Requalification, symbolic value and audience engagement of automotive heritage. The Turin case study. Italy.

The present study analyses the high symbolic value linked to automotive heritage, outlines the conservation and reuse of the architectural sites, the enhancement of others tangible and intangible cultural testimonies. It examines the loss of industrial memory values and identifies audience engagement strategies having the aim to historicize and re-appropriate of the memory, according to objectives of the immobile and mobile heritage conservation, and of re-construction of community sense in citizens as well as in cultural tourists. The reference is to the case study of the Turin area, in Italy, which has been one of the most important “motor-towns” in Europe since the early 1900s, and in it to the well-known Lingotto factory, which has assumed a high symbolic value of innovation in automotive manufacturing, since the 1930s.