Cultura Heritage and the future of territory: a partecipative experience between maintenance and enhancement in a small municipality located in Emilia

Nowadays many small Italian municipalities have to face a new and important challenge: to turn or to bring back to a “community” their territory once again. This term, used by Adriano Olivetti for his entrepreneurial project, involves both the global dimension among international relations and the enhancement of local culture and its heritage. The process of enhancement undertaken during last few years by the Municipality of Vigolzone, a small village that counts about 4.000 inhabitants in the province of Piacenza, has, from the beginning, agreed to the idea that the cultural and social activities could become engines, also economic, for the growth and the development of the area. Within this logic, the municipality, in collaboration with local associations and the Polytechnic of Milan, has started a process of participative planning that, furthermore, led to the launch of the maintenance and the renovation of an old school compound protected by the authority. The pivot of the process involved the use of a particular methodology of process design based on theories of Advanced Design and long-term project. The design of a shared meta-project has been an opportunity to bring together stakeholders and shareholders of the area, being able to start with them a constructive dialogue about the potential uses of the building and the ways of intervention. This experience bottom up, generated from a strong need for renewal, led to the establishment of new organizational models within the relations between the local population and administration, that are replicable in other contexts.