La riproduzione di uno spazio subalterno. Abitazione, classi marginali e resistenza in una città del Sud

Il presente studio esplora gli sviluppi storici della stratificazione urbana in una città del Meridione d'Italia. Attraverso 85 interviste in profondità e l'analisi delle più importanti fasi della ricostruzione che hanno seguito un disastroso terremoto nel 1908, gli autori indagano le forze che, nel corso di un secolo, hanno spinto migliaia di individui in baracche e case popolari fatiscenti erette in città. Gli autori sostengono che l'"economia del disastro" e la "shock economy" non costituiscono un tratto saliente della nostra epoca. Al contrario, gli elementi che caratterizano i contemporanei processi speculativi da disastro erano largamente attivi già all'inizio del XX secolo. Questo articolo, pertanto, mostra le conseguenze di lunga durata degli approcci speculativi alla gestione dei disastri e riflette intorno alle forme di resistenza delle popolazioni subalterne nei confronti di un'organizzazione di vita che è iniziata all'indomani di un remoto terremoto e che condiziona ancora le condizioni di vita e i modi di riproduzione.This study explores the historical development of urban stratification in an Italian Southern city, Messina. By means of 85 in-depth interviews and the analysis of the most important phases of the reconstruction following a disastrous earthquake taking place in 1908, the authors investigate the coercive forces that, over the course of a century, have pushed thousands of individuals to occupy shanties and deprived project areas within the city. The authors claim that the "economy of disaster" and the "shock economy", are not a specific feature of current epoch. On the contrary, the elements characterizing the contemporary disaster-related speculative processes were largely active at the beginning of the XX century. This article, then, shows the long-lasting social consequences of speculative approaches to the management of disasters, and reflects on the forms of resistance of subaltern populations to an organization of life that started in the aftermath of a remote earthquake, and still affects their life condition and methods of reproduction

Lezioni apprese e indicazioni di policy per la programmazione 2014-2020

Il saggio si propone di analizzare l'esperienza leader in Sardegna nella programmazione 2007-2013, a partire dai dati emersi su una ricerca empirica che ha riguardato quattro GAL

El pastoralismo sardo: Entre el mercado global, la gestión de la incertidumbre y las formas de resistencia

La ganadería ovina es una de las fuentes principales de producción de Cerdeña, una isla en el corazón del Mediterráneo que, debido a su baja densidad de población y a sus vastos campos, es el terreno ideal para un pastoralismo extensivo. La extensión del sector fue impulsada por la demanda internacional de pecorino romano, un queso estandarizado, de bajo coste y elevada volatilidad de precio. Las empresas agropecuarias sardas, ya de por sí expuestas a la incertidumbre ambiental típica del pastoralismo extensivo, han aprendido a amortiguar y contener la inestabilidad económica procedente del mercado explotando mecanismos de resiliencia, adaptabilidad y redundancia típicas de lo que Ploeg define como una empresa campesina, es decir, una empresa orientada principalmente al mantenimiento y reproducción de los factores productivos propios más que a la venta para el mercado. La modernización agrícola se ha acoplado al modelo agropastoral tradicional, pero no sin ambivalencias y contradicciones que hoy parecen volver a emerger con cada vez más frecuencia destruyendo la capacidad del modelo agropastoral de adaptarse a la incertidumbre. En este artículo se intentará exponer esta tesis a partir de los datos recogidos en una extensa investigación etnográfica acompañada de entrevistas en profundidad, observaciones y material fotográfico obra de la autora.Sheep breeding is the most important agricultural activity in Sardinia, a rural island in the heart of the Mediterranean, which is the ideal territory for extensive sheep farming, thanks to its low population density and vast fields. The international demand for Pecorino Romano, a standardized cheese, characterized by low production cost and high price volatility, has driven the expansion of Sardinian pastoralism. The local agro-pastoral farms, already exposed to environmental uncertainties typical of extensive farming, have learned to contain the economic instability of international market, exploiting their mechanisms of resilience, adaptability and redundancy. Following Ploeg, they work as “peasant farms”, i.e. farms mainly oriented to the maintenance and reproduction of its production factors rather than selling for the market. Agricultural modernization has thus grafted onto the traditional agro-pastoral model, with ambivalence and contradictions that today seem to re-emerge, depleting the ability of the agro-pastoral model to adapt to uncertainty. In this article, we will try to expose this thesis starting from the data collected in a long ethnographic research, accompanied by in-depth interviews, participatory observation, and photographic material

Mobility and Migration in Mediterranean Europe: The Case of Agro-pastoralism

AbstractWhile most of the existing literature on rural migrations focuses on immigrant workers in intensive agricultural systems, this work tries filling existing gaps by addressing more marginal and remote rural settings. The mountainous, inner and island territories that cover a large part of the Mediterranean are particularly affected by intense demographic decline, land abandonment and problems of generational renewal, posing important questions concerning the sustainability of local development

Rural Destination Areas: Impacts and Practices

AbstractIn this chapter we provide a framework to assess and analyse ongoing rural migration dynamics from the perspective of areas of destination, with a view to answer to the following questions: What are the impacts on the local economy and society? Which are the practices, programs and policies that underpin the presence and integration of migration? What is recent experience revealing on these matters

Restructuring of Agriculture and the Rural World in Mediterranean EU Countries

AbstractAgriculture and rural development represent critical domains for the economy, the society as well as the ecosystems of Euro-Mediterranean countries. Important changes and challenges have though reconfigured food production, natural resource management as well as rural livelihoods in recent decades in the region

Land, sheep, and market: how dependency on global commodity chains changed relations between pastoralists and nature

