VIRTUAL Barcelona

Abstract

The mountain areas and their rural settlements are suffering by a trend of depopulation. After the Industrial Revolution, rural abandonment and a population decrease are common problems globally. Still today, abandonment, marginalisation, disuse, and lack of oversight also occur effectively in high altitudes. The research aims to broadly investigate the common issue of abandonment and territorial fragilities, visible in various layers in two sites (Italy,Turkey) that appear remarkably different. However, over the years, their mountain areas show multiple similarities in the unemployment rate, aging of the local population, lack of investment in social services-such as health care and hospitals – and the education system. The Italian mountains (Apennines and Alps) from the 1930s onwards suffered from a geographical to a political marginalization that for years focused on the development of the major cities as economic powers, leading to migration towards the centers and total abandonment of entire valleys. Also, due to the implementation of policies and the radical changes in social life in the 1950s and also development in the field of tourism in coastal areas in the 1980s, many rural settlements in Turkish mountains lost their investment, causing the increasing decline in the number of inhabitants, social infrastructures, which are still in the high risk of abandonment. The paper aims to understand the current state of the regeneration process compared between the two cases. Actually, in Italy, in the last ten years, a step forward has been made with the government’s introduction of SNAI (National Strategy for Inner Areas). However, in Turkey, limited studies focus on the shift in the rural areas. Besides debate or individual research, there are not many sources of information. The outcome is to understand the possibility of identifying and adapting similar approaches of a specific model that could be applied to both countries in the revitalization process.