Branding4Resilience: Explorative and Collaborative Approaches for Inner Territories

Abstract

This article analyzes inner and marginal territories in four Italian peripheral contexts by first discussing some of the results and future steps of the “B4R Branding4Resilience” research project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Research from 2020 to 2023. The overall research is based on three phases: (1) the exploration phase to analyze socio-economic data and territorial dynamics; (2) the co-design phase involving local actors to develop ideas for a selected pilot case; (3) the co-visioning phase where a future transformative perspective for the whole area was shared with the institutions. The article focuses on phase 1 and presents some first results achieved by the application of a methodological approach based on the integration of different qualitative and quantitative tools and methods. The results outline the exploration of the four selected territories through data analyses and mapping, perceptive-narrative explorations, field research, and explorative designs. The concept of peripherality is addressed in a critical way, trying to go beyond standardized definitions, including interdisciplinarity as an essential tool for territorial enhancement and branding. The main interpretation findings not only outline possible strategies and actions for the four analyzed inner territories, but also foster the application of the proposed methodological approach in other complex socio-economic contexts.

Territorial Digital Twins: A key for increasing the community resilience of fragile mountain inner territories?

“…The first example includes some reflections from the “B4R Branding4Resilience” project (PRIN 2017 – Young Line, 2020–2023), linked to an on‐going doctoral research conducted at the University of Trento. The B4R project investigates the use of tourist infrastructure as a tool to promote sustainable development in small inner villages (Figure 1b, study area 1) by drawing resilient communities and new open habitats and asks if this can foster new polycentric settlement models in fragile rural‐urban contexts (Ferretti et al, 2022). Within this framework, the PhD research adopts an innovative cross‐sectoral approach to develop and test a virtual‐physical system supporting landscape planning and design by focusing on the context of the Val di Sole: an Alpine valley in the Trentino‐Alto Adige region, which coincides with the homonymous inner area in the SNAI (Favargiotti et al, 2022).…”

“…These activities jointly aim to tackle territorial imbalances by developing a collaborative online platform which incrementally builds on bottom‐up data and local views to support ideas' exchange around tourism management and infrastructure between private stakeholders, public decision‐makers, and the people (Ferretti et al, 2022).…”

“…The Val di Sole is assumed as the testbed for the use of emerging models in landscape digital representation to support information management activities relevant to planning and urban design. This is achieved through the integration of heterogeneous research methods and analysis techniques from landscape architecture and digital modelling, following the multi‐disciplinary and multi‐level methodological approach of the B4R project (Ferretti et al, 2022). The core research activities, shared by each of the four B4R research units focusing on different Italian inner mountain areas, have been organised in the following three main phases, reflecting as many methodological aspects and outputs: Exploration.…”

Integration of Public Perception in the Assessment of Licensed Solar Farms: A Case Study in Greece

“…For example, some types of questions were considered too difficult by some respondents because of a lack of knowledge and capacity to spatialize and visualize the questions. This limitation could be overcome by experimenting with other types of interactions with the citizens; for example, co-visioning [84] or q-sorting [47,48] could be valid alternatives.…”

Reactivating Built Heritage with Shared, Creative, and Transcalar Approaches: An Exploration of the Marche Apennine Inner Area

“…Beyond touristic enhancement, branding starts from identity values, intrinsic qualities, and unexpressed potentials to propose a more structural and resilient transformation of the territory, and connects the idea of heritage reactivation to the one of place-making in a multidisciplinary, transcalar, and multilevel process. In the B4R project, communities are essential to recognize, transform, and take care of local values and built heritage, and thus become a key player in the process [18].…”