«C’era due volte» la narrazione: una lettura rodariana delle comunità progettanti lungo le Alpi

[Machine translation] Development, socio-cultural, productive and labor models, together with traditional welfare systems, have experienced, in recent decades, a generalized crisis; a crisis that has affected developing countries as well as the economies of industrialized countries, made more acute by the effects of the pandemic event. Rural areas and areas considered “marginal” — within a logic of centralized and at the same time exclusive socio-economic development — are those most affected [Storti 2016; Carrosio 2019]. , Used as a synonym for agriculture, or even for backwardness, the concept of “rural” has also been identified through other approaches that have chosen its interstitial dimension alongside the micro-collective or sustainable dimension [INSOR 1992]. The result has been definitions that, over time and space, some studies and researches have disavowed or limited because they are not considered suitable to describe the complexity that the rural world brings with it, linked to the multiplicity of variables and projects that, interacting with each other on the territories, help to outline particular paths of local development [Storti 2000]. Descending visions and orientations of public policies, based on top-down methods of support, have helped to generate a progressive erosion and weakening of “marginal” territories through an outflow of human capital and a diversion of economic-financial resources. , The debate on the definition of 'rural' has not been limited to academic literature, but has also given rise to various lines of investigation developed at institutional level. Thanks to the impetus given by the European Union in this context, the identification of rural has in fact become an issue that is also politically relevant, in the sense that it is necessary as a basis for formulating specific development policies and identifying the areas receiving the interventions. , Geography assumes, in this scenario, a role of increasing importance in order to dedicate investigations and reflections to “broken territories”, in order to explore and question rural territories in all their physical and anthropogenic aspects, as well as relational and dynamic [Jánica and Palumbo 2019]. In this perspective, rural areas in transition occupy a marginality that brings to light proactive peripheral areas; the suburbs often constitute contexts of innovation and transformation, fertile ecosystems for developing projects that cross sectors. They represent places of choice in which to observe the action of unprecedented partnerships between associations, informal groups, social enterprises, local authorities, citizens [CAU 2016]. The processes of depopulation, rarefaction of services, impoverishment of the social fabric, undoubtedly extended and common to many Italian and European peripheral areas, especially less close to urban centers, are counterbalanced by motivated, organized communities focused on the same recovery objectives, which read opportunities and opportunities for relaunch in the post-Covid-19 phases [Cois and Pacetti, 2020]., Processes of reappropriation and reinterpretation of what are recognized as common goods and identity [SSG 2016] pass through diversified experiences based on the adoption of different tools, sometimes integrated with each other, ranging from maps to community cooperatives, from ecomuseums to community walks, from festivals to rural film or music festivals. Added to them, in a logic of new livability of villages and internal areas as conditions for new citizenship, grafts and proposals aimed at a reasoned use of technology to offer services to the person (e.g. proximity services, security, telemedicine, oriented to the inhabitants as well as to visitors or those who come from outside). Rural areas are, in fact, exposed to flows of mobility of resources and people that modify their trajectories and mix up social strata (local inhabitants, migrants, new farmers, second-home residents, tourists, digital nomads, etc.) different in class and age; from the possibility of exchanging information and establishing unprecedented alliances, interesting participatory and shared projects are born. These dynamics have also affected the Alps, where you can find examples and cases that can become an s-objective reference for the analysis and coding of the participatory approach [Cerutti 2019]., In this framework, the chapter aims to narrate the events, objectives and outcomes of three different projects carried out in the Ligurian and Piedmontese mountains, highlighting the different tools used, with strength, unity and foresight, by the communities that live and operate in these contexts. The objective of the chapter is to highlight how “Rodarian logic”, understood as a “grammar” of participatory design creativity, can be adopted as a qualitative methodological filter to analyze these initiatives and to achieve two fundamental objectives: to find, along the perimeters and within the same marginal areas, the pressures and energies of rebirth/restart; to identify approaches and tools that can be replicated in similar contexts, in which communities are the protagonists of a living and vital narrative. The explanation of the title and the adoption of a “Rodarian” point of view make it possible to draw some (non) conclusions - presented in the last paragraph - and to emphasize the need to name and re-name resources and ideas to keep small municipalities and Alpine territories alive, full of changing, co-creative, collective and fascinating stories and geographies.