Geografie di prossimità. Prove sul terreno.

The book is designed around a crucial question in geography: the effectiveness of the proximity analysis to explain successes and failures in local and regional projects of development. Economic geographers commonly carry out studies about the role of proximity in the establishment and evolution of industrial clusters. It’s less common to find social geographers, as the authors, committed on the issue of proximity not just by an economic perspective. The volume is divided in two parts. The first explains the role of proximity in designing and implementing fieldwork research: how do geographers approach the fieldwork? The second part concerns the analysis of the proximity configurations effects on the success or failure of the selected case studies. On the ground of Boschma’s studies, we deal with five types of proximity: geographical, social, institutional, organizational and cognitive. Deepening the issue we tried to identify the intersections among different proximity and again the results on the projects outcomes. The selected case studies regard issues from our research in Sahelian Africa (agriculture investments), the venetian SME delocalization process (to Romania) and the Po Delta (environmental projects).