Today we publish the first part of the interview with Sergio Gallo, a graduate in Management for International and Governmental Organisations, who dedicated his Thesis to I.T.I. and our Smart Land In Valmalenco project.
- How did you get to know CISA and what prompted you to delve into the topics we deal with?
I got to know CISA in my professional career at REFE and, in particular, the reasons why I decided to do a Thesis on Integrated Territorial Investments are essentially two.
Firstly, the fact that it is a model that I had never heard of before and that, at the beginning of my research, did not have much relevance in practice. In fact, the I.T.I., as an instrument introduced by the European Union, is defined rather vaguely and can therefore be applied in many ways depending on the specificities of the territories. So let’s say that there was no standard model, I appreciated it and found it useful for society, besides being objectively an interesting idea in terms of business strategy.
The second reason is that it is a new collaboration model, scalable and with an important territorial dimension also in terms of level of impact, an interesting and functional model that therefore lent itself well to a Thesis for a degree course in Management for international and governmental organisations.
- What does developing a territory mean to you?
I didn’t have a vision of territorial development before I got to know CISA and started my research for the Thesis by delving into the literature (which is not strictly academic because it is a very new discipline, so the materials came from different sources, mainly official documents). So I started from there, because I did not have my own vision of what it means to develop a territory. The nice thing, however, was to find in the theoretical approach a coherence between the model you propose and develop on territories and those characteristics that had been identified in the literature from 10 years ago up to the documents published in 2023.
The convergence of these things then created what is now for me my conception of the development of a territory, which starts from an undeniable observation: sustainable development. We talk a lot about this concept today, but a development model that is truly sustainable must achieve impact where it can maximise it. This means acting on increasingly smaller territorial scales because we have so much planning and so many strategies that are, however, written, elaborated and thought out at international and national levels, after which there is a cascade of implementation levels in which all this vision runs the risk of being lost or in any case fragmented. We have a development model, but we do not have development: that is to say, concretely, the territories remain stationary at fifteen years ago. Therefore, for me, developing a territory essentially means fighting the inequalities that in today’s world have a precise geographical distribution and that persist between territories, between nations, between regions, within the same region and within the same province (banally with the gap that exists between urban areas, which are now pursuing models of sustainable development at a somewhat more sustained pace, and the more peripheral areas, the rural areas, which instead remain fairly static). The territorial dimension of sustainable development must therefore, in my opinion, necessarily take these into account because no one should feel the need to leave home.
Everything must be born and evolve according to a territory, the people who inhabit it and the relationship between these two.
I fell in love with this vision also because of my personal past as a Palermo resident: I come from a big city and a fairly wealthy background, but I still felt the need to leave, which cost me a lot from a psychological and emotional point of view, as well as economically. This is not because I couldn’t survive otherwise, but because I didn’t see the opportunity, and still don’t see it today, to develop a career as I had envisaged it and in the sector I had envisaged, for the simple fact that that market is not there… if conditions were different I would come back, even before long.
In order to develop a territory today, the objective must be to understand these dynamics, to take full advantage of all the economic and strategic opportunities present at national and international level, but planning for and with the territories and the communities that inhabit them, supporting the Administrations.
It is the latter, in fact, that play a key and central role in bringing a territory’s development to fruition: development can only occur fully if the Administrations that manage it are put in a position to continue to do so ‘autonomously’, supported always by their network of stakeholders but without having to depend on a private partner, except for an initial period of know-how transfer.
