Roghudi: Developing Knowledge of the Places in an Abandoned Inland Municipality

Inland 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. The case study of Roghudi, gave us the opportunity to remark the importance of perceiving landscape as starting phase of the design process. Formal and informal knowledge of the places, are assumed as a key to read values of inland abandoned places, in order to structure a development scenario recovering the balance between man and nature. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.