Reconstruction after an Earthquake: Learning from the Past. The Case Study of Emilia-Romagna

The earthquake that in 2012 hit the Emilian plain - on the border with Veneto and Lombardy - was one of the biggest in the recent history of Italy. In Emilia, the reconstruction was able to reconnect people and places, mobilizing resources that in that territory, in ordinary times, were in fact latent. Moreover, such an extraordinary action was able to orient the system along new trajectories of development, accelerating those very processes of transformation that were already in motion before the occurrence of the 2012 earthquake. Both the case of the biomedical sector in the Mirandola area, which was the closest to the epicentres and the case of the agri-food sector represent leading examples of such a local capacity. Yet, the process of reconstruction in Emilia was also marked by light and shadow: some of the organizational innovations, which have represented the distinctive feature of that experience, could have had an even more disruptive effect on the national scene. The paper highlights the characteristics of these important innovations, also pointing out what potential seems not yet to have been exploited.