Southern hospitality. In the Messina Strait Area, and throughout Southern Italy, widespread welcoming of migrants brings multiple benefits

Abstract

In Calabria and Sicily, as well as throughout Southern Italy, widespread consumption and degradation of the territory, in striking contrast to enduring landscape excellences, result in the huge dimensions of empty or unused housing heritage, at the top even compared to the sensational levels reached by this phenomenon on the national scale. If in Italy about a quarter of the housing stock is in fact empty, this share reaches 30% in Sicily and exceeds 40% in Calabria. This makes paradoxical not only the existence of local housing problems, but also the fact that migrants cannot find a home and often have to lie, in sub-human conditions, in improvised and precarious ‘welcome’ centres. Therefore, even more than in the rest of the country, in the Italian South, Sicily, Calabria and especially in the Messina Strait Area it appears urgent to make empty and often abandoned housing stock – and building heritage in general – available for the priceless human and social capital represented by the migrants. Those of them who intend to stay in these areas could actually contribute to local self-sustainable development actions promoted, today, by community planning practices together with the ordinary landscape and spatial planning instruments of the two Regions. This article explores such topics and illustrates some actions, also ‘grassroots’, through which we are trying to combine heritage reuse, social and cultural integration, and reterritorialization.