Exploring the Resilience of Inner Areas: A Cross-Dimensional Approach to Bring Out Territorial Potentials

Abstract

Italian Inner Areas are fragile territories often lacking in essential services and thus characterized by depopulation and degrade. In recent years, an innovative national policy, the National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI), funded 72 pilot cases to enhance their natural and cultural resources, counteracting marginalization and demographic decline. With the aim of bringing out territorial potentials, the paper started from an in-depth literature review, highlighting that resilience is widely dealt with at urban scale, neglecting -above all- remote and marginal territories. In order to bridging this gap, authors propose a 6-phases methodological approach to study different contexts through a quantitative analysis based on specific indicators. Shifting from the mono-dimensional approach (focused on vulnerabilities), the use of cross-dimensional indexes is suggested to explore territorial vulnerability and vibrancy (intended as local trigger to development and renewal). The selected case study is “Branding4Resilience” research project, where 4 Italian fragile areas were explored to define new resilient scenarios for local development. The results showed that the proposed approach effectively support the territory exploration and lay the ground for future evaluations useful also to better address specific local policies.