Rethinking in-land rural areas. Towards renaturalization.

The Calabrian hinterland case study may represent an opportunity to discuss and debate the central problems of in-land areas. In-land rural regions are territories quite distant from the welfare of urban centers and are positioned far away from the established infrastructure network of the country. Demographic trends, despite the availability of natural resources, entail marginalization, abandonment, and depopulation mainly due to socio-economic changes. The considerable social cost of traditions that disappear also implies, for example, degradation of land use and hydrogeological instability. In recent years, different types of strategies aimed at reversing such demographic trend, mostly based on tourism economy, but sometimes they revealed cons as destructive as abandonment itself. As those strategies prove to be ineffective, some claim that the abandonment of small towns and villages located on the slope of the mountain ranges should not become a collective cost. Instead of working with the assumption of future repopulation through temporary devices for each in-land area, the research aims at showing an alternative approach to the loss of permanent population by prioritizing hydrogeological stability and naturalization of landscape.