing to the surface the “dead-living” of the forgotten interior.
His long invisibility, which only fires disturb, hides a long-announced death. It is a cynical and cowardly silence on the part of the central power, which, in this way, hopes to be able to “manage more rationally” its scarce resources; according to their logic, without visibility, it is easier to manage scarce resources and then share those resources with those who have greater visibility.
Territories also collapse, because these territories have been “silently but meticulously deterritorialized”. It is a bipolar country for a long time, it is the failures and absences of the State-administration, it is a country without a backbone, they are district capitals completely bent on Lisbon's centralism.
Today, the convergence of climate change, demographic changes and agro-industrial monocultures prepare “the path of abandonment” so that these territories are captured without the need to “privatize” them.
And yet.
In such a small country, where all territories, even the most remote ones, have distinctive signs and expectant resources, it is a crime for the lesa homeland not to carry out an intelligibility exercise on these signs and resources, bringing them into the light of day, launching them in the regional and national public space, giving them the visibility that is necessary and all this in a “climate of perfect normality”.
Unfortunately, the Lilliputian universe of our small towns in the interior is a difficult terrain for the formation of stronger and more muscular self-governing communities.
In this context, the creation of “intermunicipal communities”, placed between the local and regional levels, is an excellent pretext for reconsidering the entire territorial policy of enhancing the interior.
However, I have many doubts that these “mini-land” variables are part of the territorial equation of the future.
If not, let's see.
II. The territory equation today
We are in 2017, the way in which we occupy the territory at the precise moment when it is most deterritorialized and dematerialized is directly at issue.
The territory that was, it should be remembered, one of the fundamental elements of State sovereignty, is today struggling with the risks of extra-territoriality, the various diasporas of its population and the fragmentation of political power by countless national and transnational corporate powers.
If to these risks we also add the virtual nomadism of citizens and the profound transformation and turmoil that will affect labor markets in the near future, we will have a realistic picture of the devastating impacts that await us.
The question is, therefore, very pertinent: is the “territorial equation” of the sovereignty of the State-administration in a process of inversion?
Three centuries after the Westphalian revolution of the XNUMXth century (the territory as a constituent element of a State's sovereignty), globalization, deterritorialization and dematerialization are the great political issues of the XNUMXst century and, in this context, we are all migrant citizens immersed in the great paradigm of mobility and, most likely, “married” to several territories.
In this dominant register, speed is the unit of measurement of our time and each speed corresponds to a grid for reading reality.
On the other hand, as the “digitalization of the territory” continues, we see the world revolve around us and become a gigantic “revolving plate”, in a complex mixture of reality and virtuality.
Again, the choice of speed will determine the reading grid of reality. Therefore, in the interaction between territory and technology, the degree of digital literacy will determine the nature and formation of self-government online communities, supported by digital technologies and social networks, and increasingly interacting with local communities and in search of its own territorial affiliation and rooting process.
In this heavy trend of deterritorialization and dematerialization, the malaise of the State-administration is not surprising, as the interactions between technology and territory largely elude it and seem to confirm the inversion of the “territorial equation”.
Globalization, extra-territoriality, the population diaspora, the emergence of the automatic society, the society of peer collaboration, the breaking of the labor and social bonds of the welfare state, the permanent virtual nomadism, all point to the “disauthorization of the State -administration” as we know it today.
For all these reasons, the passage I quoted is a real cry of alarm, as under these conditions it is very likely that the State will fail again more often. In fact, what will the structure of the population of the territory be like in a society in perpetual movement, a society in which mobility and nomadism are the guiding principles?
I quote the letter already mentioned:
“The Interior has become a bed of weeds, without gardeners, its people. A keg of gunpowder in addition to the institutionalized fire industry and any election year. The ideal ingredients for the perfect storm. The tragedy of June 17th to 24th was more than announced. It was just a matter of time and time does not stand still”.
My wish is, of course, that the State will not fail again.
