Artisans’ Land Access Challenges and Proposed Municipal Solutions

Once, all artisans started out in a hole under their house, cellar, or barn, managing somehow until their activity grew enough to move on to something better. With the enactment of Law 626, they would have ended up in prison. Like many other aspects of the past, that kind of craftsmanship has become a memory of times gone by.

It is obvious that the trade association expected a timely response from the public authority. The municipality of Riva, on the Fangolino area, did not provide one. The president, Tosi, is disappointed as he leaves at the end of the evening. He is disappointed because the association and the administrators—everyone in the same boat, including the mayor, the city council, the majority, and the opposition—speak entirely different languages.

Yet, the solution is simple. Today, when artisans want space to work, they can only turn to the market, controlled by the usual three entrepreneurs. The requests are around 1.8 million lire per square meter on the ground floor, rising to three million with the second floor. An industrial shed costs, to build, from 6 to 8 hundred thousand lire per square meter.

Instead of paying and remaining silent as they always have, artisans would have preferred that, as happens elsewhere (including Arco), the municipality—considered a productive area—would have bought the land, equipped it, and resold it to artisans as needs arose, without the profit margins characteristic of private initiatives.

Starting next year, this kind of operation can be carried out directly by the province. The association is engaged in a series of contacts with Tecnofin to even reach the possibility of leasing the warehouses to young artisans who cannot afford billion-lira investments at the start of their activities.

Proposals and challenges regarding industrial urban planning

This approach—buying areas, subdividing them, and reselling—represents, according to the association, a genuine policy in favor of craftsmanship. But no one has discussed this. This eventuality was not even considered. It is not a matter of one more or one less hectare when the land remains ultimately in the hands of private entrepreneurs who build to profit from it.

It was not about that: but that is all that was discussed.