Urban Creativity for the Rehabilitation of Small Mediterranean Villages: Virtuous Experiences and Impacts’ Evaluation.

The Italian peninsula boasts a heritage of inestimable beauty, often hidden, and spread throughout the country, such as the small villages. These places preserve extraordinary historical and artistic heritage and maintain an authenticity rooted in local traditions. However, these territories suffer from a double vulnerability: a logistical and infrastructural fragility combined with a socio-economic marginality. In recent years, urban creativity interventions provided an opportunity to re-launch smaller Mediterranean villages, through processes of re-centralisation and generating impacts of a different nature. In fact, several Italian villages have been transformed into authentic openair museums, involving the valorisation of local contexts. From the north to the south of the peninsula, numerous virtuous examples demonstrate how urban art can be considered as an efficient tool for redevelopment and regeneration, aiming at tourist and economic recovery as well as the repopulation of these places. Frequently these forms of urban art celebrate the history of villages, narrating traditions, customs and scenes of local life through the universal language of drawing and preserving memories that would instead risk being lost. However, not all projects have proven to be successful. This paper explores a case study in the Campania Region, Italy, to deepen the possible reasons why urban creativity projects may fail in boosting regeneration processes, paving the way for further systematic attempts to comprehensively evaluate the outcomes of such projects that can influence their success or failure.