The crisis of the rural world, of its sustainability and sobriety, leads to new inhabitants of less accessible areas and the prospect of a new way of living, a narrow unexplored path between the risk of isolation and that of definitive unsustainability
The beaches were dotted with overturned boats, which in winter were repainted in white or light blue by certain wrinkled and taciturn types; in the mountains, three or four Sundays a year the whole valley dedicated itself to a corvée of cleaning and restoring paths and mule tracks, with a day of feverish work but in an atmosphere of festivity and reunion that not infrequently brought children a couple of seasons later.
The land wants maintenance and taking care of maintenance is the primary essence of the sense of heimat, of belonging to a territory. It is one of the three founding pillars of the material culture of the rural era that Europe has gone through in the last millennium, with the sustainability implicit in the production model and the sobriety implicit in the consumption model.
Now that system, in which even the cities of the Middle Ages and up to 1800 grew, is collapsing. It is a collapse largely announced in its structural dynamics (economic, demographic, organisational), but little explored in terms of cultural behaviour and territorial outcomes. Covered by this obliviousness, we are not ashamed to be surprised by the damage of abandonment, unsustainability, and consumerism, which instead are the outcome of a dynamic that has been evident and under everyone’s eyes for at least 50 years.
For abandonment, we still cry out in scandal at the sight of empty and ruined villages, uncultivated fields and orchards, overgrown railway lines, disused factories. We pretend not to have realised that those places have for years lacked a community, a lively social subject that felt culturally ownership of them, that integrated into its normal behaviour, without heroic efforts, the vital minimum of land maintenance. And we pretend not to see the parallel affair occurring in the suburbs, where it is not possible to consolidate an inhabitant nucleus that makes that strip of the city its own, left orphaned of people who care for it and born already lost to common feeling, outside the primary affections. It too has been condemned to abandonment ever since the foundation stone was laid. The concrete houses will last more or less like the dry stone walls, then their degradation will make them seem extraneous to the city, and it will be impossible to understand whether it is the degradation that calls for the marginality of the inhabitants or vice versa it is the condition of dropout that prevents the taking root and caring for the places one inhabits. And all that will remain is to reset everything, demolish the walls, disperse every possible memory, return to the raw material of the soil in order to re-propose new spaces to newcomers, without ever being sure of being able to establish the contact and the temperature that allows that mayonnaise between men and spaces that makes the city to go crazy.
These are events that we know, or at least we feel, but we pretend not to know, with the ‘false conscience’ that still makes us outraged at the unsustainability of our consumer model, the model we pretend not to see radically transformed in the last two generations and accelerated towards a dead and deadly track. Knowing but not acting accordingly is not a radical-chic quirk, but a dark evil that profoundly pervades our culture, from technical expertise devoid of ethical guidelines to the emergence of needs and ‘rights’ unbalanced by adequate responsible ‘taking charge’.
This is how disciplinary apparatuses that we believed to be fundamental, such as those of town planners, crumble, dedicated to a technique of governing territorial changes that, even if there were still mayors who wanted to apply it, would be totally ineffective compared to the current epochal dynamics. But it is no better for economists and public administrators, lacking references to strategies that pay in the short term and inept at supporting structural and cultural policies that (perhaps) pay in the medium to long term.
We have all had at least 30 years to adapt our techniques to the new dynamics underway and have instead developed seemingly more effective systems to govern the old situations. Operational master plans and cubage premiums in town planning are now as good as filling ditches with crocodiles when cannons crumble every wall.
Perhaps the problem seems addressable because it still seems episodic. Like all endogenous pathologies, abandonment has begun by eroding the weakest parts: from the factories of early industry to the bogus ones of European funding, from emergency settlements (where the growing masses of those who demand cities without knowing how to use them are emerging) to terraced slopes. Every mayor thinks he has stumbled upon a particular case, and fights to find the special solution for his own case: demolished neighbourhoods, money poured into a bank foundation to set up self-defined museums, deserted multifunctional centres, landslide containment along roads leading to ruins abandoned by all but the dumpers, not to mention the therapeutic treatment of decayed factories, in the name of jobs (also decaying).
