The ‘earthen cities’ itinerary

The pilot project ‘The itinerary of the earthen cities’, presented in 2006 at the Civis regional announcement of selection, has been recently founded, and it is now developing. The goals of the project are several, but mainly it aims for offer a new local sustainable development based on the local traditional earthen building culture. It considers both the wide architectural heritage still survived in Sardinia, and the intangible patrimony of ‘good lessons’ coming from the past which represents, at the same time, the traditional local identity and the ‘quality of life’ inherents to the earth. For this reason, this project looks on the Sardinian earthen culture as the main strategy to couple the conservation and rehabilitation of its heritage with a new development policy, able to appraise the communities traditional culture and foster a new local ‘green’ economy. In this way, the project achieves a new earthen itinerary through ten small towns in to the flatland of the middle-south Sardinia (the Campidano area). This cities network, which it has already taken part into the National Earthen Cities Association since 2001, collaborates and cooperates in the achievement of three main specific goals : 1- promoting both the urban regeneration and the local sustainable development supporting the ‘building good practices’ into the rehabilitation and new construction of earthen architectures. This involves the ‘sustainable’ features of the earth (healthiness, recycling, environmental-friendly and energy-saving property, etc.) and its deep relationship with the current need of sustainable architecture. 2- Promoting a new tourist sustainable development through the creation of cultural-tourist itineraries. Those latter will be joint with urban and architectural requalification’s actions with the aim to incentivized and support the ‘horizontal’ or ‘scattered’ hotel on territory. Specifically, the project achieves high-quality scattered hotels in to these ten different towns, recovering the existing structures or building a new one, in both cases according to the best sustainable standards. In addition of this, some traditional buildings will be recover and use as ‘domus amigas’: ‘stations’ and focal points of this earthen path. Those ‘containers’ function as a territorial network of info points, laboratories and launch windows where showing and selling tourist, handcrafted and food farming products. 3- Promoting both technical-administrative cultures and social perception links to the earth. The aim is the creation of a real technical and administrative local cultures able to manage the earthen heritage. This can be reach through the dissemination of knowledge and the integration of earthen culture and techniques at different levels of educational modules. All those objectives go with specific strategies, which point out the priority actions for each of them. Therefore, the paper aims to follow the example of this pilot project to show as communities can find in their local cultural heritage the ideal tool through which built a new sustainable development model base on local resources.