The Calabrian Landscapes as an Innovative Laboratory for the Integrated Enhancement of Local Resources

Landscape and cultural heritage are key resources for territories and local communities as well as for their economy and tourism to undertake sustainable development paths. Such paths are sustainable if they originate in communities that are involved in imagining and designing development models able to protect and enhance those environmental and cultural resources and tangible and intangible values that have found a wonderful synthesis in the landscape and are directly related not only to the image and identity of the places, but also to the residents’ quality of life and to the development of certain economic sectors, such as tourism (Pultrone, 2012).In the European, national and regional documents on sustainable development, tourism and landscape, the quality of the territory as a whole is considered as the most important resource for the socio-economic development of cities and territories. The European Landscape Convention itself states that the protection of the landscape is not inconsistent with economic development but will support sustainable development and social involvement. In particular, the characteristics of the Calabrian landscape are important unifying elements for the whole regional territory. Mountain and hill areas with a limited anthropic pressure have a huge landscape value due to the presence of natural resources of excellence, in spite of certain weaknesses related to depopulation and marginalization, which have resulted in degradation and lack of maintenance of the same natural resources (Teti, 2013). Moreover, the varied coastal landscapes are peculiar and unique in certain stretches, while they reveal high landscape degradation in others as a result of the high anthropic pressure deriving from the lack of adequate planning. The Regional Landscape Framework (QTR/P), provided for by the regional planning law and adopted in 2013, gave an incisive direction to the processes of rehabilitation and sustainable development of the territory. It refers to the Regional Planning Guidelines and states the active role of the landscape as well as the need for its protection. Therefore, the regional cultural, environmental and landscape resources are brought into play to achieve development while assuring protection and considering the landscape as a resource with a view to generating positive impacts in an “economy of quality”. The responsibility the Region Calabria has taken on towards the landscape is clearly shown by the following actions it has undertaken: being one of the founding members of the European Network of local and regional authorities for the implementation of the Landscape Convention; promoting the Calabrian Landscape Charter; signing the Memorandum of Understanding for landscape protection between the Region Calabria and the Ministry for Cultural Heritage (2010), which binds the State and Regions to integrate landscape into their physical- and town-planning policies and into those with a direct or indirect impact on it. Such a memorandum is expected to be implemented through the Territorial Landscape Plans which allow preserving and protecting landscape values within the physical- and town-planning schemes resulting from the approval of the Territorial Framework and of the Municipal Structural Plans. Finally, a further action undertaken by the Region Calabria is the approval of Calabria Landscape Policy Document (2013), which is focussed on the integration of protection and development, conservation and enhancement, asset and context. Plans and virtuous relationships between landscape, natural and historical resources, tourism and knowledge of places should be developed also in the light of some ongoing experiences of Integrated Local Development Projects (PISL) – operational tools to impleme