The role of landscape design in cultural rural areas. A didactic exercise to experiment a research-by-design process applied to an Italian UNESCO wine site

Rural landscapes all over the world are subject to great transformations, first being the continuous and slow depopulation of towns and villages. It is a dramatic phenomenon that causes devastating consequences for environmental systems and for the tangible and intangible heritage of entire territories. The situation becomes more ambiguous when it comes to cultural landscapes, especially those internationally recognized as exceptional (i.e., inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List). In this case, the risk is to abandon agricultural production in favor of consumerist tourist economies, which can damage the territorial authenticity. In this paper, we question the role of the landscape design in strengthening territorial resilience. In particular, a composite and interdepen- dent action has been proposed between landscape design and implementation of a multifunctional agriculture model, oriented towards tourism. To undertake this investigation, a master’s thesis work on Landscape Architecture has been examined as an opportunity to test the research-by-design method through the didactic process. The application case is the Italian UNESCO site of Vignale Monferrato, a depopulated rural village, characterized by abandoned land and buildings. The paper concludes by outlining replicability application scenarios for the proposed model.