If, on the one hand, we are witnessing a growth of urban and metropolitan systems on a national and supranational level, a sign of the progress and speed of relations and flows; but on the other hand, we see that the dimension of abandonment is affecting new and numerous settlement centres located above all in the inland areas of the various territorial contexts. These are territories that, in the face of extraordinary resources and potential, are characterised by a marginality that is not only geographic-physical, but also social and economic. With respect to this condition, a renewed interest in them has been spreading for some years now, especially in consequence of a change in views, visions and directions, also on the part of public policies, which are not always, however, truly effective and decisive. Nonetheless, there are various experiences of “re-centralisation of the margin” that stand out as emblematic examples of the refunctionalisation and reuse of housing assets that have suffered abandonment and loss of meaning. These are experiments and regenerations mainly bottom-up, which provide a glimpse of new housing possibilities, but with an innovative conception of work, production and services. This is the general framework for studying the case study of the municipality of Irsina in the province of Matera (Basilicata Region), characterised by a partial process of abandonment, to which its inhabitants and the municipal administration have responded with a ‘repopulation’ project, although in its beginnings and currently very contained, through the phenomenon of International Retirement Migrations (IRM). A kind of migration that involves different actors whose profile, both in terms of cultural background and social and economic status, is totally different from that of migrants from the South, as well as the motivations that are mainly based on the search for a qualitatively better territory, especially in the environmental and socio-cultural dimensions.

Luisa Spagnoli (1); Lucia Varasano (2)
National Research Council (CNR)-Institute of Mediterranean Europe History (ISEM) (1) University of Rome “Tor Vergata”(2)

 
ID Abstract: 224