Guardia Sanframondi Heritage between Narratives and Community Maps. An Application Model to represent the Italian Heritage of Inner Areas

Guardia Sanframondi is one of the pilot sites selected by Italy’s National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI). The contribution explores how the cultural landscape of the area can be represented through participatory processes. By engaging the local community, the project seeks to develop new languages, symbolic codes, and communicative tools that promote inclusive and identity-based narratives of Guardia Sanframondi’s heritage. The broader framework aims to support sustainable and regenerative futures for rural regions by aligning policy strategies with the needs and aspirations of local populations. This study approaches territorial representation through a framework that extends beyond traditional cartography, that emphasizes the role of perception, identity, and cultural meaning in spatial understanding. Central to this perspective is the concept of the eco-territorial, which informs the use of community-based and collaborative mapping as tools for exploring and designing place-based knowledge. Participatory mapping enabled the initial outlining of the cultural landscape and helped to reconstruct the community’s symbolic and functional relationships with its territory. To retain the relational dimension of the-se insights and to build a georeferenced spatial archive, this phase was supported by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies. DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.35.2025.23