Sense of Place, Biocultural Heritage, and Sustainable Knowledge and Practices in Three Italian Rural Regeneration Processes

• Main Authors: Belliggiano, A. (Author), Bindi, L. (Author), Conti, M. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI 2022
• Subjects: bio-cultural heritage; ethnography; knowledge-practices system; local regeneration; multifunctional rurality; new peasantries; participatory processes; social innovation; sustainable development
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 This paper addresses sustainable development processes based on biocultural heritage, sense of place, and socio-cultural innovation and inclusiveness in the rural context, particularly focusing different scales of endogenous/neo-endogenous rural regeneration processes. Ethnographic and grounded case studies allow a critical analysis of different forms of rural development from a multidisciplinary perspective based on old and new rurality, rural and local communities’ partici-pation, resilience and regeneration processes, sense of place, belongingness, and “restanza”. The three cases are situated in three areas of Italy: the ecomuseum of pastoralism in Pontebernardo in the northern region of Piedmont as a driver of local shared development pathways; the municipality of Castel del Giudice, in the Central-Southern region of Molise, enabling different and integrated local regeneration actions; and the Association “Casa delle AgriCulture”/Green Night Festival in Castiglione d’Otranto in the Southern region of Puglia as a performative opportunity to define in-novative and transversal as well as community-oriented activities. In these contexts, different local regeneration programs were applied in order to provide a critical evaluation of the knowledge and practices of sustainability in terms of their entanglements with biocultural heritage and socio-cul-tural innovation. The present analysis insists on the impact of biocultural heritage in regeneration processes in rural regions and endogenous/neo-endogenous factors in rural sustainable develop-ment. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.