PLUS Creative Community Hub: A Culture-Led Urban Regeneration Process for Pisticci (Matera, Italy)

Culture-led urban regeneration strategies are becoming interesting processes at European, national, regional and local level, able to activate innovative productivity systems where culture and creativity interplay in urban districts, adaptive reuse of buildings and industrial sites, and bottom-up cooperation for common goods. A culture-led regeneration process is able to set the scene and create the enabling conditions to promote cultural and creative industries, supporting alternative and situated forms of governance and management of local resources. According to this approach, the research aims at responding to a yet open question in place-based regeneration policies and strategies: how the cultural and creative production could implement inclusive strategies of culture-led urban regeneration, in a framework of Circular Economy, through evaluation processes? The paper introduces the experience of the so-called "PLUS - Pisticci Laboratorio Urbano Sostenibile" (Pisticci Sustainable Urban Lab), a "community hub" developed within the framework of Matera ECoC 2019, in Pisticci (MT), the third-largest town in Basilicata (Italy). PLUS is the result of a methodological process, named "Community Branding (Co-Bra)", that combines management models and multi-criteria/multi-group evaluation methods, and explores the potentials of a deliberative decision-making process. The Co-Bra method has been elaborated for the Pisticci reality and supported the birth and the growth of a cultural co-creative enterprise, oriented to the local regeneration. The multidimensional evaluative approach, that combines different techniques and tools, focused on the recognition of social, economic and cultural opportunities, and provides community-based strategies for both valorising cultural heritage and strengthening places network with a multilevel governance.