The ‘città abusiva’ in contemporary Southern Italy: present conditions and evolutionary prospects

Abusivismo edilizio is a familiar issue among Italian urban planners and policy makers. Outlaw construction accounted for a large slice of the national building sector for several decades during the second half of the twentieth century, affecting a variety of urban environments the length and breadth of the peninsula: rural and coastal settlements, small and medium-size towns, as well as those emerging metropolitan areas undergoing huge internal migration flows. While popular among scholars from the 1960s to the late 1980s, the topic has received dwindling attention since then. Nowadays, it registers little interest in urban studies circles, even if it remains a burning issue both at local and national level in terms of its political implications. This has again been underlined by the controversies surrounding centre-right party candidates in Campania during recent elections. If abusivismo is once more under scrutiny – in a seminar dedicated to changing Italian cities – and if we are using the word città to refer to its outcomes, then this is in order to advance two significant hypotheses. The first is that outlaw construction, far from being a form of deviance, can be seen as one of the structural factors in the building of contemporary Italian cities, particularly in the South. The second is that the peculiar features of settlements generated by outlaw practices should be recognized: they are specificities which deserve close observation in the light of their possible impact on the attractiveness, competitiveness and liveability of the urban systems of the Mezzogiorno in the near future. To lend support to the first hypothesis, a backward glance might be taken at the main factors at play in the social and material construction of these peculiar forms of città – factors that continue to influence its present-day condition. First, southern abusivismo can be read as a more sinister manifestation of the tacit policy of “individual mobilization” that operated throughout Italy in the second half of twentieth century. Described in detail by Alessandro Pizzorno and Bernardo Secchi, it developed where an inoperative State played on disadvantage in order to encourage individual families to work out their own solutions, taking advantage of incentives and the opportune lack of controls. Whereas in the North-East this has mainly taken the form of diffuse economic activation by local communities, in the Mezzogiorno the same strategy of mobilization seemed to respond almost exclusively to the demand for private residential space. A demand which can be better understood when seen in the context of the acute economic imbalances and housing shortage that still afflicted the Regions of the South in the early 1970s, and which was answered by local elites through the patronage of a massively abusive campaign of house building. Second, the history of Italian abusivismo is closely connected to the amnesty policy promoted to grant retrospective legalization to illegal housing. Initially tested in Sicily and Lazio in the early 1980s, the condono edilizio has been recurrently adopted at national level – in 1985, 1994 and 2003 – producing a variety of uncontrolled outcomes. On the one hand, by assigning to local municipalities – with no specific resources – the onerous recovery of outlaw urbanization, it has created the conditions for a permanent urban landscape of extremely poor quality, with scarce, if not totally absent, infrastructures and civic facilities. On the other hand, the periodic re-introduction of the condono has encouraged more de-regulated behaviours – as pointed out by Carlo Donolo – which even led to structured initiatives on the part of criminal organizations that were quick to recognise in the shady area of abusivismo an opportunity to launder money from illegal activities. In support of the second hypothesis, we might look at the findings of fieldwork undertaken by my team in recent years in an attempt to correct and enhance the interpretative frameworks formerly adopted to define outlaw building up to the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, we might observe three transformation scenarios that are taking place in specific parts of southern città abusiva. The first scenario, set in a quarter of Sarno, a municipality in Campania, tells the story of a widespread trend towards rootedness and responsibility. What we see is that the growing perception of failure – a mood that pervades many illegally-born settlements where both quality and facilities are missing – at times goes hand in hand with a conscious decision by the populace to take care of the space in which they live. Independently organised initiatives and residents’ committees are thus growing in response to the chronic lack of a collective dimension. The result is an unprecedented concern for public space. The second scenario, set in the municipality of Ardea, in southern Lazio, is a story of individual responses to the absence of publicly supplied infrastructure networks. Here we see that off-grid solutions are being implemented by individuals or by consortiums, at times achieving higher standards of comfort and performance compared with the public infrastructure provisions to which they are a creative alternative. A third scenario – set in Marina di Acate, in eastern Sicily – tells of the abandon and decay processes that are affecting the lowest quality settlements. An increasing number of coastal resorts are showing serious signs of neglect, becoming increasingly unsuitable for tourism and seasonal use. Unable to attract the investment needed for maintenance, they are being repopulated by marginalised groups, and this often adds a social emergency to what is already a serious environmental issue. Beyond their local specificities, these stories allow us to glimpse some of the general evolutionary dynamics that give new meaning to the term città abusiva within the urban systems of contemporary Southern Italy. As such, they are a long way from the interpretative paradigms inherited from the debates of the 1970s and 1980s. By following these new trajectories, we can formulate a more meaningful urban-policy agenda designed to deal with the città abusiva, thus going beyond the intervention modes envisaged by a policy of condono – interventions that have repeatedly proven inadequate. Accordingly, at least three approaches can be proposed, with a shift of focus towards the opportunities and the limits to their implementation within the existing administrative framework. A first line of approach is inspired by the embryonic sense of cohesion, awareness and rootedness which is appearing in certain settlements. These expressions of social capital could be enhanced so as to feed into an alternative to urban rehabilitation, whereby citizens would no longer be required to wait passively for services to be supplied by a remote authority – nor should they have to demand such services after payment of the amnesty surcharge – but would feel involved as aware agents. A second line of approach regards the scattered self-improvement schemes which are being promoted by individuals or consortiums in response to delays in municipal action. Rather than relying entirely on public intervention, these initiatives could be fostered through new forms of incentives and regulations, designed to disseminate decentralized and flexible infrastructural solutions and promote collaborative practices. A third and final line of approach implies removing the more problematic and disqualified outlaw urbanizations from the southern landscape. The processes of decay that affect these settlements could then provide the precondition to inspire new long-term policies, based on predicting changing tastes in future generations, and aimed at moving disused volumes from the more degraded areas towards more consolidated and dynamic centres. All of this would take place within a more coherent framework of territorial re-composition.