Architectural Heritage and Digital Transition: Intangible Components as Regeneration Infrastructure for Inner Rural Areas

Abstract

Architectural heritage (AH) located in inner rural areas, hardly accessible and sparsely populated, requires specific preservation actions to enhance its systemic role as a development vector. The digital transition, promoted through global, European, and national strategies, represents, in this sense, an opportunity and a challenge. The fragile equilibrium between AH and its environmental and cultural context requires to deal both with its tangible and intangible components. The chapter tackles this problem, providing a methodological framework and a case study (Calascio, Italy) about the use of digital technologies to enhance accessibility and attractiveness of AH in inner rural areas, through a sustainable, participatory, and low-impact approach. GIS methods and tools permit integrating physical-spatial data with several intangible information levels (social, historical, cultural, etc.), building up a collaborative, multidisciplinary, and transcalar base of knowledge. Thus, intangible heritage recovery, in the form of digital narratives, is systematized with the design of AH access and fruition paths, emphasizing its connections (spatial and temporal) with the context and activating both attractive mechanisms for external temporary communities (tourists, students, researchers) and new awareness of the place's cultural value in the local community, with the aim of encouraging participatory processes of preservation and sustainable development.