Università Roma Tre

In recent decades, the theme of local development has assumed a central role in the development debate. The lessons will present the concepts and methods of local development, understood not only as a growth process for an aggregation of local companies, but as a diversified territorial development process based on self-organizing capacity of local networks of actors and on the sustainable exploitation of tangible and intangible resources available in a certain territory, including the social and cultural spheres. The high expectations of the early days on the potential of local development has recently been followed by a less optimistic phase. Today's challenge is to avoid the trap of localism and rethink local development even in new terms, to give cities and territories the ability to respond to economic, social and environmental pressures of the globalized world. Some case studies in Italy not only will help to deepen some of the addressed issues. There will be lectures, eventual seminars and an educational excursion.

Lorenzo CIAPETTI, 2010, "Lo sviluppo locale", il Mulino (ALL THE BOOK)

Rapporto Annuale 2011 "Il Sud, i Sud – Geoeconomia e geopolitica della questione meridionale", Società Geografica Italiana (ONLY THE FOLLOWING CHAPTERS: 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10).