The commissioner is not the main way to secure the land

The bad weather, in one of the richest and most inhospitable parts of the country, would not have had such disastrous effects had it not been facilitated by the ‘illness of the land’. Abused land, not considered a public good, but a low-priced resource, merely a support base for economic and social activity, space to be occupied by houses, villas, sheds, buildings, networks of roads, highways and intersections. Instead of being concerned with the quality of development, at a certain point, as markets expanded, a preoccupation with quantity took hold: increasing production, exploiting the soil, and consuming above all limits of cement and asphalt. “Planning by doing,” a form of laissez-faire applied to urban planning and land management, has replaced the old spatial planning with results before our eyes.

Despite the landscape of flooded cities and countryside, there is a lack of awareness of the climate crisis. When the President of Emilia-Romagna insists, in every televised appearance, on the extraordinary nature of the flood, he is in effect minimizing the greenhouse effect and minimizing the likelihood (certainty, I think) that extreme events are destined to repeat themselves while increasing destructive capacity.

There will be no dams high enough to protect us If we do not urgently intervene in the deep cracks open in the relationship between man, nature and the environment. But in any case, Presidents Meloni and Bonaccini unanimously promised “reconstruction”, guaranteeing everyone compensation, that the state would find the necessary funds and everything would return to the way it was.

Reassuring tunes and arguments, accompanied by an informative chorus that salutes the people of Romania who “don’t cry over themselves and roll up their sleeves.” Stern rhetoric, useful propaganda to convey a sneaky message: to start over where economic and social life left off, hurry up, and return to normal life. As if it weren’t “precisely that normality that doesn’t go wrong”, as Mariana Mazzucato has been warning us for some time (Lo Stato Innovatore, Laterza, 2020).

contrasting side It is the same sense of unity and support that arose from this terrible accident that is being used politically to weaken the discussion about the causes of the disaster, to dampen the protest and extinguish the questions about the wrongs that were committed. There are many leftists who hope that in Romania, the land of strong socialist and republican traditions, there will be a bitter and close showdown over the way the government and the region are preparing to face Reconstruction. It is not clear and automatic that this happens.

In recent decades, the liberal mindset has permeated deeply into the political class and into large parts of society, hence, it must be borne in mind that the people, still grappling with the enormous inconveniences of the emergency, objectively tend to cling to the rescue anchor, whatever it may be. In everyday difficulties and fears for the future, closure prevails in one’s “private”, and intolerance increases towards everything that hinders or slows down the resumption of activities. The competitive spirit replaces solidarity, and collective problems turn into individual dramas.

Helping those who have been damaged or lost everything is out of the questionHowever, it is legitimate to believe that “reconstruction” as a restoration of the previous situation would be a disaster. It might mean legitimizing the possibility of building on riverbanks, diverting watercourses, or expecting places that have found their layout over centuries of history to be modified to his liking.

Nurture and respect for territory, maintenance of rivers and streams, construction of hydraulic forestry works, dams, reservoirs, etc. take a back seat. The appointment of the Commissioner in this sense contradicts the need to assert a new consciousness and a new culture of government. It responds to the categorical imperative to act quickly, not to do well, it takes power away from municipalities, it excludes the sharing of on-site collective intelligence, and it conforms to a policy of continuity, not change.

Local self-government and citizen participation They are the only antidote to the black hole of managing delegates (in its centralized nature). There is a big difference between managing the delegate and managing democratic institutions.

Developing a “plan”, discussing it, sharing it with local communities, and managing it with municipal administrations is one thing, and interventions under the banner of secrecy and abolition of controls are another. The alternative to rebuilding a paradigm that has shown all its weaknesses can only be the right to self-government, the fight against false myths about speed and quantity, and the resumption of social conflict.