Gabriele Di Francesco

The themes of local growth and social planning, always the centre of sociological reflection and research, are tackled in diachronic perspective through theoretical and methodological considerations and explanatory examples that, beginning from the Enlightenment paradigm, succeed to outline the existing and potential planning scenarios, connected to relational patterns of participation in management. The essay proposes different social-historical analysis, related to the origin and the development of local communities on territory, and it tries to explain them, combining their creation, the most of time utopian, with the social planning processes. In this context the sociologist is qualified as a professional researcher who participates to planning, indispensable in identifying and describing meaningful leading indicators of development process in their relational evolution.