LIBRI DI GIOVANNI PIERETTI

Social Work and Territory. Italian Social Affairs transferred to Regional Level: what changes in the Social Work? is a project financed by Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Universistà e della Ricerca”, that involves eight Universities (Bologna, Catania, Macerata, Napoli, Sassari, Siena, Trento, Trieste). The local projects analyse the role of Social Work in this stage of promotion of regional policies in their typical contexts, where the formation of Social Worker rises as a central aspect. The territorial dimension, the organization and the management are very important, as law, administrative and project policies too. The effects on the interactions between public and private sectors and on the role of voluntary and Third Sector are very interesting, specially regarding their support activities for public policies.

Hidden needs, i.e. those needs that though present in the territory are not per-ceived by the institutions, have become more and more a crucial issue in the pre-sent discussion going on in Italy on the aims and tasks of the social services, espe-cially after the passing of the Act 328/2000. Even if the social services addressing elderly people are in fact rather well structured if we compare them to other branches of the social services, still action here is often taken assuming that the expressed demand for services is equal to and the same as the potential demand for services. Several research works conducted in the past already proved that, in a variety of different territorial realities, this does not apply. Our essay presents the results of a research study carried out on this topic in the Municipality of Riccione. The idea upon which such work was based is that more relevance should be granted to the abstract needs of elderly people. According to this standpoint, the local gov-ernmental social services should therefore stop acting as an opposed agent with respect to the world of private associations and social cooperatives and set as a priority the following goals: first of all to reach out for those elderly citizens who do not go by themselves to the services to express their needs, and then next to figure out and link together all the resources present in the territory, giving special value to those persons who could help first read and then also answer the hidden needs of their territory, that is to say those needs for which the traditional welfare strategies of health and social assistance have proved to be no longer adequate or efficient.

Based on research work on a new establishment area near Bologna, the present paper shall deal with a common dream of architects, urbanists and their customers: their shared idea of the perfect city which can be thoroughly planned, their utopia of the new city as it can be observed in the Disney Celebration and in every CID. These realities do not differ much from the urban way of life described by L. Wirth: it is right there that homogeneity and differentiation coexist and become one, thus producing the very distinguishing factor of urbanism as a way of life. Generally speaking, in many periurban areas as well as in the CIDs and in the Gated Communities, there is an attempt to reproduce all the positive aspects of urbanism, while trying to avoid, or at least hide, all the difficulties and negative sides it entails. As Guidicini has long suggested, this approach reaches its highest peak in the rationalism of Le Corbusier. It is therefore possible to see a connecting line along the main stream of rationalism, which affected New Towns and Garden Towns in the past, as well as it nowadays affects the Common Interest Developments, of which the one examined is one significant example.

While there is no doubt that the homeless, those living in extreme urban poverty, undergo forms of vulnerability, this paper puts forward the hypothesis that today new subjects are exposed to this phenomenon: part of the middle classes, who have expectations of a high and steady income and consumption, living in the non-place of the Americanized periurban belt. Due to a lack of moral life and normative orientation, people belonging to this social group can «crack» when confronted with the smallest problem, as they have no ability to face sacrifices and frustrations. Their relationship with space is symbolically disconnected, and such inhabitants of the periurban belts are unable to build «mental maps» which would allow them to make sense of their territory.