(Not) always looking at the bright side of life: territorial social infrastructure and institutional innovation in fragile territories

Loris Servillo

Chapter 16 in The Value of Place, 2025, pp 242-261 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: In fragile non-urbanized areas, a ‘thinning of the socio-institutional infrastructure’ is occurring. In lagging-behind areas (Pike et al. 2024), this process is intensifying because of an ‘uneven spatial deployment of the welfare state’ and the ‘polarised development of service provision’. This has involved both a reduction in the presence of the state (fact) and a progressive exclusion of these places from the mainstream narrative (perception). The role of the welfare state disparity in territories – and especially the access to its socio-institutional infrastructure and services – has been underestimated for a long time, despite its territorial relevancy and importance. In this regard, Flavia Martinelli's work has been inspiring in defining the importance of the spatial dimension of welfare, while uneven regional development and regional and local development policies have coped differently with this issue (Martinelli & Novy 2013; Martinelli et al. 2017). Meanwhile, Pavlos Delladetsimas's work has underscored the critical role of real estate development in reproducing regional inequality and institutional fragilization (Delladetsimas 2006). Increasingly, fragile territories are calling for tailored answers to their socio-spatial needs and evidence shows that ongoing innovative practices are prone to re-think the traditional ‘public-led’ welfare state for innovative governance initiatives that can ‘redesign the welfare provision’ through the mobilization of local communities. Interesting innovative processes, on the one hand, represent tentative solutions in the shadow of the welfare state crisis; on the other hand, these are accompanied by institutional innovations, especially in the domain of supralocal initiatives, within a general trend towards the dismantling of subregional coordinative capacities in planning actions (Delladetsimas 2011; Martinelli 2020).

Keywords: Territorial social infrastructure; Spatial disparity; Spatial justice; Fragile territory; Experimental governance; Institutional innovation; Place-base development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035347919
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035347926.00025 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:24001_16

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().