Digital Platforms for (or Against?) Marginal Areas: Smart Working and Back-to-the-Village Rhetoric in Italy

Italy was the first Western country to be heavily affected by Covid-19 after the first Chinese outbreak. Apart from the effects in terms of health and emergency issues, mainstream discourses have been early monopolized by the need to reconsider the ways of living and working in post-pandemic times. An ubiquitarian narrative mobilizing a “back-to-the-village” rhetoric transversally emphasized the possibility to permanently or temporarily live in small towns and villages thanks to the unprecedented opportunities provided by remote working, often combined with tourist practices. This chapter aims at evaluating to what extent remote working has been mobilized in several mainstream discourses to tackle the challenges that small villages, rural areas, and marginal contexts have to face in the country, where the epidemics has emphasized the historically rooted territorial fragmentation. In particular, the research explores discourses combining smart working and new mobility/tourist models and practices such as “workation” to scrutinize if these innovation practices fall within strategies of local development or, on the contrary, of territorial corporization, by reproducing crystallized stereotyped imageries about marginal places.