Distinctive and Innovative Regions: Urban Resilient Communities and Regional Policies. The Sardinia Case Study

The contemporary research for alternative and sustainable models of development is based on collaborating networks of urban polarities aiming to create an added value for the global territorial system. In these models, the economic, environmental and social issues are framed following territory identity and according to local resources, above all cultural heritage and landscape. In particular, the recovery of some community practices and their application in land use planning allows the creation of cooperative distinctive networks which are able to develop knowledge-based tools aimed to respond in a “creative” way to a pre-assembled urbanism model. In this discourse, it is possible to fit the strategies inspired by endogenous growth that some urban and rural communities have fielded rediscovering and reinterpreting the rules of the historical landscape construction, the behaviours and practices related to it. They become central in the contemporary debate on common goods and civic uses. Some regions aspire to develop innovative tools starting from these practices to stand out as places of excellence. One of the privileged asset is the redesign of economic policies together with the regional image to create induced economies in tourism and attract investment, planning landscape and territory with the inhabitants. The traditional instruments of regional planning must therefore be questioned. They have been revisited according to multidimensional and cooperative approaches in the attempt to involve the final stakeholders of plans and projects, spacing from the regional scale to a neighbourhood level, from urban planning to the cultural policies. New perspectives are opened today by the spread of the landscape approach which inextricably links territorial planning and cultural heritage enhancement to needs and aspirations of local communities. The study try to shed light on the contributions given by cultural heritage-based development models in the construction of resilient, competitive and “distinctive” regions according to territorial vocations, making local communities less vulnerable to economic and environmental impacts of global competition. Through a critical analysis of the literature and the Sardinia Region experience we attempt to provide some guidelines for the draft of regional planning tools inspired to landscape approach and the related community engagement.