This paper develops the distinctive concept of the grounded city, drawing on historical insights from Tilly and Braudel to argue that the development of cities can be analysed through specific accelerators and stabilisers. The city is grounded through its relation with a hinterland which provides resources and revenues and thus governs city development. The nature of any hinterland is as much political and social, as economic and helps explain the specific forms of city development and decline. In modern cities property development is an increasingly important accelerator which shapes what is built and where. At the same time, the foundational economy -which meets the everyday needs of citizens for housing, utilities, food and mobility -is a stabilizer providing large scale employment but one that is vulnerable to financialisation. The grounded city therefore provides an alternative view of city dynamics to the competitive city; and its implications for policy suggest a direct focus on controllable internal accelerators and stabilisers to improve the quality of foundational provision to improve welfare, rather than a promoting a view of cities competing for resources to pursue success through agglomeration.

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In the Leader approach, innovation plays a key role in European territories, especially in marginal and peripheral ones, being essentially assumed, from a programmatic point of view, as social innovation. This paper aims to understand the interpretation and the declination of innovation in the practice of Leader initiative at local scale and analyze contextual factors related to its implementation in two southern provinces of Spain and Italy (Granada and Lecce). The study aims to analyze the projects reported as innovative by the leaders of the Local Action Groups, starting from the literature and using a key Community document entitled “Extended report on preserving the innovative character of LEADER”. Lastly, the study reveals common significant problems linked to local awareness of the role of social innovation, as well as the absence or limitations of key institutions.

Mots clés : Gouvernement d'entreprise, structure financière, stratégie et performance.

Innovation in rural development in Puglia, Italy: critical issues and potentialities starting from empirical evidenceSince the 1990s, innovation has been recognised as having a key role in the development and competitiveness of European rural territories. In particular, in the LEADER approach, innovation is seen in social and cultural terms rather than as a technological issue, but it has been interpreted by national and, above all, local policies almost exclusively in the latter sense. Especially at local level, often a 'productivist' approach emerges that in many cases reveals deeply-rooted conservativeness in the planning and implementation of programmes. Puglia, a NUTS 2 region in southern Italy, acknowledges the key role of innovation in rural development and invested a bigger share of funding in Axes III and IV of Pillar 2 of the Common Agricultural Policy in the 2007-2013 programming cycle than did the other Italian regions. This study examines the regional case in two interconnected stages to identify fi rstly the interpretation of innovation from the programmatic and operative points of view, and secondly, the needs and critical issues in terms of innovation in governance on the local scale through interviews with stakeholders from a representative LAG named 'Terra dei Messapi'. It reveals not only a marked disparity in the way innovation was interpreted, but also the limitations and critical issues in planning and in regional and local governance, which prove unable to embrace innovation affecting social and institutional processes and, more generally, processes related to the context.

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