Ricerche in corso Current Researches

ABSTRACT

Today, the complexity of territorial transformation and the extension of local/global relationship needs a revision of planning methodologies and instruments, above all a revision of knowledge and communication tools. Then, we can say that cognitive and communicative instruments are the first step in a democratic government of territorial transformation.
My contribution starts from the valuation that conservation of the cultural heritage has become an important issue of international significance. There is a growing demand for building tools and trained professionals who have the skills to identify the heritage resources and to ensure that they are useful for planning. The premise that creative conservation can only be achieved through economic viability and accountability runs through the research.
The research explores good practices in interpretative planning (considered in the contexts of recreation management, tourism, education and museums) and presents a case study in Sicily (the Eolie Islands' Heritage Plan) that is able to conjugate heritage knowledge with development planning, using some "interpretation frameworks" and didactic systems, continuously updating. The waiting results concern the ways and the tools with which cultural heritage's policy could become a base for the "citizenship rights" that characterised the most recent activity of the European Community. The aim is to connect knowledge and participation's needs with tools, methods and policies of a planning able to be effective because based on shared values, heritage's elements and local identity.

INTRODUCTION: Reinterpreting territorial development.

Development divorced from its cultural context is destined to grow without a soul. Economic, social and spatial development in its full flowering is part of a people's culture. A more conventional view regards cultural heritage as either a help or a hindrance to economic development, leading to the call to take "cultural factors into account in development". Cultural heritage, therefore, however important it may be as an instrument of development (or an obstacle to development), cannot ultimately be reduced to a subsidiary position as a mere promoter of (or an impediment to) economic growth. Cultural heritage's role is not exhausted as a servant of ends - though in a narrower sense of the concept this is one of its roles - but is the social basis of the ends themselves. Development and the economy are part of a people's culture and they are based on cultural resources.
Both culture and development have become variable concepts, with an elusive and sometimes bewildering variety of meanings. For our present purpose, however, we can confine ourselves to viewing development in two different ways. According to one view, development is a process of eco-nomic growth, a rapid and sustained expansion of production, productivity and income per head (sometimes qualified by insistence on a wide spread of the benefits of this growth). Development is seen as a process that enhances the effective freedom of the people involved to pursue whatever they have reason to value. This view of human development (in contrast to narrowly economic development) is a culturally conditioned view of economic and social progress. Poverty of a life, in this view, implies not only lack of essential goods and services, but also a lack of opportunities to choose a fuller, more satisfying, more valuable and valued existence. The choice can also be for a different style of development, a different path, based on different values from those of the highest income countries now. The recent spread of democratic institutions, of market choices, of participatory management of firms, has enabled individuals and groups and different cultures to choose for themselves.
This dual role of culture (background of identity and tool for development) applies not only in the context of the promotion of economic growth, but also in relation to other objectives, such as sustaining the physical environment, preserving family values, protecting civil institutions in a society, and so on. We cannot begin to understand the so-called "cultural dimension of development" without taking note of each of these two roles of culture.
Human development as defined above refers to the individual human being, who is both the ultimate objective of development and one of the most important instruments or means to it. Culture and cultural heritage then is not a means to material progress: it is the end and aim of "development" seen as the flourishing of human existence in all its forms and as a whole.
It is for this reason that attempts to make cultural heritage a qualifier of development, as in the notion of "culturally sustainable" development, must be undertaken with great care. It should not be interpreted in such a way as to confine cultural heritage to the role of an element that "sustains" some other objective; nor should it be defined so as to exclude the possibility that the culture can grow and develop. It should not be given an excessively conservationist meaning. Unlike the physical environment, where we dare not improve on the best that nature provides, culture is the fountain of our progress and creativity. Once we shift our attention from the purely instrumental view of culture to awarding it a constructive, constitutive and creative role, we have to see development in terms that include cultural growth.