But if we raise our gaze to the vast area, and look at the medium-sized mountain valleys, the coastlines far from the major centres, the expanses of industrial zones that have never taken off, it becomes clear that one cannot think of hundreds of special solutions, each with its own disposable investment, its displaced neighbourhood, its always-closed museum, its management unsustainability.
It is undeniable that outside cities, abandonment is an epochal process of even continental dimensions. In Italy, it no longer makes sense to refer to the exchange value of rural real estate, with housing for sale at a thousand euro, with the nightmare of the IMU tax on the homes of peasant fathers upsetting the meagre budgets of city children. On the other hand, we cannot but note the end of the use value of abandoned places, the extinction of demand, of those interested in having that means to live and produce again in that millenary way.
Until now, every project had tried to patch up the reproductive machine of traditional conditions; now we have to attest that land abandonment marks the end of a cultural property of places, the one that derived from that way of living made of systematic manual labour, of continuous maintenance, of seasonal rhythms, of extreme sobriety in consumption and social relations.
It is now clear that there is no longer any possibility of restoring the continuity of the rural world of the last millennium. It is clear that the future of territories such as ours will be organised and hierarchised according to values and behaviours different from those to which we are accustomed. And the lucid ethics of the project that Gambino put forward over 20 years ago comes to mind: ‘to conserve is to innovate’.
The new mountaineers
Just as a ship abandoned even by its captain becomes a wreck available to anyone who takes possession of it, so a place abandoned even by the last cultivator belongs to those who inhabit it again.
If we look at what has happened along the coasts, with the advent of sun tourism, which has uprooted the ways and places of coastal living, we understand the incommensurability of the two models, with the current winning one reducing fishermen and boatmen, who were the protagonists of the model consolidated for centuries and prevalent until 50 years ago, to extras in an Indian reserve. And thinking about that dynamic and the ecosystemic, landscape and moral destruction that has ensued, it seems to us that an unrepeatable opportunity has been wasted, that of enhancing a planetary unicum, such as our coasts would be without the obscenity achieved over the last two or three generations.
Now it is the turn of the mountains, no matter if Apennine or Alpine, it is the turn of thousands of settlements above 600 metres, outside the hundred tourist destinations and the routes of the great pass roads. Now that mountain is depopulated. Few and often temporary are the current inhabitants, children and grandchildren of the last generation of independent natives, mostly unable to maintain among themselves a minimum of real local community and not just representation. Alongside these are growing numbers of outsiders who by choice (mostly Europeans) or by necessity (mostly others) do not stay in the city.
At first glance, they might be called mountain users, as different from mountain dwellers as city users are from city dwellers. In fact, there is some radical difference in the behaviour and culture of places: the new arrivals are almost always people who have lived in an urban environment, who have savoured the status of the city dweller, who have easy access to services, are immersed in a, sea of opportunities, know many places and many people superficially, communicate before thinking, have a rare and sporadic relationship with nature.
And yet, if we disregard those who do it out of necessity, those citizens have chosen the mountain habitat precisely because they are able to provide inverse services to those in the city: access to services is arduous, the range of possible activities is very modest, both for work and leisure (they mostly retrace the activities carried out secularly, now with less effort), the frequentations of people are limited (even more so than in past generations, when villages were well populated), communications are reduced and sporadic (even mobile phones often have no range), and on the other hand the relationship with nature is systematic and continuous, inescapable (also given the general modesty of indoor spaces).
In short, those who, out of nostalgia or a sense of enterprise, go to live in the mountains today, consciously make the choice of a model of life that is culturally alternative to the urban one to which they are accustomed, perhaps precisely because they are disillusioned by some disciplinary competence that was supposed to allow them to plan for the future and instead…. These are choices that result in new behaviours, difficult to distinguish between those induced by passing fads and those that are taking root in a new socio-cultural structure.
In general, there are some constant aspects: on the one hand, there is an attempt to maintain a minimum kit of urbanity to which one is accustomed, on the other hand, there is a demand that those alternative diversities remain intact, for which one decided to go up to live at altitude with a sense of liberation, after generations that instead came down to the valley with a feeling of care. The new mountaineer appreciates nature and the landscape in a ‘cultured’ way, much more explicitly and with attention than the historical inhabitant; he has a sober lifestyle model, often by choice or to make his choice of life more sustainable; he has a work model or at least a leisure time model with substantial shares of outdoor physical activities.
