Amina Pereno, Martina Spinelli, Diana Rolando, Giorgia Malavasi, and Lorenza Mola
Fragile rural territories are increasingly confronted with intertwined green and grey transitions, where environmental sustainability, energy poverty, demographic ageing, shrinking services, social isolation, and territorial marginalisation intersect. Addressing these conditions through local governance requires forms of collaboration capable of bridging heterogeneous disciplinary perspectives and situated territorial knowledge. This paper reflects on a transdisciplinary mapping process developed within the SustAge research project, focused on Renewable Energy Communities and active ageing in Alto Canavese, an Alpine inner area in Northern Italy. Rather than approaching mapping as a neutral representational practice, the paper frames systemic mapping as a translational and collaborative process through which legal, technical, sociological, and design perspectives negotiate meanings and collectively construct territorial understanding. Through a co-creation process involving researchers and institutional actors from multiple disciplines, the study examines what forms of knowledge emerge when territorial transitions are mapped collaboratively. Such knowledge then constitutes the basis for local policy proposals. The findings suggest that systemic mapping generates situated, relational, translational, strategic, and negotiated forms of knowledge that cannot emerge within isolated disciplinary frameworks. The paper argues that systemic mapping functions less as a static visual output and more as an epistemic interface enabling collective sensemaking across disciplinary boundaries. In this perspective, systemic design contributes to sustainability transitions by creating the conditions through which diverse actors can collaboratively interpret complexity and imagine new territorial futures.
Keywords: Systemic Design, Transdisciplinarity, System Mapping, Renewable Energy Communities, Active Ageing, Fragile Territories