Paper short abstract:

Industrial production continues to cause the abandonment and destruction of spaces, where populations live without services and opportunities. The recovery practices offer possibilities for reorganisation based on the social infrastructure of family and spatial ties.

Paper long abstract:

This proposal analyses the practices of recuperation of urban spaces and how they reflect social meanings and ways of organizing settlements and relationships. The research based on the context of the Old city of Taranto (Apulia, Italy) seeks to deepen the connections between an urban area affected by historical phenomena of abandonment and the industrial development of the steel industry and the consequent spatial expansion of the city. The Old city's abandoned number of buildings in physical decay represents an opportunity to reconstruct a new space for living, relations, and work. Family units and social organizations resist abandonment, continuing to live and occupy the available spaces in the old city. These groups suffer a form of social marginalization and violence: they live in an area abandoned by the rest of the town without access to services and opportunities to improve their conditions. For these reasons, the ethnographic investigation focused on the organization of recovery initiatives and abandoned spaces, promoted by an informal group called "I Ragazzi Della Città Vecchia" (The Boys of the Old City). These practices highlight the centrality and importance of space as a fundamental resource for the social reproduction of inhabitants, relationships and economies. The reproduction of social infrastructures based on the kinship and neighbourhood relations of the inhabitants involved in the recovery allows them to resist abandonment and the absence of infrastructures. Trought a spatialization of the social infrastructure, the inhabitants defend the living dimension from the violence of depopulation and abandonment.