Heritage Conservation and Regional Development Models:
the Challenge of a Cognitive Approach
1. The Role of Cultural Heritage and Landscape in Regional
Development Models /1/
This paper has taken shape within the “Innovative Technologies for Planned
Conservation and Cultural Heritage Enhancement” Research Unit, led by Stefano Della
Torre, that operates in the field of architectural conservation: a branch developed since
the late Seventies with a strong tradition at the Politecnico di Milano. Moving from such
theoretical and methodological bases, during more recent years studies have been
carried on towards a radical innovation of the architectural conservation process itself, by
the so called Planned Conservation /2/, developing its interactions and outcomes and
integrating it in a wider insight, within the knowledge economy frame. This perspective
involves an hybridization with culture economics on one hand and with cognitive sciences
on the other.
Following these research lines, this paper aims to investigate which could be the role of
the built cultural heritage conservation processes in regional development models, with
regard not only to material and economic aspects, but also and especially to the
intangible and cognitive ones.
From recent research experiences and applications, the emerging scenario shows that
the “cultural chain”, considered by many as an inestimable field of values for local
development, in fact seems to eat up resources, rather than increasing them.
Against huge public funding, devoted to built heritage protection and valorisation, most of
the times the outcomes for territories and local communities are poor:
- first of all the intervention results are often poor because the conservation process
management does not set quality as one of its priorities;
- in addiction the lacking method of the approach does not allow an efficient management
of the externalities involved in restoration interventions, hereby limiting positive fallouts in
terms of identity, awareness and local development;
- finally the unsuccessful involvement of the communities implies the impossibility of
using such cultural heritage interventions as occasions to activate awareness, reappropriation and reinterpretation processes, stimulating knowledge towards innovation
and development.
Face to such situation and moving from the thematic background of architectural
conservation sciences, the need has emerged to find a confrontation ground with
disciplines such as culture economics and cognitive sciences.
The theoretical framework, and more recently institutional and normative assets,
have adopted a less and less restrictive concept of cultural heritage, ever more inclined to
include an increasing amount of heritage among the objects to be protected and
enhanced. From this viewpoint at European level such process has achieved the
elaboration of the European Landscape Convention (between 1994 and 2000 at the seat
of the Council of Europe). Such convention extends the concept of landscape to the
whole territory, while it was previously tied, in the various Countries protection legislative
and normative traditions, to selective conceptions which separated areas of landscape
and environmental excellence from the remaining territory /3/. It confirms the need to
globally face the topic of quality in all populated areas, recognized as an essential
condition for individual and social welfare, for a sustainable development and as resource
that favours economic activities. These are the themes affirmed in the resulting Universal
Declaration on Cultural Diversity (Unesco, Paris 2001).
A key role becomes that of the enhancement processes, that should consist of
activities aiming at knowledge dissemination and at ensuring the best conditions for
sustainable cultural heritage fruition. Conservation would not any longer be
misunderstood as an obstacle to access and transformation, generating a futureless
culture, but could finally be correctly interpreted as the respect for co-evolutionary
potentials between man and heritage /4/.
Culture cannot be, nor become, the centrepiece of local economy, but it can become the
perfect context to stimulate communities awareness, thanks to its role in capacity-building
processes /5/. May be that cultural heritage is not the key sector for revitalizing
communities in social and economical decline, but would be more and more the tool to
redesign their identities.
If local development is a knowledge-based process, local communities should act as
“Learning Districts”: this referring to Florida’s and to Lundvall and Johnson’s “Learning
Regions” /6/ as a model in which development strategies are based on the sociopolitic
and cultural frame, and learning processes are one of the key factors.
The challenge arising is therefore that of finding modes and tools to induce evolutionary
behaviours in the territorial system. In other words, in the model under study, this means
asking how local communities might become learning districts, where cultural values are
something else than mere guardians of tradition and fixed identities, and are remodelled
on a more actual basis. The idea is starting to be acknowledged that culture-driven
system projects, aiming at local development, might have higher chances of success by
adopting a contextual methodology.
Among the most encouraging experiences achieved to-date, aiming to the development
of communities based on learning and capacity-building processes, the potentialities of
built heritage have not yet been fully enquired.
