Cultural Sustainability and Regional Development. Theories and practices of territorialisation

J. Dessein, E. Battaglini, L. Horlings, eds (2015) Cultural Sustainability and Regional Development. Theories and practices of territorialisation, Routledge Studies in Culture and Sustainable Development, London, Routledge.

Main aim of this book is to discuss the role played by culture in regional endogenous development and sustainability.
For the first time, we are bringing to the fore of Anglo Saxon literatures the concept of territorialisation as a new frame to understand regional development. The very word territory has an etymological link to “terrain”, through the Latin terrēnum (ground) and terra (earth). It therefore offers a clear reference to the natural features of places, offering a stronger semantic efficacy, compared to the notions of region and place.
The role played by culture in regional development and sustainability is discussed in this book using 15 case studies from North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. This role implicitly and explicitly relates to what we intend by territorialisation providing us with a lens to understand how culture influences multi-scale spatial development. Among the Authors from all around the globe we count Michael Redclift and Michael Woods.
The international cases discussed here make clear that there exist different natures and cultures in relation to diverse territorialisation processes. We could therefore assert that the conceptual strength of territorialisation lies precisely in the possibility that it could frame different coproductions of nature–culture within specific strands of time and space.
Unlike other broader and normative concept of sustainable development which could be located in any place and at any time, territorialisation offers an improved understanding of the process underlying regional development, allowing scholars to better analyse the interests at stake, the stakeholders in play, the valued resources to be taken into account for sustainable development initiatives and paths.

Year: 
2015
ISBN: 
9781138830080
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