Up to this point, it is an easily ascertainable identikit, which holds together almost the entire heterogeneous huddle of the new mountaineers, but there is also a disruptive situation: those who choose the mountains to defend themselves from the society of social networking and obsessive and compulsory communication certainly have a life project, but often squeezed into an autistic closure that leads to solitary choices, to social individualism. In short, the desired mountain is thought of in the imagination of the new inhabitants more as a hermitage than a cenoby.
With this attitude, it is perhaps the dimension of the village that has been lost most with the end of historical communities. It was a modest community, of a few dozen or a few hundred people, which was always close to the youngest, but which made the implicit project of rural settlement powerful, because it was capable of titanic work such as terracing, channelling, clearing and clearing to have pasture, mowing and arable land. It was that community of toil and rules of survival that still endured in the traditional coutumier (the handbook of established behaviour that replaced the official, town law) and that gave the gathering of heads of families a strategic role for joint undertakings in the face of collective adversity.
Today, those who live in the mountains seem to prefer ‘the solitary life’, or more likely, they satisfy their need for social relations by participating in inter-territorial networks, between even very distant people, through social networks or by meeting directly on an occasional and individual basis, not shared with neighbours. It is clear that, with this new approach, the mountain settlement in which one lives is experienced more as an apartment block rather than a village: it generates problems of managing the existing rather than pushing to design collective enterprises to guarantee a better future for that place and the people who will inhabit it.
These are the effects that we see a couple of decades after interventions, albeit still valuable, to rehabilitate entire nuclei in abandonment, or programmes to reintroduce rural practices that had been lost, or to organise scattered villages in valleys cut off from winter tourism into widespread hotels. These are almost always projects supported by a strong capacity for mobilisation and entrepreneurial sense on the part of a promoter and by a substantial public contribution, which sometimes overcome a thousand difficulties in the phase of creating the infrastructure or the physical location of the new equipment, and which then lose energy and sustainability when it comes to the management phase and the entrepreneurship distributed among the users of the intervention: the new inhabitants so far do not know how to make the most of them and the risk of a second abandonment in less than a century is looming.
A revolution for territorial projects
A hitherto neglected aspect emerges from this tale, but one that is fundamental for those who study territorial enhancement strategies. It can be summarised brutally as follows: the mountain settlement can have new human resources at its disposal in the future, who inhabit it, recognising its primary values, but who have a planning and organisational instrumentation that is probably inadequate to deal with the problems of such a demanding territory, often lacking the capacity for collective and long-term intervention.
Now, if these are the characteristics of the socio-cultural and psychological typology of the new inhabitants, with these we must address the problem: in the short term we cannot count on widespread and structural changes to a generational trend that is just becoming consolidated and that has no alternative but worse: total abandonment or consumerist devastation.
Therefore, any programme aimed at the sustainable development of mountain settlements cannot disregard the characteristics of this new type of inhabitant, on pain of losing the investment, the energies of all players, the commitment of the best planners and public money. In a situation like this, what are the strategies to be devised?
One must obviously discard the compulsion to behave ‘as’ in a traditional village, which, as we have seen, was organic to a locally closed system of life and choices, but driven to collective and long-term actions, whereas here we are dealing with subjects open to the world, but who tend not to adhere convincingly to organised local actions.
On the other hand, the strategy of disseminating urban service standards, central to the Inner Areas Programme, is proving necessary but not sufficient. In fact, the interventions foreseen in the Internal Areas Programme satisfy (perhaps) the demand for accessibility to minimum service endowments, but (probably) do little to affect the specific particularity of mountain living.
Life in the mountains is desired by the new inhabitants, but in many cases they are not able to sustain it over time, not so much because of the lack of services for them, but because of the lack of planning and competence with regard to the work they can do, with regard to the production or services they can provide for lowlanders.
Indeed, the new lowlanders tend to neglect a resource implicit in their own biographical history: their knowledge of the city system, of the tastes and manners of its citizens. On the other hand, it is evident that a decent perspective of life in mountain contexts can only be achieved through a new relationship with the lowlands, which is the natural complement necessary for any economically sustainable integration.
