Il paesaggio, tessera mancante nella nozione di milieu

Exit from the union between Fordism and Keynesianism has been accompanied by the rediscovery of the meso-economic dimension, which is representative of the system of extra-market relations favourable to the ‘production’ and diffusion of knowledge and innovation. What distinguishes the notion of milieu from other contiguous notions that aim to explain the specific outcome of the meso dimension is the importance it attributes to the role of the structural components and the connected generative power in collective learning processes. The singular circumstance that the interpretation of milieu given by regional science does not mention the Durkheim’s seminal notion suggests the usefulness of a comparative examination. The outcome is that, whilst both notions converge towards a common representation, they both stop at the threshold of a key notion − landscape − with critical consequences at the interpretative and the normative level.