Valuing heritage from a community-based perspective. Some reflections for the making of ecomuseums in Sicily, IT.

Built heritage is one of the key elements that societies inherit from the past and could be reused as an opportunity for applying the principles of sustainability in the making of the future. Therefore - together with natural and immaterial heritage – built heritage has to be preserved and valued, not frozen but rather actively protected and enhanced. This has been widely stated by several norms and conventions, starting from the Italian Constitution, till the 2005 European Convention on the Value and valorization heritage – with a participatory approach – can be ascribed to the organizational form of the so-called “ecomuseums”, became a tool for organizing community-based processes aimed at protecting and enhancing heritage in its various facets while promoting local development. Despite ecomuseums gained a certain success at an international scale, in some contexts, such as the Sicilian Region (IT), there is a delay in implementing processes of local development due to several elements of criticality. This paper aims at discussing the current advancement of the ecomuseum’s experimentations in Sicily, starting from a Sicily. The ultimate goal is to share some lessons and to open a discussion for next steps in terms of processes and practices related with heritage