Making sense of heritage in the periphery of a cultural city. Exploring spaces as places of identity and participation.

Valorization is a fundamental dimension of making value for cultural heritage, alongside the need to preserve and protect our material and immaterial heritage. However, since the adoption of the Faro Convention in 2005, cultural heritage has been also recognized as a vital component of human rights, identity, dialogue, and social cohesion. Encouraging a participatory approach to cultural heritage, Faro promoted the involvement of stakeholders and local communities, placing a strong emphasis on bottom-up practices and participation. This vision has brought attention to the social and cultural dimensions of heritage beyond its material value, influencing policies and practices related to cultural heritage preservation, interpretation, and community engagement. However, nearly 20 years later, the realization of Faro's vision is still far from complete, and our rich cultural heritage often involves individuals and communities primarily as cultural consumers rather than active participants. To make it real and to utilize cultural heritage as a source of social cohesion and democratization (Evrard, 1997), we need to shift our focus from cultural spaces to cultural places, prioritizing the social dimension of places that are lived and experienced by people in their daily lives. Adopting a bottom-up qualitative methodology, we investigate the urban neighborhoods starting from the narratives of the inhabitants and identifying the processes through which some places in the city become meaningful and affective places of action, and cultural identity. In this context, cultural cities, defined as cities characterized by an abundance of historical sites, museums, galleries and events (Hudson, Sandberg & Schmauch, 2017), face the challenge of matching a model of cultural extraction that prioritizes tourism and economic sustainability with the aim to reach social inclusion and genuine participation. Conversely, peripheral areas can assume great relevance. While they may not possess the conventional notion of Cultural Heritage or have beautiful attractions, they have the potential to undergo a process of "heritagization" by investing in culture as a social resource. Although they risk being perceived as mere satellite spaces of the more renowned historical centers, they can strategically position themselves as places dedicated to hosting cultural and social experiences, working on policies that are highly relevant at the European level (see for example the Horizon Europe - Work Programme 2023-2024: Culture, Creativity, and Inclusive Society). Building on this idea, our paper provides evidence on how peripheral areas of large cultural cities either activate or fail to activate processes of " heritagization." Are these peripheral areas equipped to find their own identity and contribute to the process of creating cultural heritage, even when the absence of "beautiful artifacts" and "ancient sites" seemingly excludes them from the list of strategic places in the territory? Our research focuses on the municipality of Marghera, one of the two peripheral areas of the world-renowned city of Venice, to identify and understand the practices of signification and valuation of the cultural heritage characterizing the community of Marghera. Historically conceived and architecturally planned in the early 20th century as a residential area for workers of the industrial Porto Marghera area and their families, Marghera has gradually transformed into a more complex neighborhood. As a hybrid living space where new forms of living emerge, creating needs and demands, Marghera appears to be delimited by borders designed by old planners (such as the railway station) and struggles to find its new cultural and social identity. Marghera’s history as industrial periphery of Venice is well-suited to this investigation, potentially allowing us to advance both theoretical contributions and practical implications. On the one hand, Marghera’s context is rife with former industrial sites that are currently objects of urban regeneration processes supposedly aimed at engaging the community into cultural endeavors. On the other hand, because of its primarily industrial traction, Marghera has always attracted migratory fluxes from the rest of Italy and from other nations, making the very concept of “community” an ever-changing and hardy circumscribable entity. Adopting an exploratory and open-ended approach to start inquiring the empirical setting, the research started with a set of open interviews to people who are in one way or another well embedded in the social and cultural tissue of the town. Stimulated by the initial insights emerging from the interviews, and supported by a recently revitalized literature in organizational and managerial studies (Stephenson, Kuismin, Putnam, & Sivunen, 2020; Wright, Irving, Zafar, & Reay, 2023), we will focus on the space dimension as one of the key organizational factors that may enable processes of cross-boundary collaboration and mutual support between actors (Cartel, Boxenbaum, & Aggeri, 2019; Furnari, 2014), as well as creating a sense of identity that feeds narrative activities (Kimmitt, Kibler, Schildt, & Oinas, 2023) igniting a process of heritagization. Relatedly, space can be conceived as an organizational process that both produces and is produced by social relations (Holstein & Rantakari, 2023), and can thus possibly catalyze virtuous processes of democratic participation and citizenship engagement. Our first evidence reveal how bottom up participation and citizens appropriation can positively redesign the territory, while a long sequence of urban planning and administrative decisions failed to meet the evolving needs of old and new inhabitants. Based on emerging findings, the paper will potentially help to re-frame the concept of “heritage” to be intended not simply as the set of cultural assets institutionally ascertained to possess some historic or artistic value, but as a more bottom-up understanding of those symbolic and material elements located in specific spaces which can catalyze a care-taking behavior by virtue of their identifiability and relatability properties.