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

The phenomenon of the “houses for one Euro” is the epitome of theprogressive and increasing abandonment of the inland territories in which manysmall towns are affected by continuous and unstoppable depopulation. Thisprocess, mostly affecting the southern and insular Italian regions, have beentriggered by the quick industrial development started after the second post-war,led by the northern regions, that deeply and irreversibly modified the anthropographyof the whole country until now. The impoverishment of a wide part ofthe Italian territory, is one of the many issues connected to the social-territorialjustice that is the original topic by which appraisal and valuation, that is scienceof the economic value judgement, differs from other branches of the appliedeconomics. With the prospect of an insight of the case of Calabria, the paperpresents: as first some factual basic premises for defining the matters and thesense of the concept of land debt; as second some theoretical and methodologicalcoordinates for reinterpreting “abandonment as a metaphor of beingback”.