Perifericità e sviluppo, nuove geografie relazionali dell’Italia interna

Peripherality, understood as a phenomenon according to which regions physically far away from the centers of economic activity are denied the benefits of agglomeration, thus causing a series of economic disadvantages associated with high transport costs, access to sources of innovation, the labor market and so on, has been the subject of study since the early 1980s. The objective of the research presented in this article is to retrace, in the first instance, the fundamental stages of the interpretations made in this regard over time, paying attention to the intimate link between these and the concept of development. Peripherality is understood, therefore, as a complex and multidimensional phenomenon that aggravates the effects of socio-economic processes that are the cause of an increasingly marked disconnection between territories. Attention is therefore paid not so much to the geographical position of the same but to their degree of disconnection, so as to imagine a set of relational geographies through the interpretation of which we can overcome the classic models of dualistic development, applied from the 50s onwards, and the paradigm of the “center that produces the periphery”, which has constituted in history a model of strong stability, whose efficiency, interpretative in particular, has never been questioned except in the decades closer to us.