Mobartech: experiencing local heritage and cultural landscape in a Unesco site

Our work explores educational experiences to improve the use of landscape and heritage in a Unesco site, Mantua and Sabbioneta, within an Italian research project named MOBARTECH funded by the European Union, Lombardy Region (FSR). This was inspired by "Cultural landscapes. The research and the proposal of a didactic of the heritage between art and science. New forms of valorisation", financed in 2014 - 2015 by the Lombardy Region (FSeR) and aiming at developing educational paths to valorize Isola comacina, Lorenzo Rota’s botanical garden and Villa Carlotta. While listening to visiting public and cultural operators, great importance was given to educational activities aimed at the school. The result was an empirical kit (Dewey 1954) to be used by different visiting publics. A new project was born from this successful research, MOBARTECH . With a similar multidisciplinary approach, we aim at co-building knowledge to encourage the creation of new creative processes to enhance cultural landscape from a local community perspective. This study will discuss data collected during school work alternance actions’ in February and April 2019 in Mantua and Sabbioneta. Thanks to the collaboration of a groups of 15 students of Pitentino Institute, we have reflected on the relationship between heritage, landscape and local stories. Attention will be paid to how school-work alternance activities may have promoted personal and collective identity in young citizens of a Unesco site. As cultural geography argue cultural landscape is not just the expression of a domination single perspective, rather a complex multifaceted construction laden with symbolic power (Olwing, 1996). In the light of this, an exploratory and experiential kit will be created by the students themselves as a tool for participatory activities in the Unesco site involving different types of audience (senior visitors, families, foreign tourists, city users, pupils of any age etc.) in the near future.Without heritage literacy, no sustainable attitude to local culture and landscape can be enhanced. Action research (Mortari 2004) together with scientific observation (Barell 2007) will be adopted to question the possibility of exploiting theories on landscape use (Hooper Greenhil 2000; Zuccoli 2010) in the scientific field.