The Abandoned Villages as a Regional Resource

Abstract

In recent years, we have witnessed the rediscovery of urban rural realities. Even if these realities may be of small dimensions, they are characterized by a deep-rooted local identity. In many regions, these realities have been exploited to promote actions and policies of local development. Within the same territory, urban, environmental and landscape resources have been identified that could preserve the uniqueness of these places and could counteract the pervasive effects of supra-local development. In this framework, the presence of abandoned villages can gain significant importance. The uninhabited villages, given their general state of deterioration and abandonment, can be considered both as a discarded element of modern consumer society, which erroneously fails to recognize in them any practical use, as well as a regional asset, reinterpreted from a qualifying perspective which does not stop at observing the current state of decay but instead comes to recognize the value of the identity of such places. The abandoned village is a place of interest for its architecture, built in accordance with ancient tradition, for the dialectical relationship with nature that the construction has established over time, and for the rarefied context of the urban landscape that becomes an evocation of the past. The uninhabited villages reflect the essence of the bond that was dissolved between man and territory. While the ghost villages have lost their “life function”, they are abandoned but not forgotten: their present is located in the past and they do not remember the future, thus they become places in the memory. However, by attributing new meaning, these villages can acquire a new function, a new use in and for the territory. Recognizing in the abandoned village a resource identity foreshadows the possibility of tangible and intangible trigger actions for its recovery—actions which can nourish a local economic development in tourism with benefits for the entire territory in which they are located. The proposal aims to investigate the phenomenon and the reality of ghost villages in order to understand the meaning and role to be given to each abandoned village, to define the areas of comparison between cases identified, and to identify possible models of revitalization. Finally, the work hopes to stand as a simple witness, because it is in the transmission of knowledge and the evocation of memory that abandoned villages can be brought back to life.