Museums and Territories: An Exploration of New Scopes for Mapping Technologies

In their evolution from conservation places of isolated resources to social spaces in service of communities, museums are increasingly called to express their representative character towards their originating territories. Furthermore, the museum’s mission has been gradually enriched with new, more complex functions towards local communities, through a call to actively confront with their contexts, a trend the recent pandemic events have only accelerated. Cultural heritage, with museums at the forefront, as an acknowledged driver of socioeconomic development, has manifold impacts on territories, which have been identified and investigated in the literature, often from a potential perspective. Given the strong territorial component of the museum heritage connection with its reference context, this study aims to investigate the contribution that mapping and GIS technologies, traditionally employed at the scale of single museum buildings, can offer in assessing the actual “living” presence of museums in the local socioeconomic and productive fabric, through the relationships with other reference entities in the territories and their outreach. Taking a sample with a marked nature of spatially ‘distributed’ heritage (archaeologic museums of the Puglia region, South Italy) as a case study, the article presents a mapped representation of a questionnaire-based survey of museums’ recent territorial relationships. The twofold outcomes of the study show, on the one hand, that the investigated sample still experiences criticalities in fully expressing and communicating its potentialities and values in the current scenario and, on the other hand, that mapping technologies can concretely contribute to the museum sector’s innovation by examining its territorial relationships, in line with the current conceptual evolution, also with possible implications on museums’ quality assessment.