Over the last years, smart technologies have been widely considered as a panacea to overcome territorial marginality, especially in rural areas where digitalization and smart innovation could face the main challenges of depopulation and socio-economic deprivation. In particular, at the European scale the Smart Village Action was launched in 2017 in order to deal with the so-called « circle of decline » , thus showing to what extent rural smartness has been recently gaining momentum in transnational cohesion policies._x000D_
The proposal aims at critically exploring the paradigm of Smart Village as a recently-emerged framework of territorial governance in order to scrutinize what are the related mainstream discourses and perceptions at the national scale by providing a critical mapping of the Smart Village projects implemented in Italy within the European Union action._x000D_
From a methodological point of view, a Qualitative Policy Document Analysis will be carried out on UE and Italian official documents through content/world cloud analysis to deconstruct the main narratives emerging from UE and national policies; the results of this first step will be compared with the software-based Sentiment Analysis in order to evaluate potential conflicts and/or conflicting narratives about the Smart Village paradigm._x000D_
The research can provide new theoretical insights on the concept of Smartness going beyond the urban dimension, as well as new methodological approaches combining traditional methods (such as content analysis) with more innovative ones (world cloud & software-based Sentiment Analysis) in order to critically deconstruct how smartness is mobilized in and for rural areas._x000D_

Valentina Albanese, Teresa Graziano (corresponding)
University of Insubria, Como (Italy); University of Catania (Italy)

 
ID Abstract: 807