In this article, we present a historical analysis on how Sardinian pastoralism has become an integrated activity in global capitalism, oriented to the production of cheap milk, through the extraction of ecological surplus from the exploitation of nature and labour. Pastoralism has often been looked at as a marginal and traditional activity. On the contrary, our objective is to stress the central role played by pastoralism in the capitalist world-ecology. Since there is currently little work analysing the historical development of pastoralism in a concrete agro-ecological setting from a world-ecology perspective, we want to contribute to the development of the literature by analysing the concrete case of Sardinian pastoralism. To do so, we will use the analytical framework of world-ecology to analyse the historical dialectic of capital accumulation and the production of nature through which pastoralism -understood as a socio-cultural system that organises nature-society relations for the reproduction of local rural societies- became an activity trapped in the production of market commodities and cheap food exploiting human (labour) and extra-human factors (e.g. land, water, environment, animals etc.). Looking at the exploitation of extra-human factors, the concept of ecological surplus allows us to understand how capital accumulation and surplus was possible thanks to the exploitation of nature, or rather the creation of cheap nature and chap inputs for the production of cheap commodities. We analyse historical pastoralism to understand how geopolitical configurations of global capitalism interact with the national and local scales to change pastoral production, nature and labour relations. We will pay particular attention to the role of land and the relationship between pastoralists and animals. The article is based on secondary data, historical material and primary data collected from 2012 to 2020 through qualitative interviews and ethnographic research. We identify four main cycles of agro-ecological transformation to explore the interactions between waves of historical capitalist expansion and changes in the exploitation of agroecological factors. The first two phases will be explored in the first section of the paper: the mercantilist phase during the modern era and the commodification of pastoralist products, which extend from the nineteenth century to the Second World War. In the mercantilist phase, the expansion of pastoralism finds its external limits in the trend of international demand (influenced by international trade policies that may favour or hinder exports) and its internal limits in the competition/complementarity with agriculture for the available land that results in a transhumant model of pastoralism. In this phase, the ecological surplus needed for capitalist accumulation is produced by nature as a gift, or nature for free, which results in the possibility of producing milk at a very low cost by exploiting the natural pasture of the open fields. The second cycle, “the commodification of pastoralist products”, started at the end of the nineteenth century, with the introduction on the island of the industrial processing of Pecorino Romano cheese, and which was increasingly in demand in the North American market.  This pushed pastoralism towards a strong commodification. Shepherds stopped processing cheese on-farm and became producers of cheap milk for the Pecorino Romano processing industry. Industrialists control the distribution channels and therefore the price of milk. Moreover, following the partial privatisation of land and high rent prices, shepherds progressively lose the ecological surplus that was guaranteed by free land and natural grazing, key to lower production costs and to counterbalance the unequal distribution of wealth within the chain. At the beginning of the twentieth century, although the market for Pecorino Romano was growing, these contradictions emerged and the unfair redistribution of profits within the chain (which benefited industrialists, middlemen and landowners to the detriment of shepherds) led to numerous protests and the birth of shepherds' cooperatives. The second section of the paper will explore the third agro-ecological phase: the rise of the “monoculture of sheep-raising” through the modernisation policies (from the fifties until 1990s). The protests that affected the inland areas of Sardinia, as well as the increase in banditry, signal the impossibility of continuing to guarantee cheap nature and cheap labour, which are at the basis of the mechanism of capitalist accumulation. On the basis of these pressures, the 1970s witnessed a profound transformation that opened a new cycle of accumulation: laws favouring the purchase of land led to the sedenterization of pastoralism, while agricultural modernisation policies pushed towards the rationalisation of the farm. Land improvements and technological innovations (such as the milking machine and the purchase of agricultural machinery) led to the beginning of the “monoculture of sheep raising”: a phase of intensification in the exploitation of nature and the extraction of ecological surplus. This includes a great increase of the number of sheep per unit of agricultural area, thanks to the cultivated pasture replacing natural grazing and the production and purchase of stock and feed. Subsidised agricultural modernisation and sedentarisation can once again "sustain" the cost of cheap milk that is the basis of the industrial dairy chain. However, agricultural modernisation results in the further commodification of pastoralism, which becomes increasingly dependent on the upstream and downstream market, making pastoralists less autonomous. Moreover, given the impossibility of further expanding the herd, the productivity need of keeping low milk production costs has to be achieved through an increase in the average production per head. Therefore, there are higher investments in genetic selection to increase breed productivity, higher investments to improve animal feeding and a more intensive animal exploitation to increase productivity. These production strategies imply higher farm costs. In this context, the fourth phase, the neoliberal phase (analysed in the third section of the paper) broke out in Sardinia in the mid-1990s. With the end of export subsidies and the opening of the new large-scale retail channel in which producers are completely subordinate, it starts a period of increased volatility in the price of milk. In order to counter income erosion and achieve the productivity gains needed to continue producing cheap milk, pastoralists have intensified the exploitation of both human (labour) and non-human (nature) factors, with contradictory effects. In the case of nature, the intensive exploitation of land through monocultural crops has reduced biodiversity and impoverished the soil. In the case of labour, pastoralists have intensified the levels of self-exploitation and free family labour to extreme levels and have also resorted to cheaply paid foreign labourers. Throughout the paper, we reconstruct the path towards the production of "cheap milk" in Sardinia, processed mainly into pecorino romano for international export. We argue that the production of ecological surplus through the exploitation of nature and labour has been central to capital accumulation and to the unfolding of the capitalist world ecology. However, we have reached a point of crisis where pastoralists are trapped between rising costs and eroding revenues. Further exploitation of human (cheap labour) and extra-human (nature and animals) factors is becoming unsustainable for the great majority, leading to a polarization between pastoralists who push towards further intensification and mechanisation and pastoralists who increasingly de-commodify to build greater autonomy