SMART LANDSCAPES: FROM LANDSCAPES TO ADVANCED CULTURAL DISTRICTS. MARCHE REGION CASE STUDY

The work aims to strengthen the belief that the future of territorial development of intermediate regions largely depends on a more effective marketing of local cultural heritage. Far from being an empty rhetoric, such a strengthened relation among places and their memory should revive and reinvent a creative bond entangling culture, food, memories, folk traditions and landscapes. The turmoil of current crisis urges Italian policy makers and local managers to boost the culture-landscape binomial, delivering new models and creative culture-based economy strongly linked to social needs and deeply rooted into the territorial cohesion vision, whose key issue is: create new jobs - especially for young people. The role of planning is crucial for cultural landscapes creation. Planning gets a meaningful sense playing as connecting media. The place where definition of the main goals are coordinated and articulated in the attempt to bring plans into action. If this is generally true, in Italy more often different level of planning intersects several territorial plans. And most of the times, these processes overlap each other without the due communication among actors from the different levels. Such a dystopic view creates unbiased results, which a more sound policing among regional and local coordination actors, at the beginning of strategic implementation, would help to mend. The CLLD -and in a certain way ITI- have been issued in a new form to meet such an issue. According with Europe 2020 Strategy (ERDF, ESF, EAFRD, etc.) the CLLD strategy offers several positive implications for the development of the territories, with regard of rural-urban settings. These latter particularly benefit from the last novelties stemmed during the revision of the European bottom-up development strategies. CLLD could represent a solid perspective of strategic governance on cultural and creative economy at regional scale, into an European governance framework. The Cultural Districts (DCE) initiative in Marche Region shows a seminal attempt to bring new life to local governance, by boosting impulses to new cultural and creative initiatives (sharing economy, creative commons and many more). In this frame, the renewed experience of Leader’s CLLD –which for the 2014 – 2020 is open to not only rural areas- could play a pivotal role to implement local strategies (both rural and maritime). By merging the demands from the local arena with the urge of regional and local administrations and the LAGs managing bodies, the emerging strategies should be able to give a new perspective to local economy. Either those merely based on the all-too familiar concept sustainable, and that who try to innovative their vision by input from sharing economy, cultural and creative industries, creative commons, Smart Landscapes experiences, etc. (Pine, Gilmore, 2000).