Leaderless, mutualistic, and organic agricultural co-production as a socially-ecologically sustainable rural-urban practice. A local Italian experience, an international perspective to rethink the territory and the city

Abstract

In an expanding world demanding more and more resources and causing interconnected crisis, the systemic nature of tragic social and ecological incidents is not (yet) widely acknowledged. The social and ecological limits of the current industry-based economic paradigm let us forerun the onset of possible emergencies to be possibly tackled through preventive design and positive transformation, where the rethinking of the territory, the city, and their supporting environments is necessarily involved. In this perspective, nurturing initiatives to ensure distributed food provision seems a good start in such a transformation, at least as a socio-economic sustainability tool and as a satisfier of basic human needs. We present an example of communal self-management for organic agricultural production, inspired to the model of Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA). This project was started in the urban sprawl of massively industrialised North-Eastern Italy by committed individuals and grassroot groups, already active in discourses on ecological sustainability, social equity, social and solidarity economy, transition and post-growth. From individual-to-collective self-determination and bottom-up initiative potentials through food plans and other tools to be participatorily defined with all the actors of a given area, a CSA can represent the trigger of a virtuous paradigmatic shift in more or less institutional policies for the maintenance, regeneration, and strengthening of territory and urban environments