Cultural Districts for heritage: a participatory model for the territory of Mantova

The cultural district, in Italy, is a participatory and collaborative model for the management and enhancement of cultural and environmental resources at a territorial scale. In particular, in 2011 a bank Foundation (Fondazione Cariplo) has supported the studies for ten proposals and afterwards the activation of six cultural districts in Northern Italy. For this Foundation the cultural district is a territory in which there are numerous pieces of heritage and of landscape, services and productive activities in synergy one with the others. In this scenario, a group of researchers of Laboratorio TEMa (Politecnicodi Milano) has participated to the definition and activation of two cultural districts in the area of Mantova (cultural district DOMinUS and cultural district Le Regge dei Gonzaga) and, after a start up period, the group is working on their transformation in permanent organizations. Starting from a common bottom-up approach, these two example has been developed following different organization and management models according to the specific local opportunities and resources, to administrative and cultural peculiarities, and also to a diverse participative model. The paper describes the opportunities of local development related to the application of the cultural district model and analyzes the two case studies to stress the different approaches, their limits and strengths.