Starting from the background outlined till now, it is possible to demonstrate that the
inefficiency of many recent local development projects derives from having
underestimated community’s perceptions and cognitive aspects with respect to cultural
resources, meant in their broader sense enclosing landscape, architecture, intangible
values. Furthermore, there will be an attempt to highlight the role that désapprentissage
/7/ applied to the landscape and cultural heritage themes can play in overcoming the
limits of development models incoherent with the local context.
2. Heritage and Development in the Marginal Areas Laboratory /8/
Marginal communities can be considered as a privileged observation lab for the limitation
of variables at sake and a relatively higher possibility to identify socio-economic
mechanisms linked to cultural heritage. In this sense, marginality is referred to mountain
or rural contexts /9/ or in any case areas left excluded by the main contemporary
economic development dynamics, but in the end “it does not seem to be much of a
geographic concept correlated to kilometric distance, rather an concept of cognitive
estrangement of man in his own living environment”/10/.
Therefore, in perspective the outlined observations and the proposed methodologies
could find applications also in less peripheral contexts.
Figure 1: Historical settlements on Alps are an example of marginality (CulturALP project,
Interreg III B)
The culture driven models commonly used to improve the future of marginal territories,
countering abandonment and naturalization of ancient anthropization territories, still
consider landscape only as functional to touristic offer: a postcard that must be kept
immutable as it has been transformed in consumer goods.
Along this line, cultural landscape is in fact excluded from development, “musealized” and
isolated from all other territorial dynamics. Let’s think of cases where the public domain
has taken the engagement of funding activities ensuring communities permanence in
disadvantaged areas, acknowledging their role of territorial protection. For example
through agricultural activities, to which multifunctional value is more and more
acknowledged: it does not matter if the activity in itself is not competitive from a strictly
productive point of view; society acknowledges to the rural world an important role, which,
according to the case, underlines more the landscape maintenance components or the
ecosystemic fall-outs or fruition and touristic potentials.
Notwithstanding, subventions and incentives, even if assigned within policies showing the
best of intentions, may on the long run reveal to be unsustainable and finally counter
producing /11/. This system in fact can stand up only as long as the continuity of
subventions is guaranteed, as when they stop, the progressive abandonment of
landscape starts for as the assistance policy has not stimulated and produced innovative
behaviours.
This deals with areas where the cultural heritage acknowledgement capability has
undoubtedly undergone a crisis and has not been replaced by other cognitive models.
The crystallization of landscape fallouts of an economic model that has already proven to
be losing, almost always corresponds to a non-evolving society, where local communities
risk to remain the hostage of regressive mentalities /12/. The same behaviour can only
coexist with the most updated contemporaneity, in a totally alienating and decontextualized split. This being a society that, in order to survive according to a model
that has to remain unchanged, seems to have but two alternatives:
- the first one is to play within the crystallized model, but on the long run, the
consequence is the estrangement from its own contemporaneity, causing abandonment
by those who feel left out by the rest of an evolving world if compared to their own, which
seems on the contrary, crystallized;
- the second is to find a balance within the model. Maybe the answer is hidden in the
ability “to live as many areas as possible”, going along with an idea of absolutely
contemporary experience /13/.
Still rare are those cases in which cultural landscapes manage to survive thanks to new
uses, that transform and reinterpreting them in a contemporary style, creating competitive
productive niches, applying ways of updating tradition, crossing various chains. An
example is given by wine growing, that still resists within marginal landscapes such as
mountain sides, thanks to investments in product innovation that allow production of highquality wines in harmony with century-old terraces (i.e. in Valtellina, Lombardy region and
in the Cinque Terre area, Liguria region). They receive an indubitable added value from
this landscape, which is lived and told as a factual representation of man’s place and
work, sedimented in the territory to the point that it’s not possible to consider it as
separated from the natural environment.
The prevailing model is still the simplest and less sustainable, based on touristic short
terms objectives. The hypothesis is that the difficulty in relating to modernity and
elaborating development models coherent with the context in marginal areas, derives
from the penetration of development models estranged and banalizing, which at the same
time have interrupted the continuity of traditional processes and have caused a crisis in
the communities’ ability to identify with their own heritage.
Figures 2/3: Wine growing in Valtellina (Lombardy region, Italy): an historical terraced
landscape that is still productive
Figures 4/5: Effects of tourism at St. Moritz (Graubunden, Switzerland): an old alpine
village that today from a distance looks as a postcard and it is like a city from inside
3. Local development as a learning process: capability of institutional
actors
In order to understand the difficulties that are to be met in the development path that a
territory pursues, the reconstruction of misunderstandings which institutional actors more
frequently fall into bears many consequences. Some recurring “de-contextualization”
typologies can be identified in the initiatives started and in locally expressed aspirations.
