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Interpretation of territorial interdependences – their consequences for analysis of the trajectories and development potentials of local systems and for public policies –  is the starting point for designing an economic development strategy for the Province of Macerata .

In the early 1950s, the province of Macerata was characterized by a set of “relational densities” which, with a good degree of approximation, could be represented by municipal borders and were administered by municipalities. During the 1950s, in the Province of Macerata – but also in the Marche Region and in most parts of Italy – a “territorial revolution” took place which profoundly  reconfigured territorial interdependences. Large-scale investment in infrastructures, a major rise in car use, marked (in relative terms) increases/decreases in population density, and large-scale building investment generated new polarities and new gravitational patterns.

All this called into question the standard approach, which used municipalities as units of analysis and of territorial governance. New procedures and categories of analysis were introduced in order to shift the focus from individual municipalities to sets of contiguous municipalities so that territorial patterns could be interpreted and territorial policy designed. By formulating the concept of “local system”, analysts and policy makers began to focus on regions encompassing sets of contiguous territorial units.

Devising an economic development strategy for a given territory starting from identification of its structuring into local systems therefore seems to be a necessary step – one already accomplished in other instances of economic and territorial planning. The changes in the Province of Macerata ’s territorial patterns suggest – indeed require – that the issue of identifying the local systems in the Province of Macerata should be addressed.

This is both an analytical and political issue at the same time. It is an analytical issue because identification of the province’s local systems must begin with analysis of the relational interdependencies which have consolidated over the past decades. It is a political issue because when a certain relational uncertainty is observed, identification of the borders of a local system must be matched with a project for territorial organization.