Alpinescapes

Following the agreement on the “European Landscape Convention” (European Commission, 2000) and the Joint Programme Initiative on “Cultural Heritage” (JPI Cultural Heritage, 2010) , a new operational definition of Landscape has been promoted in recent years by EU Institutions. In such definition, the Social Dimension of Landscape (which is henceforth viewed both as a social construct as well as social product (Castiglioni, 2009) ) has been posed at the heart of the matter (and consequently, at the core of any policy action involving such issue). The new Horizon 2020 programming directives will also push forward in the same direction, by stressing the need to tackle Societal Challenges related to Cultural Heritage (European Commission, 2014) with new forms of innovation, enabled by a combination of modern ICT, such as social media and mobile technologies, combined with a shift towards more transparent and participative models of territorial governance for the public sector, such as the OpenGovernment and OpenData paradigms (European Commission, 2014).

Building upon such premises, the Alpinescapes project poses itself as a novel tentative to link these multiple dimensions, by focusing on OpenData and Open licensing to collect, organise, provide access to and ultimately give back and contribute, to the existing open content on the alpine landscape (and its heritage, geography and anthropology…) of Valsassina valley in Northern Italy. Linking data from traditional Geographic Information Science repositories to Wikipedia and from local Public Institutions geo-databases to the crowdsourced planetary database of OpenStreetMap, the project aims at building an easy-to-use platform, not only for the promotion and exploration of the areas’ surroundings, but most crucially to enable the participative construction and representation of Valsassina’s landscape as perceived by its User/Citizens.

Year: 2014

Client: INTERREG ITA-CH, Comunità Montana della Valsassina, SUSPI-Lugano, Politecnico di Milano

Team: Daniele Villa, Paolo Tagliolato, Michele Ferretti