The Production of Abandonment. Vulnerable Territories and New Extractive Economies of Public Heritage in Italy

Abstract

The abandonment of buildings or entire territories is often interpreted as the outcome of seemingly spontaneous processes of demographic decline, economic crisis, or the functional obsolescence of the built environment. This paper proposes an alternative interpretation, arguing that abandonment should be understood not as a residual condition but also as the outcome of the political production of space.

Drawing on an analysis of disused public assets and recent transformations in urban policy in Italy, the paper argues that abandonment functions as a mechanism of territorial governance, producing social vulnerability and spatial availability. This availability is subsequently captured by extractive processes of real-estate and financial valorisation. The progressive withdrawal of the state, the decline in public maintenance capacity, and the financialisation of collective assets delineate an apparently dual geography that is, in fact, deeply unified, in which depopulating inland areas and cities under intense real-estate pressure represent convergent outcomes of the same transformation in the relationship between the public sphere, territory, and dwelling.