Intelligenza territoriale e partecipazione.Territorial Intelligence and Participation

Contemporary sociological observation has placed under discussion not only the idea of society as defined in the past, but also the idea of the possibility of every cultural reference, including the close correspondence between social, cultural and personality dimensions: the world of business relations has lost its own unity, with its members being dragged into a modernity that is characterised by an obsequious de-socialisation as well as, in contrast, belonging to separate identities (and often separatist), mistakenly interpreted as the abilities of connecting and conserving the union of culture and personality. Nowadays, society is considered to be a pure system of functioning and func- tional objects and structures and, in dependence of these, as a system of individuals that are perceived “together” and contemporarily “isolated”: the freedom of the in- dividual is identified as an egocentric “individualisation” or with an annihilation in submission to a world without “subjectivity”. Attention to the person and his harmonious collocation within the different socio-cultural contexts proposes to modern sociology the need to emphasize its own sensitivity towards relationships based on values perceived as truly “collec- tive” as well as on processes of making individuals responsible for the construction of a “sense of us”. This therefore requires it to create interpretative categories which can be collocated between the holistic and individual dimensions. Social analysis requires an articulation that can be called its own, with it no longer being constituted as a product of a “vision from above”, but implies that, with the aim of an effective interpretation of the social events, the work of observa- tion starts from the “bottom” of the “critical” elements of social relationships, of “discarded worlds” or marginalised by general sociological analysis