The paper proposed employs data from a research on (1335) private-law companies owned by municipalities in six Italian regions: information about their field of activity (including, but not limited to, public utilities and social services), their size and location, and their ownership structures, will indicate to what extent municipalities are exploring new forms of interaction and hybridization with the private sphere, or reinterpreting the public. Many municipalities create companies simply to carry out their institutional tasks, many do it for intermunicipal cooperation, others use private-law companies to get private actors, or other public actors, involved in a partnership.
These different forms of cooperation will be explored by looking at the diffusion of such companies, the amount of resources mobilized, the territorial distribution, the fields of activity and the structure of companies. Besides offering a rich and innovative descriptive contribution, the analysis will also contribute to the discussion of the reasons why, and the ways in which, private actors are involved in municipal government, and public bodies take on the corporate structure as their operating model.
