Filippo Gagliano

As in many parts of Italy and Europe, the Sicilian Trazzera regional property has been for a long time the main land infrastructure supporting the agro-pastoral economy. Throughout its slow evolution, this land heritage has been affected by transport transformations and illegal appropriations by neighboring landowners, which have reduced its potential public function in the current renewed prospects of sustainability and a new balance between territories concerning the issue of the inland areas. A further issue concerns the management of the relationship between private interest and prospects for public reuse in progressively urbanized territorial contexts where this infrastructure takes on considerable economic and real estate interest. The current regional legislation suggests some measures for inter-municipal planning that also include the legitimization of illegal appropriations. From this twofold prospect, according to the wide-spread information and communication technologies (ICTs), and also including the geographic information systems (GIS), this work provides the application of two assessment tools based on a GeoDatabase of the current heard roads in the two areas of quantitative–monetary and aesthetic–qualitative assessment. The first shows the extent to which the fair compensation to be charged for legitimizing land parcels is underestimated today, to the detriment of urban social fixed capital development. The second demonstrates the way that common awareness of landscape value can be nurtured for the benefit of land and ecological–environmental rebalancing.

Archaeological sites are part of the history and identity of a community playing a strategic role on the different scales of the cultural and economic common life. Whereas on the one end the most famous archaeological sites attract huge flows of tourists and investment, on the other hand, many minor archaeological sites remain almost ignored and neglected. This study proposes a project-evaluation approach devoted to the “minor” archaeological site development, outlining a territorial, socio-economic, and landscape communication pattern aimed at creating an archaeological network integrating other cultural and natural resources. As such, these networks get able to match the demand of customers who shy away from iper-consumerist tourism and want to deepen their knowledge of a place. The proposed approach integrates knowledge, evaluation, and design in a multiscale pattern whose scope is to foster and extend the archaeological research program, involving public and private stake/stockholders to widen the cultural-contemplative experience and promote further educational events concerning the themes of the local identity. With reference to the archaeological basin of Tornambè, Italy, a Web-GIS knowledge system has been drawn to provide the territorial information requested by the economic-evaluation multiscale pattern implemented to verify the cost-effectiveness of the project. The expected negative results of the economic valuation supported the allocation pattern of the considerable investment costs, as well as the hypothetic scenarios about the evolution of the cultural-contemplative experience due to the extension of the archaeological estate. Some disciplinary remarks propose a heterodox approach for a further interpretation of the economic results and financial indexes, by introducing the monetary dimension of such a social capital asset.