Negotiating between slow mobility and heritagisation: Multistakeholder’s perceptions, uses and perspective views over heritage landscape

This contribution aims to analyse the different perceptions, current uses and perspective views associated with a particular heritage landscape: a linear walkable and cyclable elevated riverbank. Walking and cycling trails are slow mobility infrastructures that links different heritage landscapes at local, regional and transnational levels. At the same time, the trail is a heritage landscape, constantly reshaped and negotiated by the interactions of humans and nature. To highlight the stakeholders’ perspectives towards this peculiar object, the so-called Percorso Primaro, one of the pilot areas of the H2020 project rurAllure, is taken as a case study. Overlapping in the Argenta Municipality (Italy) with the Via Romea Germanica, a medieval pilgrimage route extending from Stade (Germany) to Rome, the Percorso Primaro stretches along the banks of the old “Po di Primaro” river, an evident landmark standing out above the almost flat landscape and thus a strong element of territorial identity. Using a case study, we explore the locally promoted initiatives to enhance the Primaro trail as a slow mobility axis and cultural heritage landscape. By comparing these initiatives with the viewpoints and objectives of supra-local actors, we contribute to a better understanding of the contested representations over the same slow mobility infrastructure and its complex heritage-making and governance process.