Le cooperative di comunità nelle aree interne:buone pratiche per un distretto conviviale in Abruzzo

The proposed research investigates the dynamics in community cooperatives within one of the Abruzzo internal SNAI areas (National Strategy for Internal Areas), the Valle Subequana/Gran Sasso area. The focus is on the municipalities of Fontecchio and Santo Stefano di Sessanio (AQ) that have defined their entrepreneurial activity around the ‘care of the landscape’ as active citizenship laboratories that experiment with new ways of self-care of the territory. The ‘care of the landscape’ becomes the basis for the social enterprise and is declined by intercepting the spending flows of the municipalities themselves and of the private individuals who gravitate in the territories, declining new local development processes. The rooting in the territory and the desire to transform the spending flows of the municipality into economic repercussions on a local scale make community cooperatives a suitable tool for triggering processes of local self-sustainability. From the critical analysis carried out in the study it emerges that these ‘riterritorialization’ processes can be favoured by a more widespread awareness of local territorial resources and of the potential use of such resources. The provision of adequate tools, knowledge of the territory and dissemination of good practices would constitute a possible starting point for a replicable sustainable operating model that can be applied to the entire network of SNAI area municipalities. The proposed model is focused on the imitation of ecosystems and the circularity of material flows, supporting the formation of the ‘social’ district of ‘conviviality’. The ‘production system’ (food, energy, building materials) can be organized on integrated actions (symbiosis) in a circular approach to close local metabolic cycles, and define capillary microeconomies through mapping actions of the sedimented heritage to identify operators and quantify the availability of local resources. The expressed need is to overcome the logic of the sector and give space to complex solutions capable of integrating economic visions with environmental and social solutions, starting from what the Municipalities are already experiencing.