by Elaine Anne Wang, MCP’23 & Surbhi Agrawal, MCP’24
The Valtellina region, a valley in the foothills of the Italian Alps, is facing challenges of economic degrowth and population decline. Our project proposes a regional development plan to revitalize Valtellina’s local economies and develop tourism through remote work. We explore how the global trend of remote work, which has been accelerated by the pandemic, can be used as a catalyst for economic revitalization in Italy’s small towns. We are looking at ways of combining local communities with the global knowledge economy, empowered by digital connectivity. We conducted workshops with remote workers to understand what makes a place an attractive remote working destination for them and discussed our findings with the region’s municipal authorities to understand compliments between the Sondrio’s plans for a ‘Smart City’ and its potential to develop as a destination for remote work. This informed our city-town-village development strategy, a place-based intervention framework that proposes different interventions for the different scales of towns in the region. The key ideas of our strategy are to develop a ‘Remote Work Valley’ along with building a new knowledge economy and developing sustainable tourism in the region.
In this practicum, we are exploring how the global trend of remote work, which has been accelerated by the pandemic, can be used as a catalyst for economic revitalization in Italy’s small towns. We are looking at ways of combining local communities with the global knowledge economy, empowered by digital connectivity. Our visits to these small towns and villages in Italy were immensely enriched by interactions with local authorities and their aspirations for their towns.
Elaine Anne Wang & Surbhi Agrawal