Dalla grande impresa al distretto polivalente: il caso di Bassano del Grappa

The issue of industrial districts, after the acdemic luck of the last two decades of the last century, has vecome somehow obsolete following the transformations of the economic context and its consequent decline as a development model. This paper reconstructs the history of a "multi-purpose district" that grew up around Bassano del Grappa in the second half of the 20th century. The city underwent a transformation from an industrial town in a rural setting into the service center for a wide industrialised area. The mechanisms underlying this change allow to question and clarify some contradictions in the sociological interpretation of industrial districts. The industrialisation of the surrounding area could parallel the crisis of the largest factory in the city thanks to the technological expertise built within the latter, which allowed the the local production of specialized machine tools to mechanise traditional sectors. On the other hand, the peasant origin of small entrepreneurship is explained by an original "accumulation of capital" resulting from the indiscriminate conversion of poor farmland into building plots used as a collateral to obtain funding when starting a business.