Heritage as a resource, memory as a project. Responible network-based design strategies

The Italian territory is dotted with a large number of villages called Borghi Minori, that, for centuries, have represented the urban framework for vast territorial areas and identities inhabiting the landscape,now in a state of abandon. As part of an inter-disciplinary research on the fragility of the so-called ‘minor’ diffused heritage, this contribution responds to the present and future need to imagine new forms of living and transformation strategies for these abandoned settlements, through the creation of an operational methodology and the identification of specific tools. The selected urban areas are rooted in the territories of the internal areas of Abruzzo, interpreted as laboratory-villages, in which to experiment with innovative mapping processes able to deal with the complexity of these contexts. Here present fragilities become resources for imagining possible future scenarios, to be specified by the same Communities in an open and polyphonic transformation design vision. From an application point of view, this work resulted in the construction of a dynamic, multiscalar and interdisciplinary ‘atlas of trans-form-actions’, aimed at identifying in the stratified layers of the landscape palimpsest, those resilient and silent modifications that made these territories habitable. An atlas, a project sharing knowledge and information, which is characterized by a marked design dimension. Here the transformative processes of the landscape are interpreted as a continuous sequence between past, present and future. Topographies of memory whose feature is a non-hierarchical network, made up of layers and rarefactions, which becomes the framework for the trans-form-action, in which design actions correspond to spatial devices, whose architectural expression will derive from present and future needs, a sharing path, listening places and people.