The community archive can be a powerful tool for territorial investigation and simultaneously a collaborative approach to learn and act in social innovation and urban regeneration processes. This study presents a methodological advancement for defining a community-based archive based on participatory mutual learning between experts and community inhabitants, aimed at co-identifying shared values by the context’s spatial, social, cultural and environmental dimensions. If, on the one hand, non-formal training experiences represent an opportunity to re-understand the territory together through community engagement and empowerment actions, on the other, they produce data and tools that become interfaces to interact with in the decision-making processes that the archive is constantly called upon to define. The Atena Archive project, in the village of Atena Lucana in the province of Salerno, Italy, represents the context in which the methodological advancement was structured and applied in some parts.
The research, therefore, aims to examine the role of the community archive in territorial transformative processes, structure a value-centred approach for activating a community archive, and identify the decision-making processes to active during the census processes to make communities protagonists choose what to archive collaboratively.