Fostering resilience in Inner Areas. The Sicani case study in Sicily

Abstract

In recent years, the theme of the regeneration of small centres in fragile and marginal areas has returned to the centre of the Italian debate and public policies, as well as resilience practices in which culturally-based regenera-tion projects, community cooperatives and resettlement processes are based on a spatial dimension capable of playing an active and unprecedented role. The COVID-19 pandemic we are currently experiencing has reignited the debate on fragile areas, reinforcing the perception of those territorial ine-qualities between metropolitan and inner areas exacerbated by the crisis. In fact, the pandemic has further highlighted the serious shortcomings in the provision of services – first and foremost health and education services – and in the infrastructure of these territories, both material and digital, and has revealed the limits of incessant urbanisation and the concentration of settlement and infrastructure policies in large conurbations. Starting from the framework of the research project of national interest “B4R Brand-ing4Resilience” and continuing in the wake opened by the SNAI but also overcoming it, Unipa Unit Research aims to define the need for a more inclusive settlement model in the Sicani Territory in Sicily (Ita-ly) in order to rebalance the existing asymmetries by recharging the periph-eral areas with a new centrality.