Images of local societies and projects for space

The coherence between the spatial images of local societies and the images produced by expert knowledge becomes a constituent requisite of the project for space organisation. Indeed, one of the reasons for the inefficacy of projectual activity may be acknowledged in the divergence between the project and implementation of it and, as underlined, in the ever-increasing difficulty of producing and promoting a sense of belonging and rootedness towards the urban territorial contexts concerned, that translates into a principle of responsibility with respect to the future of our own space of life. This leads us to hypothesise that the gap ensuing might indeed constitute a cause of inefficacy, in the sense that when the image with which the project is represented does not contain elements coming down from the ‘perceptive worlds’ of a settled society, created by a process of ‘territorial hysteresis’ in which environmental dominants emerge, the significant places, the unnegotiable values, the long-lasting elements that have always been at the head of space organisation of the society, and above all the relations between the latter, it may often happen that the outcome is not effective and shared, precisely because it concerns elements alienated from the local population and because it comes down from exogenous models of development indifferent to the actual vocations of the context.