International conference | Reggio Calabria 7-9 November 2018
The conference aims to analyze the effects of the processes of abandonment of small European centers on material and immaterial cultural heritage and to identify possible strategies for their social and economic recovery. Today the phenomenon is emerging widely in all its gravity, despite the growing sensitivity towards issues related to the protection of cultural heritage and a greater propensity towards lifestyles that participate in the ecological and social problems connected to large urban centers.
In fact, that of small towns, often located in marginal, internal and mountain areas, is almost always a story made of departures and abandonments but only rarely of returns. Economic emigration, denatality, natural disasters, epidemics, war events, climate change, new infrastructure networks, socio-cultural changes are just some of the factors that over the centuries, jointly or individually, in a sudden or gradual way, have pushed and , especially in Italy, they continue to push populations to abandon their places of origin.
With this in mind, the conference intends to offer itself as an opportunity to investigate the causes that led to depopulation processes of small urban settlements and to start a reflection on the effects - reversible or permanent - that those processes have generated on the territory and on the communities. Losing inhabitants, local communities risk losing their cultural identity, the architectural heritage degrades more quickly, economic activities are abandoned, millennial traditions risk being forgotten. Add to this the considerable increase in the risk of hydrogeological instability, connected to the lack of care for the territory, while in parallel, congestion in urban centers is growing.
The conference therefore intends to start a broad reflection on the strategies to combat the depopulation phenomenon and to identify some of the possible ways of enhancing the economic value of small towns too. To this end, it is placed in a transdisciplinary perspective, within which the sectors that traditionally deal with the phenomena of transformation of the territory and the built heritage (restoration, history of architecture, history of the city and territory, urban planning ), can be profitably compared with different methodological approaches, such as those of sociology, anthropology, economic history, urban and territorial geography.