The following considerations derive from the experience acquired within a research on
the applicability to the Lombard territory of the most advanced elaborations of the Cultural
District Model /14/. The definition of potential districts has taken place by subsequent
approximations, verifying on the basis of a complex indicator system, the vocation of an
area to formulate its own system project, or at least to positively react to a project
proposed by a higher organization. The indicators provided have willingly been
configured as qualitative requisites, such as:
- the quality of environmental and cultural heritage, in terms of plurality and
recognizability
- the identification by population
- the active presence of research and training
- the synergy with the economic system
- the ability to prepare projects and build network
- the existence of a public administration capable of facilitating activities
systemization.
In order to understand the development routes that a territory was following and to
reconstruct its context, an activity of comparison and attention has been coupled to
recognition, activating forms of dialogue with local privileged witnesses. Research
progress has made clear the impossibility of a proper and truly objective evaluation of the
potential districts taken into consideration, both in absolute and comparative terms, while
higher interest was taking the probable but not foreseeable action of the subjects.
For this reason, research reports have been directed towards feeding back such detailed
observations that allowed to evaluate the “contextuality” level of future projects.
Extrapolating the interaction with local stakeholders from research aims and results has
allowed to identify some recurring “de-contextualization” typologies.
The more refractory to dialogue situations occur when public funding and
subventions dynamics prevail, due to which any local development objective is ignored
and it is hard to propose any network or system logic. In some cases, the cognitive
representation of the local administrators, addicted to subventions approach, over boards
towards a persecution complex: they think that the only problem is that the funding actors
are not sufficiently close to the real local problems.
The opposite happens that the public authorities, indeed trying to be a system,
overstep into a bureaucratic derive, limited to confirm institutional hierarchies and
upgrade entrepreneurial mechanisms, monitoring timing and costs of interventions
without caring for contents quality and training of the actors involved.
In other instances, there prevail territorial marketing approaches, where the brand
victim planner tends to reduce development project amplitude to the sole communication
aspects (typically: logo, internet site…), practically pursuing only objectives of tourist
attractiveness empowerment. Instead of igniting circular development activities, local
identity is thus crystallized in a kind of territorial visiting card.
A final figure often encountered is the serial promoter: this subject is convinced to
achieve remarkable touristic valorization results, at times even cultural, through the
promotion of highly attractive and onerous events. Such initiatives, even if sometime
achieving a certain success in terms of presences, not having the least connection to the
local reality, have practically no territorial return
The “decontextualization” typologies analyzed show how there exists a fixation on needs
reflecting partial cognitive representations, tied to contingent scopes, non fully aware of
the local cultural heritage opportunities.
The challenge arising is therefore that of finding modes and tools to induce evolutionary
behaviours in the territorial system. The idea is starting to be acknowledged that culture
driven system projects, aiming at local development, might have higher chances of
success by adopting a contextual methodology. In other words, in the model under study,
this means asking how local communities might become learning districts.
4. The Challenge of a Cognitive Approach /15/
From a cognitive point of view the failure of many regional development projects could
be seen as the direct consequence of a shortfall, related above all to the methodology
applied to establish and support the relationship with the local community over time.
The research implemented by Dieter Schürch and his regional development team aims to
evaluate to what extent theories and praxis of social and psychological development
sciences could be transferred to the economic and cultural development sector of
communities and regions. Nomadismo cognitivo (Cognitive nomadism), the book
published in 2006, illustrates the strategies tested in five alpine regions for fifteen years.
The approach’s focal point was the activation of a movement in which the regional actors
take to themselves the transformation process induced. Still, the global dimension, where
the local view-point is permanently positioned, was never underestimated, making use of
the most advanced communication technologies, while trying to adapt them to the social
network need existing in each considered area.
