Rethinking the potential of the territories

The start of the third millennium has been characterized, from the social and economic point of view, by almost extreme debates in which we discuss on how to organize the life of people for guaranteeing one increasing level of welfare to all through one growth considered natural and unstoppable. We discussed the growth and celebrated the absolute power of consume as lever for realizing the new “paradise on earth”. Naturally, the dominating ideas have found some resistance to fully assert (and really all felt among those rewarded by the new model) and even in the periods of greater optimism on the future of humanity, the debate on the actual birth of the new era has remained open, bringing some element of criticism to this vision. The criticism, although not supported by the majority of the economists (and by great part of the politics), has allowed to keep alive some ideas and many experiences “different” from the dominating thought and, with the crisis that has begun to hit and the consequent end of the illusion of continuous growth without break, has offered cues capable of proposing new and different perspectives (Latouche, 2005). Among the most successful topics, not only between the economists, one has particularly warmed the hearts even of scholars and professionals of other sectors. It was the comparison between who thought about one equal growth in every part of the world able to reduce the inequalities increasingly dramatic in the globe (Atkinson, 2015), satisfy the needs that become identical at every latitude of the planet(the so-called phenomenon of globalization) and who tried to protect the diversities, the localisms, the values and the histories of single territories.