B4R Branding4Resilience: Tourist infrastructure as a tool to enhance small villages by drawing resilient communities and new open habitats

“Marginal” areas are a central issue that is being discussed all over Europe. Indeed, more than 60% of the European population live in peripheral contexts outside of main urban conurbations (Data “EUROSTAT regional yearbook 2013”. Data referred to the sum of the population in ‘intermediate regions’ and in ‘rural areas’ in the EU27). Yet, the contexts addressed by the Italian National Strategy on Inner Areas (covering approximately the 60 per cent of Italy and hosting nearly 13.540 million people) are often lacking successful regional policies and systemic territorial approaches to achieve effective transformations. In order to tackle with such fragile areas, a new development path has to be defined. This paper aims to present and discuss the first results of a PRIN project, “B4R Branding4Resilience”, that investigates fragile territories around the Italian peninsula. Exploring and comparing the areas through an interdisciplinary perspective, the project aims to operatively intervene on selected contexts in Marche Region, Trento Province, Piedmont, and Sicily. A new role of these peripheral contexts in relation to growing metropolitan areas is a possibility that B4R Branding4Resilience aims to investigate.