Photovoice and Landscape: Participatory Research-Action to Led Young People to Monitor Policies and Landscapes

Abstract

This paper proposes the use of the landscape as a key to the interpretation of the territory during participatory action research (PAR). The “landscape” collects and tells the effects of policies: on territory, on environment, on cultural and architectural heritage of the community. In addition, the landscape indicates past practices and may indicate future sustainable policies. In this document is tested a method of PAR called photovoice. The aim of the application is to test if the photovoice can be useful to activate civic monitoring of projects with European cohesion funding.

Photovoice is a methodology born in the 90s of the last century and brings together the visual and mnemonic perception of the community to obtain useful elements for a dialogue with local decision makers. The perception of the landscape itself is one of the best reading keys to be provided to the involved communities, meanwhile the community itself is involved doing photovoice. From the landscape elements it is possible to identify the connections between territory, perceived landscape heritage, and territorial management.

In the case study reported in this paper, the application of photovoice takes place in the inner area of Calabria called «Grecanica» or Greek. The elements identified by young people in the community are linked to local projects resulting from European cohesion policies (according to open-cohesion data and Monithon). Finally, the application verifies the usefulness of the photovoice method in reading the landscape in order to activate social innovation processes, bring the community to perform civil monitoring, write civic monitoring reports and upload them to the Monithon platform (in this case study).