Revitalizing Inner Areas: The Emilia-Romagna Model of Community Cooperatives

There is much talk about the recovery of "Inner Areas" and their development to maintain the cohesion of small, especially Apennine, villages that have seen the specter of depopulation materialize, but except for some special measures, with a relative downpour of funds, nothing systemic is done. Perhaps the right idea, to be then poured into national legislation, could come from the experience of Emilia Romagna with its regional legislation that established the "Community Cooperatives", a new modern-day declination of social cooperatives. Here, the intervention arises from the needs of the territory: "When from a marginal place the State withdraws and there are even no post office or other services", then it is time to create a community cooperative that will allow for the establishment of businesses of the most diverse kinds, from the pizzeria, to the bakery, to the parish cinema, that build community by providing solid jobs for young people in the logic of environmental and cultural sustainability, respecting the vocation of individual places. Elio Pezzi, a historian and press officer for the Confocooperative of Emilia Romagna, as well as a poet of national relevance, to explain this phenomenon has produced a text "Generative Territories. Stories of community cooperatives in Emilia-Romagna told by their protagonists", which is a collection of interviews of individual experiences of recovery of various and multiple inner areas of the Emilian-Romagna Apennines. Twenty-four are the villages that have also taken advantage of the mutualistic Fondosviluppo of the Confcooperative to revive themselves communally. "Peripheries" as Pope Francis calls them, which had nothing underdeveloped, but were just waiting to restart. Environment, enogastronomy, hiking: in general, creating places of cultural and environmental receptivity based on a history made of felt communitarianism, this is the mantra to regenerate territories that only needed a social and economic input to recreate sociability.