Socio-cultural hybrid spaces and the Smart Villages methodology: the case study of LAG Escartons and Valli Valdesi.

The present thesis deals with the issue of peripheral areas development: being commonly represented as sub-urban territorial appendices, their endogenous capital has been long underrated. The over-valorization of urban centers as the political, social, cultural, and economic hubs has led to a progressive overshadowing of peripheral areas, which have been increasingly abandoned by their inhabitants and felt as scarcely attractive to potential new settlers. The present analysis attempt to present an alternative paradigm for the development of peripheral areas in Italy: if it’s true that we as author deeply believe in the necessity of a new enhancement of areas considered marginal if compared to urban centers, we also hardly believe that a top-down policy approach might be beneficial to this process. For this reason, we aim to propose the European LEADER approach as an alternative policy operational paradigm for program development in rural areas: we firmly believe that only by engaging with the local communities it would be possible to transform the macro-level objective identified by the PAC into operative and effective programs. And even beyond this, we sustain that the ultimate key to sustainable, long-lasting, and holistic rural development is the empowerment of local communities. We conceive European institutions as enablers of the local inhabitants of each country: rather than centralized power structures with rigid administrative procedures, we’d like to present the European bodies as not only legal institutions but as social and relational capital builder opportunities. In this sense we aim at humanizing the European Common Agricultural Policy (PAC), demonstrating the European Union has provided within it a broad set of tools to translate their policy objective into community-led local development initiatives. The area chosen for the analysis is the Western part of the Piedmont region, with its different landscapes, resources, and opportunities. However, we have gradually witnessed the progressive abandonment of the rural areas of the region and its contemporary gentrification of an urban center, mainly the city of Turin. Only during the pandemic this tendency has slightly reduced: the experience of COVID-19 has in fact given us the opportunity to completely rethink our way of life, both in the working and non-working domain. Our primary desire is thus to present how it is possible to invert the current tendency concerning the Piedmont peripheral areas by riding the wave of one of the main effects of the pandemic, being the shift from office-based work to remote-working modality. We believe that this might be a great redemption opportunity for rural areas, to both reassert their intrinsic value and to overcome their development issues. We furthermore aim to do it by empowering the local Piedmont rural communities, which is why we have chosen the LAG Escartons & Valli Valdesi project. By starting from the European Smart Villages methodology, the LAG EVV is in the process of realizing a network of co-working spaces in its territory: these co-working spaces are aimed to be set up in strict collaboration with the local communities. The local inhabitants are expected to be the ones realizing, managing, and animating these co-working spaces. Furthermore, their possible elevated social impact on the area makes them the perfect opportunity for the LAG EVV to conceive these co-working spaces as hybrid spaces from the very beginning: coherently with the Smart Village framework, the co-working spaces are expected to become social innovation hubs, local antennas for both the LAG EVV and local inhabitants to increase their social, cultural, professional, political and even economic capital. Said this, the project proposed by the LAG EVV is the best synthesis of all the relevant topics that will be treated in the present analysis.