Cultural practices for territorial cohesion

Abstract

In the context of an overall trend of global unification, we are witnessing an increase in territorial inequalities that see cities grow and flourish at the expense of territories increasingly seen as marginal, fragile, and often the object of extraction of human and material resources. Within this picture, various attempts, political, academic or applied, move in the direction of overcoming the urban-rural binomial and attempt to give a new centrality to marginal territories based on the local cultural (festivals, residential artistic productions or regenerated spaces) or ecosystemic (biophysical, aesthetic, educational or recreational) assets that characterise them. Through the examination of Borgofuturo, an experience of cultural regeneration in the inland Le Marche region, we analyse how giving support to situated cultural practices can create fruitful relations and long-lasting processes which enable these territories to overturn dominant narratives of territorial polarisation and of value extraction, giving cultural actors a new leading role in discourses and policies of society-territory co-evolution.