I return to the theme of intermunicipal communities (CIM) and their role as the main agent of local, intermunicipal and regional development.
In a context of post-pandemic and major transitions - climate, energy, digital, demographic, migratory, labor - we need a rationality center that knows how to look across local and regional territories and is able to administer it consistently and effectively , the various programs and policy measures that are coming.
The integrated and complementary offer of common services
In the post-pandemic period, in our small towns and cities, we will progressively move towards an integrated and complementary offer of common goods and services that will use the best technological and digital practices, but also community and institutional, with a view to preventing migration of people, goods and services of any nature to coastal areas and emigration.
As we know, there is the European Union's Recovery and Resilience Program and the next Community support framework, with substantial financial means. It is therefore necessary, from now on, to prepare the various local and regional economies, and the CIMs in particular, for the recovery and development strategies that are needed.
Now that decentralization and the transfer of competences to the various levels of administration (regional, inter-municipal and municipal) are discussed, it is important to know at what levels or scales we are going to place the provision of fundamental common services, for example:
– The planning of intercity public transport and its interoperability,
– Smooth mobility planning and public space architecture,
– Planning measures against climate change and the ecological footprint,
– Local food supply planning and community farming,
– The planning of long-term care and home support services,
– The planning of cultural, leisure and recreation and therapeutic services,
– The planning of security and protection services for the most vulnerable groups,
– The planning of administrative, public health, postal and banking services,
– Planning vocational education and training services for the digital transition,
– Planning technical services to encourage business rejuvenation.
All these services can be the object of a grouped management at the inter-municipal level and an Inter-municipal Community can also play the role of main agent of the respective local productive system (SPL).
In other words, CIM can choose its SPL as the strategic objective of its territory. It's not an easy task, but it's a task worth doing.
When I refer to inter-municipal communities, I am thinking, in particular, of the art of composing networked territories and, in this composition, the role of the digital economy in the intersection and convergence between the physical world of municipal entities and the digital world of inter-municipal collaborative platforms .
It is good not to forget that we still live in the so-called "zone-territory logistics": party logistics, electoral logistics, municipal logistics, administrative logistics, sector logistics, associative logistics, union logistics, clientele logistics, identity logistics, advertising and propaganda logistics.
They are all “frontier logistics” in view of the various forms of inclusion-exclusion, that is, almost all are designed to reward subordination and punish disobedience, all are designed by the vertical power to reproduce the territory-zone.
The corporate powers around these zones-territories religiously guard their transaction costs, as they are a privileged source of profit and advantage in the power system in which we live. And the CIMs, despite their youth, are no exception to this rule.
CIM and its role as lead agent
If we look around us, the lack of gravitational mapping of a territory prevents us from seeing how the various value chains work on the ground, especially the smaller ones.
We only know centralized or vertical networks, the ranks with greater visibility, we do not know or know poorly about decentralized and distributed networks and, thus, we lose a good part of the arterial and capillary effects of small investments and enterprises.
However, in the CIM and in the small towns and cities of the interior, it is the small enterprises and their capillary and reticular effects that predominate.
There are two areas where this urgency stands out, since they are two potential victims of the virtualization of society: firstly, the way in which we reoccupy an increasingly “desertified” territory of public services and, secondly, the way in which we promote and reorganize an increasingly thin labor market.
If the technological and digital revolution opens up an immense field of possibilities and opportunities, it is prudent and sensible for the CIM to promote three "small revolutions": first, to democratize access to their local or inter-municipal productive system (internal demand), according to the logic of endogenous resources, secondly, to promote local and regional value chains outside the inter-municipal community (external demand), according to a more open and plural logic of the labor universe where the fractioning of the labor market, pluriactivity and multi-income become a fully recognized social norm.
There is a lot of work to be done in these two areas, especially with regard to the platforms and methodologies of collaborative work and the smartification of the territory. A third small revolution will involve the creation of a “fourth sector”, fair, effective and efficient.
CIM, the actor-network of the “fourth sector”
The collective interest (civil protection), public goods, common services, social solidarity, form a network of integrated care that I call here the "fourth sector", an area where municipalities already exercise a good part of their attributions and skills, but which will increase with the aging of the population and the desertification of the municipalities.
This time, the “small revolution” that is being asked of the inter-municipal communities has to do with the impacts of the great transitions on the labor markets and the new professions that demand a new generation of investments in common goods and services in the areas of knowledge, technologies, arts and culture.
For this purpose, the network territory of the CIMs must be the point of application of a virtuous triangle formed by HEIs (higher education institutions), APs (public administrations) and AEPs (business and socio-professional associations).
In recent years, many intelligent communities have been created in various regions of the country, with the support of European and national funds: science and technology parks, research and development centers, technology centers, business centers, company nests, incubators and accelerators in startup, spaces of coworking, smart cities, living labs, local development associations, societies of venture capital, Startup Portugal, an association of business angels, technological and creative hubs, in addition to many business and socio-professional associations.
These intelligent communities need to be managed effectively and efficiently, they are the almost obligatory passage for many young people from HEIs, which is why the CIMs, because they are on the ground, "are required" to function as a host territorial curatorship that takes care of to know and practice that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as there is no territorial and social cohesion of the CIMs that resist the diffuse and dispersive effects of all these so-called intelligent communities.
Final Notes
In terms of territorial cohesion, without an intelligent connection led by a main agent, the actor-network, and without a mission structure or territorial curatorship, which takes care of CIM's common goods and services, we will not have results or a reduction in territorial vulnerability.
To reinforce this assertion and the need for a territorial curatorship for the CIM, I recall, once again, the impacts of the great transitions mentioned above.
Henceforth, digital technologies will be a powerful instrument of territorial governance, but they will have to prove their lives , and not just ex situ otherwise the much-vaunted territorial cohesion is little more than a hoax.
And, finally, a suggestion I made on another occasion (Sul Informação, 28.05.2020). Why not, in each CIM, a “school of arts and technologies” in close articulation with the previously mentioned intelligent communities, similarly to the old industrial and commercial schools of the XNUMXth century?
And why not enjoy the special networking of higher education institutions that are particularly suited to being able to function as platform-institutions, as they can function in an open channel with the crowd, as a revolving plate of problems, projects and collaborators, in multiple formats of crowd sourcing, crowd learning e crowd funding, and in an innovative regime of "univercity and pluriversity"?
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