Over the last two years, the Covid-19 pandemic has emphasized the pervasive role of ICTs in reshaping long-entrenched relations among settlement patterns, everyday practices of spaces, and territorial divides.
The massive shift to tele-working in the field of education and knowledge economy has (over)emphasized the role of ICTs in overcoming territorial divides in the so-called the “left-behind places”, marginal areas that could experience a kind of “digital renaissance” thanks to new flows of people and innovation. In particular, in a country divided by historically-rooted territorial inequalities such as Italy, the narrative of a smart resilience has been intertwined with a kind of “back-to-the-village” rhetoric that promoted the return to small towns and villages ("borghi" and “paesi” in Italian language), increasingly abandoned over the years. According to several commentators, these marginal(ized) areas would be attractive from the residential point of view for new temporary residents/city-quitters/digital nomads thanks to the massive shift to teleworking, as well as for tourists looking for off-the-beaten-track destinations.
Apart from being an increasingly ubiquitous narrative, the “smart-working village” mantra has been mobilized by a variegated repertoire of private and public actors that created new platforms to intermediate between this newly emerged demand and supply of “rural tele-working” and/or repositioned already existing tourism platforms (such as Airbnb) within this new market segment.
Through a multi-method approach, including a "mapping" of platforms and e-services targeted to wannabe temporary residents in small villages and a qualitative in-depth exploration, the work scrutinizes the controversial implications in terms of still enduring digital divides, risks of rural gentrification and growing pervasiveness of digitalization mobilized as panacea for territorial development.
Mots clés : teleworking|smart village|off-the-beaten-track tourism|temporary residents|Italy
A104708TG