“Houses for One Euro” and the Territory. Some Estimation Issues for the “Geographic Debt” Reduction

Abstract

The phenomenon of the “houses for one Euro” is the epitome of the progressive and increasing abandonment of the inland territories in which many small towns are affected by continuous and unstoppable depopulation. This process, mostly affecting the southern and insular Italian regions, have been triggered by the quick industrial development started after the second post-war, led by the northern regions, that deeply and irreversibly modified the anthropography of the whole country until now. The impoverishment of a wide part of the Italian territory, is one of the many issues connected to the social-territorial justice that is the original topic by which appraisal and valuation, that is science of the economic value judgement, differs from other branches of the applied economics. With the prospect of an insight of the case of Calabria, the paper presents: as first some factual basic premises for defining the matters and the sense of the concept of land debt; as second some theoretical and methodological coordinates for reinterpreting “abandonment as a metaphor of being back”.