Rethinking urban-rural relations for a sustainable future

Funding programme: MUR - PRIN 2017

Project reference: 2017JXC55K

Principal investigator: Carlo Pongetti

Role UniMC: Coordinatore nazionale

Partnership: Università di Perugia, Università di Pisa

Runtime: 01.03.2020 - 28.02.2023

Short description: The project will analyze often-overlooked informal food value chains as a prism to rethink urban-rural relations for a sustainable future. The production, distribution and consumption of food in the macro-region of Central Italy (including Tuscany, Umbria and Marche) constitutes a unique pattern: These regions experienced, in the second half of the twentieth century, a transition from a predominantly sharecropping agriculture to a widespread small-industry system and to a territorial pattern of so-called "urbanized countryside"; a pattern which kept alive significant relations between towns and the countryside, between industrial and tertiary work and agricultural practices. Based on anthropological and geographical approaches, with the involvement of a historical dimension mainly referred to the second half of the twentieth century, the project will highlight interweaving between the formal or market economies and the strategies of institutional enhancement, on the one hand, and, on the other, the informal and daily practices of self-production, sharing, cooperation and gift circuits. These latter practices have characterized - and still characterize today – central Italy, generating an unique pattern of urban and rural relations. In particular these practices, included in the hybrid contemporary food system, are yet little analysed but they may constitute a central pillar for a sustainable future. The informal food value chains will be able to indicate policy direction for an alternative and complementary sustainable food system in contrast to the dominant model of global agribussiness.
Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, each of the three Research Unit (situated in Tuscany, Umbria and Marche) will survey at least three different levels or dimensions of local, informal and territorial food economies. First, the processes of enhancing food as cultural heritage, supported through strategic actions by institutional and official agencies; secondly, the establishment of economic agencies explicitly alternative to those of the broader global market circuits, such as associations and cooperatives that practice forms of sharing and fair economy and foster direct relations between production and consumption; thirdly, the more informal plan of everyday life and of domestic and kinship or neighbourhood networks, trying to ethnographically highlight informal practices and tactics within regimes of face-to-face relationships.
The elements of greatest theoretical originality of the project are two. On the one hand, the approach of this project goes beyond the dominant social and anthropological scholarship on food production, distribution and consumption often based on a perspective of food as a marker of symbolic identity; this project instead will focus on the daily practices of establishing economic regimes and networks of local relations focused on economic and social and political relations. On the other hand, our documentary and ethnographic project is grounded on an assumption opposed to the "apocalyptic" views of the market and mass culture, as totalizing systems of global domination that cancel any space of action or "resistance" of the social subjects; rather, we emphasize the way in which hegemonic dispositives interact with specific historical-social contexts, with civic traditions and networks of local relationships and meanings. The interstitial spaces left free from market’s direct influence are fields of the agency of various historically and territorially rooted actors, irreducible to the dominant logic. The research intends to study these spaces and moments of action (and of “discourse”) not only in their most conscious and explicitly "alternative" emergencies, but also and above all in everyday practices, "resistant” and informal. In particular, the project will go beyond the dichotomy of formal and informal economies. A more detailed and qualitatively articulated knowledge of such practices and dynamics does not have only an intrinsic (for anthropology and geography) descriptive and interpretive value; the project will also provide interesting and original policy tools for the understanding and intervention by the local government institutions (public administrations, trade associations, etc.) and the agencies involved in the management and the promotion of more sustainable foodways.

Total cost: € 715.850,00

MUR contribution: € 590.850,00

MUR contribution to UniMC: € 229.011,00