Project Ghost Cities
In Italy, many small towns and hamlets have been progressively abandoned since historical and more recent times (Ghost Cities).
Those places have become a memory of life soaked with personal or community stories, mostly little known or anonymous. Many of these places constitute a great richness for their history, cultural heritage, exquisite urban structures but also because they represent environmental indicators of the geomorphological and hydraulic vulnerability of the Italian territory. In any case, the Ghost Cities are almost unknown to public; information on the causes of their abandonment are often incomplete and, more importantly, a national inventory is still missing.
The Department for the Geological Survey of Italy has recently implemented the Ghost Cities Project. The main purpose of the project is to create an Italian inventory of Ghost Cities where every site will be detected and georeferenced on a GIS which allows the management of information in a relational database. In the data bank, each site is provided with a descriptive file reporting the causes of the abandonment as well as brief geographical, geological and historical information.
The main focus of the project is the attempt of assessing the role of social, environmental and, most importantly, of geomorphological and hydraulic hazards in the process of abandonment.
This research further intends to address the attention of a large audience about how the geological-hydraulic hazards represent a constant threat for the survival of a large number of small towns which, for their geographical position and geological conditions, need a permanent care of their own territory more than other sites.
The subject of geological-hydraulic hazard and consequent impacts either on small towns or the whole Italian territory, requires a changing model that considers the territory as an asset to use, depending on the maintenance of its fragile equilibrium and not a commodity to be subject to a permanent and reckless exploitation.
On 16th December 2021, ISPRA with SIGEA, Società Geografica Italiana and the National Council of Geologists will organize a Workshop on Ghost Cities, the first workshop of the 2nd Cycle of Geology and History Days.