Therefore, if we do not want the mountains to become, like the coastline, an archetype of the dwelling places of non-active citizens (because they are rich, or on holiday, or retired), it is necessary to facilitate new-generation productive initiatives for the new inhabitants, promoting those that sustainably enhance the mountain’s own resources, making them available to lowland citizens, but taking care that this can also be achieved by the individual operator, not necessarily integrated in a community of intentions with the other inhabitants.
This is a prospect of considerable difficulty, which calls for overcoming trust in works of general interest, hitherto considered basic infrastructures that automatically generate widespread planning and development.
Therefore, let us no longer ‘only’ trust in recovering entire abandoned nuclei, or in completing systems of forest roads giving access to every pasture, or in building school or leisure services theoretically useful for dispersed settlements: almost all those experiences, precious in their conception, glorious at the moment of realisation, demonstrate after a few years their very low effectiveness in triggering self-generating processes of development and the rooting of new settlement forces.
But it is also difficult to successfully promote the development of entrepreneurial activities of individual operators with top-down tools, as we are used to doing with targeted programmes: as mentioned earlier, we are dealing with a new type of subject, full of expectations, ethically motivated, but almost always poorly equipped and in some ways naive, who in any case hardly adapts to standard paths already mapped out.
The only strategy potentially applicable to this type of ‘new settlers’ is the one we try to activate for start-ups of innovative processes: ensuring an initial promotion against a draft project of the proposer and his lasting commitment, but above all guaranteeing systematic, competent and operational accompaniment, in the field (it has to be said), for a few years.
It is necessary to look, as examples and good practices, at the numerous experiences of governance of spatial processes that have long been tried out in countries that have the problem of real suburbs, such as France or Great Britain. As a matter of fact, planning rules have been replaced by concessions and facilitations, tax relief and aid, mostly referring to enterprises and (to a much lesser extent) to infrastructure and real estate. And for companies, which are deemed attractive on the basis of credible projects and monitored in their development and difficulties, it is facilitated not only for start-up, but also for maintenance and all aspects of skills training and amortisation of progressive investments.
In our opinion, the basic criterion for selecting projects to be facilitated is the contribution to the common good. This is a criterion that we too often associate with collective strategies, but it must be applicable in every case, individual or collective, of actions FOR the community.
It is fundamental to select projects that are positive with respect to environmental, social, and cultural sustainability, willingness to tell others about one’s experience, interest in making the economy circular, but also willingness to participate in a new operational and entrepreneurial culture that combines appreciation of nature, overcoming the division between work and leisure, and the search for non-consumeristic pleasure. These are project requirements that cannot be demanded of those who have suffered cold and hunger for generations by living in the mountains in a traditional way, and which instead more easily animate those who, disillusioned by the city, come to make synergy with the mountain’s implicit and enduring values, which resist beyond abandonment. Indeed, it must be borne in mind that ideas, know-how, and education in relations with the city nevertheless remain available to new inhabitants, like a fundamental toolbox.
In order to help those who seek to plan their future starting from the radical choice of a new way of living, a public strategy is needed that works on the level of culture rather than works, that assumes the urban paradigm not so much from personal services as from services for entrepreneurship. These are strategies that cost a lot in terms of ‘political time’ (presence on the territory of competent agencies, alliance with the mayors of small municipalities, communication of initiatives, etc.) and quality human resources (especially for accompanying and taking care of the specifics of each project), but they probably cost much less than any public works strategy that has so far captured the bulk of resources for the mountains.
When each valley has two or three examples of new inhabitants who succeed in rooting their innovative activities, it is almost certain that social mirror neurons will be activated, multiplying good practices in infinite local variants and regenerating the territory with a decisive diffusion.
It will then be the case of a lesson in development from the periphery to the centre, whereby an area, precisely because of its very characteristics, is chosen to be inhabited with ethical and sober behaviour and induces transformations that are sustainable and appropriate to the times: a model of choices for the new generations, a healthy way of inhabiting the future. And we will discover that it must necessarily move away from the previous model.
