Socio-ecological infrastructures: rural communities and habitability in Southern Puglia. – This article examines traditional living places and socio-ecological reproduction as infrastructure among farmers practicing natural and regenerative agriculture in Southern Puglia. Exploring intergenerational knowledge, it shows how farmers enhance socio-ecological systems through cooperation with natural laws and refusal of extractivism. Case studies include “Torre dei Mastro” (Castellana Grotte), “Amadeco” (Salento), and neo-farmers in and around the Itria Valley. Findings show how neoliberal threats affect farmers’ capacity to sustain their systems, while double movement, self-governance and self-sustainability emerge, rooted in place-consciousness and autopoiesi. These practices embody restanza, stressing the potential of traditional farming for socio-ecological reproduction and their medium-long term potential socio-territorial change.

Collective land tenures: socio-ecological infrastructures in the mountain territories of l’Aquila, Italy. – This study examines collective land tenures as socio-ecological infrastructures articulating multi-scalar relationships among local communities, rural commons, and mountain governance. Despite extensive dismantling and erasure during the twentieth century, these institutions persist as self-governed systems supported by statutes and assembly-based practices. Drawing on qualitative methods including participant observation, interviews and walking as a research method in the mountain territories of L’Aquila, the research shows how collective land tenures continue to sustain ecological stewardship yet struggle to reproduce civic participation and territorial habitability due to depopulation and the erosion of cultural transmission. Recognizing them as socio-ecological infrastructures highlights their potential for civic regeneration, ecological care, and shared decision-making, offering self-organized responses to contemporary political and socio-ecological challenges in mountain areas.

Rural development and territorial well-being. – The paper analyzes the issue of the relationship between rural development and well-being. Taking into account the multifunctional dimension assumed by rural development over the last few years, the topic of the landscape play a central role. In fact, it is a common good which concerns the settled communities and those who use it. The theme of the rural landscape so connects to the themes of participation and democracy.