Abstract
Vital Mountains is a project regarding the local development of a marginal mountain area located in Trentino. From the methodological point of view, in the project we adopted the action research approach to lead - through our research - a real change in the community. How to maintain this area vital? How to revitalize the territory to bring benefits to the local community and more in general to the whole society? To foster such change, we made use also of a specific theory of change, the “U Theory” of Otto Scharmer, which is used worldwide in various contexts - such as business, government and education - to address the most pressing global challenges and to co-project the future. Following the U theory approach, we involved the whole local community and invite participants to listen to each other, to suspending judgment and habits based on past experience, to observe the current and future system and to sense their territory as a whole. Concretely, participants worked sharing values, interests and intentions on the project. We, as researchers, made use of several participatory tools, like coaching circle, field visits, collective data analysis, future labs, co-creation of maps, etc. As a result, three shared future scenarios were identified by the local community, which resulted in 3 main topics to consider as priority themes for this area. Then participants defined 13 strategic guidelines that form the shared framework where several project proposals have been developed. These first steps allow researchers to accelerate change toward the co-design of a collective project related to a scattered hospitality system. The activities are ongoing on and the implementation of the starting hospitality system, with all the related services, is planned for the next summer.