Percorsi deliberativi e democrazia locale: il laboratorio novarese

[Machine translation] The contribution examines the experimentation of deliberative democracy under way in Novara, showing the importance of ties of proximity and social relations in the context of the debate on suburban participation in medium-sized cities after the suppression of districts. In the past, municipal decentralization has coincided with the multiplication of representative offices and with the deployment of city services. Starting from the Novara case, the authors suggest a different path, which looks at the possibility of combining citizen participation with forms of organization that are autonomous but not antagonistic to society aimed at an intervention from below to respond to the concrete needs of the local community, based on the principle of “horizontal subsidiarity”. Such a path, in the opinion of the authors, represents a fundamental element for the success of deliberative democracy processes.