THE REASONS FOR THE PROJECT
The reasons for the SMALLABLE Project can be traced to the desire to highlight the centrality of fragile and marginal contexts in relation to the policies promoted by the EU. This centrality manifests itself, on one hand, through specific policies promoted by the EU, which invests in these territories through both projects and the allocation of specific financial resources; on the other hand, by focusing on general policies whose impacts directly affect these territorial contexts. In other words, the pursued objectives related to strengthening the European integration process, as well as those aimed at restoring dignity to European institutions, stimulating citizens’ sense of belonging, and developing solidarity among citizens, represent values that directly involve, protect, and support even the most fragile and marginal territorial realities, stimulating the mobilization of local communities in seeking endogenous pathways out of marginalization processes.
To implement impactful interventions that aspire to achieve concrete and lasting results, it is necessary to overturn the widespread yet erroneous perception and build more positive representations of marginal, rural, and mountainous areas. It is therefore appropriate to counter the seemingly inevitable concepts of decline or disadvantage, depopulation, and abandonment conventionally associated with these territories, and instead promote favourable and advantageous images and scenarios capable of restoring the richness of values that have settled in these territories and the wide heterogeneity of resources that can be activated, around which to build economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable pathways.
In other words, it is about changing the historically dominant narrative through a reversal of perspective that the Project proposes to pursue through raising community awareness that the status of marginality does not represent an unavoidable, local, and isolated condition, but rather concerns a significant part of the European regional contexts, present in almost all EU member countries. Therefore, it is about identifying similar realities in the community context and considering how, despite specific differences, it is possible to conceive and develop alternative future scenarios.