The project aims to understand innovative and original habitation strategies in marginal areas, seen as places where to explore present and possible future scenarios. The project is intended to realize an organic and systematic ethnographic research conducted by five Research Units in 16 villages in different areas of Italy (North, Centre, South, and Islands). The situated and intensive anthropological survey is meant to understand contemporary habitation perceptions, conceptions, and practices in peripheral and small living contexts (villages), interrogating the very notion of margin, and exploring the innovative processes to produce culture and create sociality. The purpose of the research is to study ethnographically, on the one hand, the “quality of life” and the well-being of the residents, and on the other hand, the micro-practices of social and cultural life, and territorial caring.This research is thus nourished by a critical discussion with approaches focusing on development, innovation, and planning. However, it proposes that the perspective – which is made by innovative readings of the performative, progressive, and generative possibilities that inhabiting marginal areas can offer – necessarily undergoes some changes along crossing lines. These are: social networks, co-habitation and relational modalities, individual and common well-being, shared knowledge of environment and biodiversity, worship and religious practices, patrimonialization processes.