S.O.U.T.H. - Sustainable Outcomes in the Upscaling of Tourism and Heritage: Community Engagement and Governance in Southern Italy
Progetto The S.O.U.T.H. research aims to explore, elaborate and apply innovative and
resilient ways to recognize, adapt and enhance both cultural and natural
heritage in Southern Italy, in the new environmental, social, and economic
conditions imposed by urbanization processes, climate change and recent
global crises.
The territorial context of Southern Italy is assumed in the project not just as
a simple geographical area, but rather a complex ³heriWage diVpoViWiYe´: a
territorial system characterized by shared phenomena and local specificities
that, now more than ever, need to be studied and addressed in an integrated,
multidisciplinary, and structural way. Promoting the comparison between
different traditions, methods and tools, and working on a methodological
structure organized over Work Packages (WPs), S.O.U.T.H. aims to propose
strategies, visions and projects for a territory understood as a complex
system, composed of both consolidated and new features and relationships,
while promoting a resilient approach and triggering forms of active
involvement of local communities and stakeholders.
This project proposes some pilot field research as contexts in which different
active research methodologies will be tried out, aimed at testing practices
that can potentially be replicated in other territories. The main focus in an
active perspective of the research will be the creation or the enhancing of
links between the tourists, the locals and the place has as a precondition to
strengthen the bonds between the inhabitants and their territorial heritage.
In order to do this, the project is structured around two main interconnected
moments, namely: 1) the creation of a Lab Platform, a space where the UdRs
and the stakeholders involved can confront each other and act on the
territories. The Lab will be qualified as an interactive and innovative tool for
the research, action, monitoring and participatory governance; 2) the
development of a shared Agenda of visions, policies, and sustainable actions
oriented to the definition of a real public-private governance both horizontal
(local actors, associations, public administrations) and vertical (between
different administrative sectors).
The three UdRs have already undertaken several studies concerning the
development of tourism strategies in Southern Italy and want to actively
participate to boost the involvement of local actors in some territorial areas,
where economic activities and governance actions stagnate and need to be
strengthened, also from the point of view of what is hypothesized in the
PNRR. More specifically, the actions to be undertaken in this research
project are mainly related to two components of two different missions of
the PNRR: Mission 1, Component 3, "Tourism and Culture 4.0"; Mission 5,
Component 3, "Special Interventions for Territorial Cohesion".