Integrated territorial redevelopment:

The village as habitat and base unit for activating the rural space

Abstract

This paper discusses issues of rural space and rurality using as a research hypothesis the concept of integrated territorial redevelopment. We started the research with the question of overcoming the urban-rural dichotomy, presenting the formulations proposed by the culturalist, anti-urbanist and naturalist tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries, up to the new city-countryside partnership that is delineated, more recently, by international territorial strategies. The concept of integrated territorial redevelopment focuses on the notion of self-sustaining development and the relationship between territorial vocation and territorial tendency. The Village is assumed as a spatial social planning unit, both in its legal-instrumental dimension and in its rural habitat configuration. In the case study, in a region with low population density, the proposal for the activation of rural villages and the revitalization of the agro-sylvo-pastoral systems of the surrounding areas was elaborated on the basis of territorialization models based on endogenous factors in terms of their sustainability.