"Creative agriculture": from a local participative planning experience to a strategy to keep landscape alive

The most innovative element of the European Landscape Convention is participation, a real challenge for traditional design and planning. Living landscapes can exist where men/communities are able to see their landscape as resources-carrying reality: a productive relation with land is a strong connection, even when production is a mix of surviving agriculture, rural tourism and niche production… The local experience of participative planning in Carro (SP), an inner mountain Ligurian municipality, carried out from the last spring to autumn, focused on the listening of people to define the aims of the new local plan. People introduced the concept of “creative agriculture” as a strategy that the local community asked to carry on, with the support of the administrators, to attract young people to work in their landscape, taking care of the existing resources of the rural semi- abandoned areas. The idea of a “creative” way to bring into a stronger system all single initiatives (from the promotion of local products to the offering of a new model of involving hosting) is very impressive: people think it can be a strategy to give an attractive interpretation of agriculture as a job with interesting potentialities (quality of life environment, possibilities of multi-functional activities, new social model, …). They also pointed out the value of a shared project to enrich their community, based on the peculiar characters of their landscape. This idea can be used as a model for other similar realities in Liguria and in other regions in Italy, to maintain and re-create connections with landscape and reinforce social relationships of local communities.