Voices from the villages: non-urban territories facing post-COVID recovery

This chapter aims at contributing to the debate with a voice from the non-urban territories. Non-urban territories are almost always scrutinized standing from an urban point of view: a consequence is that they are usually defined with negatives adjectives, such as marginal, inner, peripheral and so on. The contribution proposes a narrative in which the voices of the non-urban territories are represented by someone who lives (works, has been educated, etc.) far from the urban poles, in the “provincia” in Italian. While showing the complexity of territories that go beyond the urban/non-urban dichotomy, the text scrutinizes a few aspects of the relationships among non-urban and urban territories as to the governance of the territorial policies and with respect to the impact of the pandemic crisis. It discusses whether the policy response and design during and after pandemics was affected by an over-representation of urban territories compared with non-urban territories.