One of the methods tested originated from the observation that daily life habits loose
sight of those values characterising the territory, while planners do not succeed in
modifying local awareness unless they remove a series of unexpressed resistances. It is
necessary to look for rather concrete methods to involve the local community, to create a
participation that otherwise is never granted from the start. If within a community, a
different perception of the territory takes shape, this depolarizes the local actors’ attention
and has the power to induce an important process of “mental reconfiguration” of the
territory. Such a cognitive method can cause a relevant chain of fall-outs, as it was
experienced with a project in Val Bregaglia (Switzerland). Children below school-age
were given the possibility of shooting pictures of their own living environment. Pictures
collected were used for local exhibition which significantly involved the population, as the
view of a child closely reaches the whole family environment. This originated awareness
in a minor local group, creating a valorisation flow of corners, which subsequently were
included in pathways offered also to families from outside, favouring the rediscovery of
locations at child level.
Figures 6: Pictures by children and the local exhibition (minimovingAlps Project,
Val Bregaglia, Graubunden, Switzerland)
The described approach is symbolic for Schürch’s approach in nearing the individual and
social territorial dimension, attributing the highest importance to local ability to produce
ideas that can translate into projects. So conceived projects result from an evolving
process, rather than from a path predetermined by needs, that do not belong to the local
community. As long as people live an outward dependency relationship, such as the one
resulting from years of financial support policies, no local development project will have a
future. The creation of such internal conditions that can provoke a circular consideration
movement on the cultural, natural, human and technological environment, is fundamental;
although any reflective movement must foresee a starting and an arrival point related to
what is local, and this jeopardizes any “outsider” planning. Guy Le Boterf /16/ refers to the
sailing metaphor to illustrate this concept: the sailor – in this case the planner – has a
goal, but he must be capable of facing local conditions that are dealt with moment by
moment, consequently the route is never linear. There can be crisis situations when there
is no wind and the boat does not move, or strong winds and very fast advancements,
extreme cases that in a development process must be read and interpreted in an
ethnographic and psychosocial key, prior to undergo any kind of intervention. Economic
sciences have tried to foresee man’s behavioural trends, but the economic being is first of
all a psychological, social and cultural being /17/. Shifting the attention on what could be
define as local determination does not mean giving up whatever external contribution, but
rather understanding behavioural schemes in order to deduce their adaptive nature. Each
growth experience implies both leaving old habits behind (a way of unlearning) and
learning new ways of interpretation and evaluation. Any development project is a learning
experience, never oneway: the social territory learns and transforms itself when also the
planners, who caused such changes, learn in their turn from relating to the peculiarities of
each individual case.
5. Conclusions
The link between cultural heritage and local communities’ identity represents a strategic
aspect in enhancement processes based on territorial cultural resources. To strengthen
such tie becomes an inescapable objective for increasing fruition but also to prevent that
culture is perceived as a restriction and as a cost rather than an opportunity. To promote
the full participation of people, favour the identification of own heritage, means to ensure
the strongest tool for care and conservation of the same. Participation tools, limited to
transmission of information and consensus creation alone, are up to neither start nor
achieve results in terms of local community training /18/. What seems to be a common
factor to a series of recent capability experiences is the idea that it might be necessary to
provoke a different insight, almost a cultural shock.
What might stem from it in methodological terms is a profound reappreciation of the tools
till now applied. It would mean to abandon the linear approach of local development
programs, that stem from the identification of needs bearing themselves pre-constituted
solutions. The experimentation of a “laboratorial” workshop that, through narration and
sharing, opens a redefinition of identities, may offer a way out from decontextualized
logics, tending to sectorialize and banalize local development projects.
An “ethnographic” approach ”(Schürch, 2006) could favour cultural heritage ability to
stimulate human capital growth. Cultural values could then be reconsidered not any
longer as guardians of tradition, but as common heritage, stemming from meeting of
cultural heritage and people’s inner space.
In this, built heritage, thanks to its visibility and the acknowledged importance, produces
the “rock into the pound” effect. In the moment when investments for cultural heritage
conservation manage to provoke renewal of cognitions, only possible if there are
investments on the intervention quality and in the training fall-outs, the circle closes: as,
at the same time, the intervention, improving comprehension and collaborating to the
identity remodulation, produces awareness of the importance of care for that heritage,
creating the prerequisites for shared conservation.
/1/ A previous version of this paragraph was already published in: Putignano F. 2009, “Il
ruolo dei beni culturali e del paesaggio nei modelli di sviluppo locale” in Putignano F.
(ed.), Learning Districts: patrimonio culturale, conoscenza e sviluppo locale, Maggioli
Editore, Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna.
