Cultures, Communities and Design

Abstract

In an age of deep, instantaneous connections, we are used to seeing culture as a constant, ever-changing flow, the result of mixing, revisiting and adapting. And yet, we need only go back a few decades to realise how much the world has changed, how much the incredible acceleration of technological progress has upset the way culture is disseminated. In this regard, I would like to reflect on what are the plausible opportunities that the rural areas of our planet are able to offer and operate from and towards the city. I think it is important to understand some aspects of the term regeneration, which in its ability to transform the territory not only runs through the history of places but also acts on space beyond the temporality of man. In order to reflect on what the process of regeneration of the rural cultural heritage is, we must however consider two substantial aspects: the first is linked to the degree of generalisability of rurality, that is, how it operates on things, the second is given by a more complex scenario that investigates the nature of things in a multidisciplinary vision of the term. The regeneration of rural places is an ongoing process of intangible condition, which concretely displays tangibility beyond human time. The ability to escape time represents today, in its temporal nature, the opportunity to give rural heritage permanence beyond the ephemeral. The countryside has an intrinsic opportunity to renew the symbolic role of society, the Church and religions in the context in which it operates. Regeneration does not necessarily represent its substantive declination, namely the urbe, but it must be considered through an extended statute opposed to the urban: the ruralis. The regeneration of the countryside is a biological action that, centripetally, brings to itself the action of life, the facts of man and pours them into the community. From the inside to the outside, from the countryside to new centralities in the widest possible sense of the term. Rurality must be seen as a vision of renewal of the social structure of human history and must put the religious, artistic, cultural heritage at the centre for a policy of sharing the common good.