Co-creative Communities and Resilience Accelerators. Sicani Hills in Sicily

The contribution asks for a change of perspective, addressing inner areas as motors of innovation and test-fields for new dynamics of development and more adaptive processes, looking at co-creative communities and the potentials and resources specifically connected to space, settlements, and landscapes. The reactivation of small towns can catalyze tourism and community’s resilience through targeted transformations of built heritage and unused building stock, social innovation initiatives, and new forms of production. In order to return to inhabit inner areas, new infrastructures and basic services are needed, but also new perspectives and projects able to radically change production, consumption, andwork/life models.Within the framework of the research project “B4R Branding4Resilience”, a research project of national interest coordinated by the Università Politecnica delle Marche (national coordinator Maddalena Ferretti) and that involves as partners the Università degli Studi di Palermo (local coordinator Barbara Lino), the University of Trento (local coordinator Sara Favargiotti) and the Politecnico di Torino (local coordinator Diana Rolando), the B4R of University of Palermo work in Sicani hills in Southern Sicily offers a framework for the region’s development and manages to describe a path to activate “reserves of resilience” for new sustainable lifestyles. The settlement development options that the study display can be used as a model for similar considerations in comparable regions of Europe.