As the concept of “territorial development” is still relatively ambiguous, this thesis proposes both a more rigorous and widerapproach than merely identifying it with the “economic development on a local area”. Our analysis goes through four distinct phases, each ofthem being dealt with in a different chapter.First, a brief historical analysis of relations between economic and political thoughts, in the sense of community affairsmanagement, emphasizes the reasons which allowed the economic sphere to progressively become more and more influential to the point toestablish itself as the finality of development and go over its status of a “tool”. Indeed, upon certain conditions, this shift can be justified,namely in presence of some scarcity of means in order to satisfy one’s own needs.Because making the concept of territorial development rely only on the economic aspect leads to implicitly consider the condition ofscarcity as permanent, we wished to verify if the current approaches to the economic theory were capable of taking into account the affluenceof developed countries. To this purpose, we relaxed the non-satiety hypothesis, which is implicit both in the convexity of the indifferencecurves in microeconomics and in the “psychological law” of Keynes’ General Theory.The extension of the economic theory to the condition of satiety, which was deeply looked into theoretically and checked against thereality all through the thesis, makes us gain a very unusual insight into economic phenomena. And, once the analysis was opened to therelations between different territories, we were able to demonstrate, from a purely economic point of view, the contradictory nature of theeconomic goals of development.Finally, taking territories as “social constructs”, the thesis suggests an alternative proposition, based on the freedoms to be and tomake, and their progressive enlargement, in a way close to Sen’s capability approach, yet not being a reduction of it. The proposed approachcouples coherently the economic and the non-economic spheres, in a development perspective which integrates completely the concept ofsustainability according to the proposition of the Brundtland Report, 1987, and it is summarized by a new synthetic development index, the“development space creation”.
