On December 14, 2024, Sara Pilia, a member of the EXIT project as a representative from ARCI, organised a workshop “Associations in contexts of territorial marginality” in the town of Monsampietro Morico (Southern Marche, Italy), and hosted also a local researcher in Geography that recently published a book on discourses and practices on tourism in Italian Inner Areas (Francesca Sabatini, Geografia delle aree interne. Discorsi e pratiche turistiche nella Sicilia fredda, Guerini Scientifica, 2024, here).
The workshop was part of a formative course for local associations devoted to the care and promotion of the territories and community, funded by the Centre for Services to Volunteering (CSV). Monsampietro Morico is a rural area strongly impacted by depopulation since the 1960s and belongs to the periphery of the 2016 earthquake area. In recent years, however, thanks to a local association led by young people (20-35 years old) affiliated with the ARCI network, the town has experienced a positive trend in different sectors.
The main aim of this specific workshop was to inform the local association of the national and EU discourses around ‘left-behind areas’ and to discuss the possible roles of associations in this type of context. The presentation started from the EU level, with the EXIT project and its Policy Brief launched at the Mid-Term Conference in September 2024, which was useful to shed light on how to adopt a critical approach to the mainstream discourses on the local ‘inner areas’, that focus (almost solely) on touristic development. The discussion was complemented by the field study by Francesca Sabatini, who studied how the political narrative of ‘Inner Areas’ has shaped new geographies all over Italy and in the specific context of the Sicani, in Sicily.
Her work analyzed as well how a group of local associations was involved in the ‘touristification process’ that often characterises the development of Inner Areas. At the same time, however, the associations were sometimes capable of questioning the development model based on tourism”, by choosing to focus their practices primarily on taking care of places, human relations, local heritage, and the environment. These associations adopted the needs of the territory and the local communities as the starting point for developing cultural and economic activities, instead of following needs and expectations imposed by external actors and factors (the market, the policymaking process, the tourists).
From this perspective, Sabatini’s results are in line with some of the evidence highlighted by the EXIT project, especially on the need for overall and appropriate strategies on housing, employment, and economic development, that need to stem from a dialectic dialogue between the residing community with their aspirations for the future on one side, and the the internal and external resources on the other side. In this, the role of local-based associations is often that of a catalyst and ‘start-up’ for new creative, civic, and productive processes.
