Glocal tourism and resilient cities: the case of Matera "European Capital of Culture 2019"

The paper presents the key elements of the strategic project “European Capital of Culture 2019” initiated by the city of Matera in 2014. Through the “big event”, defined by the combination “diluted time/diffuse space”, the “Città dei Sassi”, UNESCO World Heritage since 1993, is innovating the symbolic, material and organizational levels of all the Basilicata municipalities whose tourist resources were almost unknown both at national and international level, thus showing high resiliency, i.e. flexibility, inclusiveness, integration and initiative. Through a self-centred and sustainable model of tourist accommodation that minimizes the infrastructure fixed capital investment aiming, at the same time, to increase collective empowerment processes, it is planned to accommodate about 700,000 “temporary citizens” who, by adopting an active and participative approach, wish to live a unique and unrepeatable identity experience in the Lucanian community, instead of being mere spectators. A special attention is paid to “virtual” communication, by using the world wide web not only as a showcase to promote the bottom-up identification and enhancement process of the heritage, but also as a tool to manage contacts with potential visitors, in order to avoid any adverse impact of the event on the environmental and cultural components of the city and of the entire regional planning.