Due strategie culturali tra marginalità e accoglienza

The rise of initiatives involving small towns at risk of depopulation offers the opportunity to empirically grasp different paths “to imagine a different future”. In particular, we focus on cultural strategies: interventions drawing on symbols to fight marginalizing trends and trigger processes of local development. Such strategies are tackled by comparing two case studies: the experimentation of the Sprar model of widespread reception for refugees and asylum seekers in a small village of Calabrian Appennino (Sant’Alessio d’Aspromonte) and the variety of social and cultural initiatives that welcome fragile social groups promoted by the association Nocetum in a former agricultural village situated between the rural area Parco Agricolo Sud Milano and Milan. The heterogeneity of the selected cases will make evident two recurring mechanisms: first, the fact that associative styles and organizational cultures are in both cases the result of multiple levels of negotiation, in which local leaders are engaged in many ways to implement the reputation of their interventions; second, it will be shown the ambiguous role played by the traditional collective representations concerning the analysed local communities, thus illustrating how such representations are unavoidable conditions for anyone promoting cultural strategies in those communities.