/2/ Della Torre, S. (ed.) 2003. La conservazione programmata del patrimonio storico
architettonico, Angelo Guerini e Associati, Milano.
/3/ Scazzosi, L (ed.) 1999. Politiche e culture del paesaggio: esperienze internazionali a
confronto, Gangemi editore, Roma.
/4/ Bocchi, G., Ceruti, M. (eds.) 2007. La sfida della complessità, Bruno Mondadori
Editore, Milano. Della Torre, S. 1999, “Manutenzione o conservazione? La sfida del
passaggio dall’equilibrio al divenire”, in Biscontin, G.; Driussi, G. (eds.) Ripensare alla
manutenzione. Ricerche, progettazione, materiali, tecniche per la cura del costruito,
Venezia. Della Torre, S. 2005. “Programmare la conservazione: valore culturale e
sostenibilità”, in La fruizione sostenibile del Bene Culturale, Nardini Editore, Firenze.
/5/ Sen, A. 1999.Development as Freedom, Knopf, New York.
/6/ Florida, R. 1995. “Toward the Learning Region”, Futures, vol. 27, n.5; Lundvall, B. A.,
Johnson, B. 1994. “The learning economy”, Journal of Industry Studies, n.1.
/7/ Schürch, D. 2006. Nomadismo cognitivo. Ingegneria dello sviluppo regionale, Franco
Angeli, Milano.
/8/ A previous version of this paragraph and of the next one were presented at the
International Conference Arts, Culture and the Public Sphere. Expressive and
Instrumental Values In Economic and Sociological Perspectives, Venezia. 4-8 Nov. 2008:
Putignano, F., Canziani, A. 2008. Cultural heritage and landscape in local development
models for marginal communities.
/9/ Pedrazzini L. (ed.), 2005. CulturALP. Il sistema culturale alpino: una sfida per
l’Europa, New Press, Como.
/10/ Schürch, D. 2006, pag. 16.
/11/ Stovel, H. 1985. “Scrape and Anti-Scrape: False Idols on Main Street”, Bulletin of the
Association for Preservation Technology International (APT), Vol. 17, n. 3/4. Stovel H.,
1987, “Managing Change in Vernacular Setting”, Bulletin of the Association for
Preservation Technology International (APT), Vol. 19, n. 3. Schuster, J.M. (ed.) 1997.
Preserving the Built Heritage. Tools for Implementation, University Press of New
England, Hanover and London.
/12/ Della Torre, S. 2007. “Magistri comacini: uso e abuso di un mito identitario nei piani
di sviluppo della regione dei laghi prealpini”, La crisi dei confini, Quaderni dell’Istituto
ICIeF dell’Università della Svizzera Italiana, n. 13, Lugano.
/13/ Baricco, A. 2006. Barbari. Saggi sulla mutazione, Fandango libri, Roma.
/14/ Sacco P. L., Pedrini S. 2003. “Il distretto culturale: mito o opportunità?”, Il Risparmio,
anno LI, n. 3 settembre-dicembre. Sacco P. L., Tavano Blessi G. 2005. “Distretti culturali
evoluti e valorizzazione del territorio”, Global & Local Economic Review, Volume VIII, n.1,
Pescara. Sacco, P.L., Tavano Blessi, G. Nuccio, M. 2008. Culture as an Engine of Local
Development Processes: System-Wide Cultural Districts, DADI/ WP_5/08. Della Torre, S.
2006. “Il ruolo dei beni culturali nei nuovi modelli di sviluppo: riflessioni sulle esperienze in
atto in Lombardia”, Arkos, n.15. Canziani, A. 2007, Beni culturali e governance: il modello
dei distretti culturali, Ph.D. dissertation, tutor S. Della Torre, co-rel. P.L. Sacco,
Politecnico di Milano.
/15/ This paraghaph summarize the contribution published in: Schürch, D. 2009.
“Approccio etnografico e sviluppo regionale: la metafora della navigazione”, in Putignano
F. (ed.), Learning Districts: patrimonio culturale, conoscenza e sviluppo locale, Maggioli
Editore, Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna.
/16/ Le Boterf, G. 2007. Professionaliser, Eyrolles, Paris.
/17/ Bruner, J. 1997. La cultura dell’educazione, Feltrinelli, Milano, pp.
145-165.
/18/ See also the article by Chiapparini A., Communication and Culture - Why and how
communication should become a real support instrument in the cultural heritage
valorization process?