Creative Ecosystem Services for New Urban-Rural Communities: The "VàZapp" Experience

Abstract

Food cycles, as dynamic and ever-changing systems, need flexible solutions to be co-designed and co-evaluated to generate benefits for people and the environment. Regenerating capital stocks of ecosystem services through urban-rural cooperation requires a “creative capital” which can continuously innovate the use of resources, skills, knowledge, and impact monitoring. Moreover, cultural creative enterprises generate a new value chain in which tangible and intangible assets join the “shared value” perspective to enable a new supply chain as a pillar of the circular economy paradigm. In this perspective, a model for a creative food cycles value chain has been designed, using a Stated Preference (SP) method. A social/ creative enterprise—called “VàZapp’” (Foggia, Apulia region)—has been selected as a case study for the testing of the proposed model. The research results allow preliminary reflections about the definition of “creative ecosystem services” as tools for overcoming some critical issues concerning urban-rural cooperation.