Report by S. Iommi
This work was commissioned to IRPET by the ‘Institutional Commission for the support, valorisation and promotion of Tuscany’s inland areas’ of the Tuscan Regional Council, chaired by Marco Niccolai.
It is composed of sectoral contributions, drawing on the different areas of study of the institute. The chapters are as follows: for part one, Sabrina Iommi chapters 1 and 2, Leonardo Piccini chapter 3, Donatella Marinari and Maria Luisa Maitino chapter 4, Tommaso Ferraresi chapter 5, Sara Turchetti chapter 6, Enrico Conti chapter 7, Silvia Duranti, Donatella Marinari, Maria Luisa Maitino and Letizia Ravagli chapter 8; for part two, Giuseppe Francesco Gori chapter 9, Sabrina Iommi chapters 10 and 11.
The work belongs to the Local Systems, Culture and Tourism Area, coordinated by Sabrina Iommi.
Inland areas are by definition made up of municipalities far from what the National Agency for Territorial Cohesion identified in 2013 as essential services of citizenship, corresponding to emergency health services (hospital emergency rooms), secondary education, and public rail transport (silver level stations).
These municipalities do not always coincide with areas of persistent demographic decline, economic weakness and social marginality, as will also be confirmed in this paper. On the contrary, often these areas, although in difficulty in accessing public services, have important productive fabrics, both on a local scale for the maintenance of the resident population, and as a contribution to the regional economy, in the creation of overall added value, but also in the presidium of certain productive specialisations and related skills, starting with manufacturing. Their role, therefore, is far from marginal.
The heterogeneity of the inland areas is recognised by the same National Strategy dedicated to them (SNAI), which has now reached its second investment programming cycle, when it requires resources to be dedicated only to the most peripheral municipalities (classified as peripheral and outermost) and with persistent demographic decline. These are, in fact, the municipalities that make up the so-called SNAI areas, territorial macro-areas (particularly extensive in the Tuscan case) on which a real strategy of local development and readjustment of the offer of local public services insists, a strategy that by definition envisages multi-sectoral investments, coming from a multiplicity of sources (EU, State, Region, Local Authorities) and subject to a multi-level and supra-municipal governance. Excluded from the SNAI are the moderately peripheral municipalities (classified as intermediate inland), which in a region of diffuse development such as Tuscany are often district areas, with a relatively lively demographic dynamic, given the overall ageing and current demographic decline of the entire national context. They are areas that share some of the demographic and productive characteristics of the urban belts, from which they are substantially distinguished by a greater distance from essential services.
In this report, it was decided to consider all municipalities defined as inland areas according to the new nationwide classification published in 2022 and to highlight their heterogeneity.
The analysis allows the identification of 3 different types of inland areas.
The analysis allows the identification of 3 different types of inland areas.
A second group is represented by the peripheral and ultra-peripheral municipalities of central-southern Tuscany, which extends from Alta Valdera and Alta Valdicecina towards the Amiata area, on its two slopes of Siena and Grosseto, and towards Valdichiana. These are prevalently hilly areas, in which agricultural activity plays an important role, although increasingly integrated with tourism, and in some cases with some manufacturing production. The dominant settlement characteristic of these territories is the very low density of settlements and their strong distance from the major urban centres. They are, in most cases, small and highly isolated territories, which must find the resources for development in their own context, since they cannot develop daily commuter relations with the main urban centres. These territories were almost entirely candidates for SNAI for the 2021-2027 cycle.
The last group consists of the intermediate territories. This group includes Valdarno aretino around Montevarchi, Chianti, Valdelsa, the southern coast and the islands. They are relatively densely populated areas, with solid development engines, despite their differences (manufacturing for Valdarno aretino and Valdelsa, almost only seaside tourism for the coast and islands), with good levels of accessibility, albeit differentiated by area (e.g. Valdarno aretino is well connected to the Florentine metropolitan area), whose main deficit is precisely the provision of essential public services. The territories in this group do not meet the requirements for access to the SNAI, but could benefit greatly from the strengthening of the network of territorial services, given also the not insignificant share of population and productive activities that they host.
Altogether, the three groups account for 67% of the regional surface area (but the SNAI areas, i.e. first and second groups, alone account for 53% of the total), 24% of the Tuscan population (but the third group alone accounts for 11% of the residents) and 17% of the total added value (of which about half is produced by the third group alone).
Outlining the distinguishing features of the three groups thus allows for more targeted policy suggestions. There are at least four crucial features:
1) the morphology of the territory, because mountain areas are relatively more in need of hydrogeological safety measures and slope maintenance, as well as investment in technologies that reduce the need for travel;
2) the position with respect to the major urban areas, because the development of the more decentralised territories with less accessibility to urban centres must rely only on endogenous resources (local productive settlements), while that of the territories with easy access to the cities can also rely on the development of daily commuter relations;
3) settlement levels, because intermediate municipalities have levels of population and economic activity that in themselves justify the adjustment of the supply of essential public services;
4) local production specialisations, because many of these territories constitute real manufacturing strongholds, a development engine that ensures more solid returns in terms of job continuity, wage levels, productivity gains and propensity to innovation.
In general, however, all territories need investment in infrastructure and technology, in order to recover a historical problem of underinvestment that has affected the entire country for the past 30 years and to fully seize the new development opportunities offered by the so-called transitions. Intensifying the use of digital technologies can enable many peripheral areas to overcome at least in part their accessibility deficit, effectively reducing the need for physical mobility. In addition, the need to reduce pressure on environmental resources and mitigate climate change allows these areas, usually rich in natural heritage and providers of fundamental ecosystem services (water resource protection, pollutant abatement, hydrogeological resilience, food security, etc.) to assume a more central role in development processes.
As already mentioned, many of these areas retain important manufacturing locations, the result of investments in the distant past (the phase of industrial take-off) or even of more recent investments by companies from abroad (think of the camper van sector in Valdelsa or the fashion sector, with the important role played by designer labels). It is fundamental for these areas to maintain and renew these territorial economic strongholds, acting on localisation advantages (investments in infrastructure and technology, but also in education and training) and on the stimuli for innovation that can derive from collaboration with regional research and development centres. It is also important, for these areas with low settlement density, to try to strengthen small local poles of agglomeration, concentrating investments and services there, in order to make these investments more effective and guarantee a minimum package of essential services for the population and businesses. It is with these guidelines in mind that inland areas (and the associated multi-level governance system) must seize the opportunity of the wide availability of resources for investment (starting with the PNRR funds), after decades of austerity policies that have led to the erosion of the physical and intangible capital accumulated in the past.
The structure of the report is as follows.
The first part is dedicated to the reconstruction, in great depth, of the current conditions of the different areas, ranging from morphological and demographic characteristics, to the different production specialisations, commuter links with urban areas and the outcomes of economic processes in terms of skills demanded, employment levels, incomes produced and the extent of poverty and inequality.
The second part provides a reconstruction of the funding available for investments and their thematic and sectoral orientation. A concluding reflection on possible future development paths closes the work, highlighting the main opportunities for peripheral territories.