III. What about future plans for the territory?
In terms of deterritorialization, territories will navigate at the mercy of four major trends: the hypernomadism of large transnational corporations that easily relocate important segments of their value chain; the vertiginous increase of the so-called creative classes, in a context of great virtual nomadism; the capitalist nomadism of investment funds that increasingly replace local and regional producers in search of quick returns on their investment; finally, risk and insurance as central elements of future hetero-regulation and, in this context, the correlative importance of insurance companies in the framework of many business models.
Behind digitization and deterritorialization, or simultaneously, comes the disintermediation of old business models and the arrival of new, more collaborative business models.
Let's travel through the “virtual interior” before realizing that the whole process of converting online communities into offline communities is very complex and sometimes extremely painful.
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.
During this learning process, more or less long, we will have the opportunity to watch, mainly through precision agriculture, how algorithmic programming transforms an immense volume of raw data collected by sensors implanted in the soil, plants and animals, in operational planning of agrifood production systems, while decentralized digital networks, in the form of very sophisticated applications, make us believe in a tighter control over the most random factors of production.
We will see the emergence of a wide variety of technological and social networks and platforms, which relate not only to precision agriculture, but also to preventive forestry, the reticular urbanism of small towns in the interior, the rural economy of parks and nature reserves , the provision of local biodiversity and ecosystem services, the economy of recreation and visitation of amenities and rural landscapes, itinerant services to the lost populations of the interior, etc.
In a country as small as Portugal, served by good transport and communication infrastructure, the main problem will not be the “repopulation and population stock” of low density areas, but rather the virtuous organization of mobility and population flow, that is, the imaginative and efficient assembly of an economy of network and visitation in the territory, conceived as a network territory and based on itinerant and multipurpose services that the technology of social networks can very well imagine and assemble.
On the way to the so-called “2nd rurality”, the most important novelty will be, precisely, the emergence of a wide variety of technological and social networks and platforms, more or less rooted in the territory.
Initially, everything may seem a little chaotic, but, in the 2nd rurality, “the coming neo-rurals” will play a fundamental role and will make the countryside almost unrecognizable as we know it today.
The art of social networks will bring us a kind of “augmented reality” in the form of “agriculture accompanied by the community” (AAC), of community and grouped management of villages and towns, of sharing economy and circular economy, where no there will be idle, under-employed and forgotten resources, and where the patrimonialization of archaeological and historical resources and their moderate touristification will also be a reality.
Everything will depend on our technological fascination and, above all, on how the accumulated public and private debt is resolved, otherwise we will be hostage to the foreign investor and its technological innovations, those that provide a faster return on the investment made. .
Final Notes: the next incarnation of the rural world
These references 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.
In conclusion, here are some final notes:
– It is a fact, the “territory equation” will undergo a profound recomposition in the sense of its multi-territoriality, if we want, of a collection of diasporas;
– Territories are clearly on the 4D path: digitization, deterritorialization, dematerialization and disintermediation and learning the connection between online and offline communities;
– We are clearly facing a profound disruption of labor markets, the end of the “employment industry”, the emergence of intermittent work, pluriactivity and multi-income, and even before a historic decoupling between work and income;
– We are clearly facing two heavy trends: on the one hand “Less State, Better State”, and what this means in terms of territory recomposition, on the other, the emergence of a “fourth sector”, of merger, transition and accommodation, where “fragile, precarious and intermittent jobs” converge in the public, social, cooperative, cultural, solidarity, voluntary, assistance, collaborative sectors;
– We are clearly facing a process, perhaps chaotic, of disintermediation and re-intermediation of many business models; the emergence of distributed digital networks alongside centralized and decentralized networks is, to a large extent, a movement of extra-territoriality that will be disciplined and regular;
– The emergence of innumerable “collaborative ecosystems”, in different formats and supported by multiple technological platforms and territorial settlements, is a great hope for the inland territories, which are awaiting a finer assessment to be able to consolidate;
– The consideration of an “Iberian macroregion” at the European level and, in this context, a common candidacy of the two peninsular countries is a great opportunity for the “great peninsular interiority” and for new forms of collective intelligence, that is, new interfaces between technology and territory;
– The emergence of a 2nd rurality functionally embedded in the urban universe and which will be a kind of “extensive periurban” is also a good opportunity.
It will certainly not be the best of all worlds, but it will certainly 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
Comments