On May 27 2025, Bardonecchia hosted the territorial workshop “Rethinking the Franco-Italian Border from the Perspective of the High Valleys,” an event organized by the Institute for Studies on Regional, Federal Systems and Autonomies of the National Research Council (ISSIRFA-CNR) as part of the PRIN project “Italian Borderscapes After 2020.”

 

This workshop represents a continuation of the fieldwork initiated in July 2024. During that initial phase, research was conducted in the territories spanning from the upper Susa Valley in Italy to the Maurienne Valley in France, aiming to comprehensively understand the thematic challenges and diverse strategies adopted by cross-border communities in response to recent polycrisis events. The territorial examination yielded several critical issues that necessitated deliberation among cross-border citizens and institutional representatives from both regions.

 

The primary objective of the recent workshop was to present participants with a preliminary and partial overview of the research findings and to initiate a thematic discussion concerning the principal critical elements and prospective projects identified to date. To this end, workshop participants, comprising various civil society representatives actively engaged in cross-border cooperation on both sides of the frontier, provided substantive contributions to the development of central debate topics.

 

This engagement was facilitated by the outcomes of two co-design exercises proposed to the participants. These exercises were instrumental in highlighting crucial nodes requiring further elaboration, redefining contextual interpretations, and identifying additional elements warranting scholarly attention. Through the structured articulation of these two distinct moments of engagement, the workshop successfully delineated priority thematic areas for future projects, stimulated discourse on preferred and plausible future scenarios for the region, and contributed to the sustained invigoration of existing collaborative networks.