Smart Villages & Citizen Science: dalla digitalizzazione territoriale alla valorizzazione integrata del patrimonio storico, paesaggistico e rurale dei borghi montani

The research project aims at enhancing sustainability, attractiveness and competitiveness of peripheral mountain communities and villages. Indeed, notwithstanding the renewed public interest, which has been fostered by the current COVID-19 emergency and by some efforts that, over recent decades, have been made to improve their attractiveness as places of living, working and cultural enjoyment, they still define marginal areas. They often suffer from a plight of marginalization, especially if compared with the more bustling “urban environment”. The cultural-historical and landscape heritage of mountain rural communities has thus been experiencing serious conditions of underuse, poor usability and, even, complete neglect or deterioration. Their extensive and historically significant richness of material culture and cultural landscapes is often little- known, being consequently kept out from the flow of tourism and public interest. The project proposal, therefore, wishes to encourage some good practices which might support the rediscovery, fostering, public reuse and enjoyment of the relevant historical heritage of such “marginal geographies” by means of Data Science tools and “territorial digitization”. The research will focus on the Municipality of Orino, a mountain hamlet in the Western Lombard Prealps (Province of Varese), and on the neighbouring area of the Lombard Prealps (according to an integrated approach to land-use management). The purpose is to outline a pilot project, using digital technologies and Data Science methods, to improve enhancement and public fruition of a still-neglected cultural heritage and, at the same time, to support the preliminary development of the first “smart village/land” in Lombardy. The project’s working packages will be planned in order that they can contribute to providing a reproducible model, which can be extended to other areas with similar features. The choice to develop the research project within this mountainous area has mostly been influenced by the ongoing three-year research agreement between the University of Insubria and the Municipality of Orino. This has allowed the initial study and cataloguing of the important historical heritage of the territory. Therefore, the activities, included in the research proposal, mainly aim at recovering and promoting the rich variety of material culture, industrial archaeology and historical landscapes still existing in Orino and, more broadly, in the neighbouring Prealpine area. The ICT facilities can certainly provide innovative and more immersive forms of cultural and tourist fruition, giving at the same time extremely valuable information about the public’s attitudes towards this type of heritage. The wide range of applications they offer, especially in digital data transmission, processing and storage, together with some well-established practices of public engagement and cultural enhancement – such as participatory planning, citizen science and eco-museum planning – will allow the reuse and rediscovery of the historical, but also environmental, richness of this wonderful anthropic environment. The project deals with some key topics which are pivotal for the Call, and especially within the intervention strategies about “new forms of public use of art and culture”. They may be essentially summed up in the following points: 1) collection of digital data about the extensive, but still little-known and underuse, cultural and landscape heritage of Orino as well as of the neighbouring Prealpine area. These data will be useful to establish a dataset of information about the Alpine and Prealpine material culture in Lombardy. Moreover, they will certainly be able to complete some already existing databases about the regional and national historical, technological/industrial, and ethnoanthropological heritage; 2) the established datasets will be useful to better describe as well as understand a