Tying Territory, Society and Transformation together: A Manifesto with an Integral Approach.

The EU-funded MATILDE Project was launched after the peak of the so-called refugee crisis of 2015. Besides its humanitarian focus, it examines territorial inequality and spatial justice in light of examples of mountainous areas as a kind of laboratory of peripheral living conditions. In European mountain and peripheral areas, the hosting of refugees has not until now been of major public concern. It can be assumed that peripheral areas are not the places that refugees most want to live in, nor is it an easy task for the original local population to host overnight larger number of immigrants. Therefore, the hosting of refugees in mountain areas can be considered a social innovation. In addition, the coincidence of various global crises (climate, pandemic, global value chains) superposed and strongly influenced the project, especially when considering their interdependency and mutual self-reinforcement. In this way, the MATILDE Project links three key themes together: mobility, territorial development and social innovation.