Reconstruction as an Opportunity to Promote Local Self-sustainable Development of Shrinking Territories in Seismic Inner Areas in Central Italy

Abstract

The natural disasters that hit the Italian Apennines with increasing frequency, earthquakes, landslides and floods, cause enormous damage to people and things, modifying economies and social contexts, already affected by the scarcity and antiquity of infrastructures and the abandonment of some territories, located in particular in the inner areas of the country. In these territories there is a significant social, historical, economic, environmental and landscape capital of Italy that everyone knows and loves. The need emerges to increase infrastructural resilience, carrying out significant extraordinary maintenance interventions, promoting the technological development of monitoring activities and infrastructures, prevention activities, civil protection and public rescue. Resilience, however, is a broader concept than the physical ability to overcome disasters, as the ongoing pandemic crisis has shown. This includes, for example, the ability of the urban system to respond to unforeseen seismic events or health problems; the solidity of the network of public spaces and services to support communities and their ability to effectively deal with sudden crises. In the event of catastrophic events, it is precisely the peripheral urban contexts of the Inner Areas that are most exposed to “Risks of isolation”, as shown by the seismic events of 2016, where the secondary infrastructural network was heavily affected, limiting mobility of residents in an unsustainable way and sentencing them to further forms of isolation. The work explores the experimental methodologies capable of planning substantial changes to the structure of cities and minor urban areas (both with reference to damaged buildings and to the infrastructural network) that reconstruction can allow, making it a unique opportunity to renew and re-organize the territory.

The paper is the result of a joint work of the authors, also if the paragraph 1 has to be attributed to Francesco Rotondo, the paragraph 2–3 to Giovanni Marinelli, the paragraphs 4 to Luca Domenella, the paragraphs 5 to Marco Galasso, and the paragraph 6 – conclusion, to all the authors.