ROMA (ITALPRESS) – There are 157 intermediate cities that recompose the territorial geography of our country, with 73 in Northern Italy, 44 in the Mezzogiorno and 40 in the regions of the Centre. It is the first data among the many collected in the second volume “L’Italia Policentrica. The ferment of intermediate cities”, curated by Mecenate 90 in collaboration with the Centro Studi delle Camere di Commercio Guglielmo Tagliacarne and presented today in Rome at the headquarters of Unioncamere.
They produce a pro-capite added value of 16% higher than the rest of Italy (34.154 versus 29.534 euros in 2022); they resist in a better perspective to the demographic winter containing the decrease of the population to 4.5% between 2024 and 2050 against a contraction previewed of 7.3% of the Italian average; present a 7.3% higher quality of life than metropolitan cities and 27% higher than other cities in the country. They are cities that host companies of excellence of Made in Italy and with high innovative content, cities that express social, cultural and economic dynamism and create concrete opportunities to counter the depopulation and insufficient endowment of physical and digital infrastructure.
They promote regenerative interventions to retrain and revitalize the most degraded neighborhoods and are able to connect the smaller urban centers to a wider network. For the president of the Scientific Committee of Mecenate 90, Giuseppe De Rita “I find certain of the ancient and new fragilities, but I find especially a strong tension to grow and a strong subject of collective development”.
Compared to the dynamics of development of the last twentieth century and the first decade of this century, according to the president of Mecenate 90 Daniele Pitteri, “the intermediate cities tend to draw and define themselves by differentiation, defining their own ‘intangible dimension’ through the exaltation of the characters of uniqueness and typicality, however thinking and defining their position in an international dimension that enhances, harmonizing, the tension to economic development and the quality of society”.
For Gaetano Fausto Esposito, general manager of the Centro Studi delle Camere di Commercio Guglielmo Tagliacarne, we can see “a more intense relationality between entrepreneurship and intermediate institutional dimension that finds in the middle cities levels of quality of life altogether superior to those of the rest of the country”.
“In so many cases also in the Mezzogiorno, we also read in a greater availability of services of proximity to the population. A dimension that is particularly explanatory to demographic and cultural aspects and that makes these places an area in which to cultivate that ‘joie de vivre’ which has been one of the successful elements of the model of development of industrial districts in the 1980s and 1990s of the last century and that today it reconfirms and in many ways strengthens, to the point of being able to consider the intermediate urban dimension as a real fabric of connection between the poles”.
The ten cities taken into account, read in the Report, are not disconnected from the many social fragilities that afflict many other cities of our country, but promote regenerative interventions to retrain and revitalize the most degraded neighborhoods, thanks to the presence of a third pro-active sector, in great ferment, lively and creative.
On the side of the productive fabric, the intermediate cities host companies in their territory active in the defined production sectors of excellence and high innovative content. A productive fabric characterized by small and medium enterprises, with a significant capacity for innovation and an important export propensity.
“These are years of profound transformations of cities – emphasizes the coordinator of the Ledo Prato Research Report, general secretary of Mecenate 90 – the intensity and degree are closely linked not only with the investments of the Pnnr and other measures adopted in the last decade, as well as with the ability of local administrations to put in the field projects inspired by a vision of the cities of the near future, shared with the main actors of the economy, culture and social. Intermediate cities seem to have taken the present and tried to fill it with meaning.”.
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(ITALPRESS).
