The disaster
According to the Civil
Protection Department, the earthquake which occurred in a small hill area in the Latium, Marche, Abruzzi, and Umbria regions on 24th August
caused 290 reported deaths across three municipalities (230 in Amatrice, 11 in
Accumoli, 49 in Arquata del Tronto). There are more than 300 injured. 2,500 have
lost their homes and evacuated to tent camps. Some people are still missing.
The total number of deaths will be close to that of 309 after the
L’Aquila-Abruzzi earthquake, de facto
representing one of the most severe disasters in Italy after the 1980
earthquake in Campania (the area I am from) and Basilicata regions, which
killed more than 3000 people.
The affected area
consists of small villages. Amatrice has around 3000 inhabitants, Accumoli 700,
Arquata sul Tronto around 1000. The built environment is
mainly constituted by cultural heritage buildings, ranging from medieval times
to peasant houses of early XX century, scarcely resilient to earthquakes, and
in some cases with limited ordinary maintenance. Legislators are conducting an
initial investigation on the bureaucratic process by the Amatrice and Accumoli
City Councils for the development approval of 115 collapsed buildings (Del
Porto and Tonacci, 2016). Some of the buildings in these areas have been used
as holiday houses, for example by people from Rome, which is less than two
hours away by road. Among the victims, around 50 were from Rome or close areas,
as well as Italian and English tourists. Villages in the Apennines Mountains and,
more generally, the vast inland and rural Italy, historically suffer from limited
development and few job opportunities. This has led to depopulation,
abandonment by youth, and a demographic structure that is aging, mirroring the
general demographic trends of Italy.
“You talkin’ me?” (Robert
De Niro, Taxi Driver, 1976)
Some of the reports I
have read on this earthquake seem to be using a pure hard science approach for
analysing the chronic problem of disasters in Italy. For example, Gully (2016) on
the IRIN website focuses on cultural heritage conservation in Italy, and claims
the sacrosanct necessity for Italy to investment in earthquake-proof retrofitting.
However, individuals and families have to also increase their risk awareness
and to retrofit their buildings in order to be earthquake proof. In this
regard, the same article quotes Michele Calvi, professor of earthquake
engineering at IUSS Pavia. Calvi claims that most of the houses in the affected
area were owned by the elderly, or were holiday homes, so they had no great
motivation for retrofitting, and that it is necessary to create significant
incentives for people to update these buildings codes.
There is nothing wrong with
this, of course. What is wrong is the selection of the expert to talk about
disasters including statements on local communities. Calvi is in fact a “hard
scientist” that de facto projected,
promoted, and helped the Berlusconi’s government in 2009 to realize the CASE
Project (Calvi and Spaziante, 2009), still now one the most ignominious and widely-criticized
post-disaster housing projects worldwide. A project of 19 new settlements
spread across L’Aquila, paradoxically built through a superficial top-down
approach as a temporary measure in emergency but with permanent purposes
(Alexander, 2013). A project which radically altered the land use and the local
landscape and spatial organization, with no public services, public transport,
social spaces (Calandra, 2012; Forino, 2015), and refused by part of the
population (Fois and Forino, 2014). Therefore, it is quite shocking to a reader
with some experience of Italian disasters that a scientist like Michele Calvi, who
neglected progressive disaster social research through his action in L’Aquila,
has been given space to talk about communities in the affected areas. Why does
he have to talk to me?
Hey, Italiano: Pizza, spaghetti
and mandolin
Another interesting piece
is by Hooper (2016) in The Guardian,
which reports that
“Italian
officialdom reflects the values of society, in particular Italians’ generalised
contempt for rules of any kind, and the prevalence of lazy officials and
apathetic, or even corrupt, politicians”.
Systematic corruption
permeates most of the political and institutional levels in Italy, particularly
through the overlap of financial/economic lobbies, mafia, and powerful institutional
positions. In the current political setting of Italy, illegal activities are
often used as manu longa of legally institutionalized
systems, harassing territories through industrial pollution, environmental risk,
or private use of natural resource, all with the real blessing -but the
apparent opposition- by formal and legal institutions. This, of course, is also
reflected in disaster recovery. National and international literature is full
of examples of seismic disaster recoveries (but not limited to them) in Italy
which have been led by powerful lobbies, intruding into the political setting
and conniving in order to raise the reconstruction cost, three, four, ten times,
and demanding the required funds to be disbursed (Caporale, 2010). This process
has been spammed across decades and has been held just by a fistful of powerful
people within the political, industrial, and financial environment, while
leaving crumbs to the rest of the community and therefore contributing to
exacerbate emigration, unemployment and social injustice. In a sort of perennial
post-disaster recovery associated with paternalistic development in Southern
Italy, the Italian government is still sending reconstruction funds to e.g. the
Belice area (1968 earthquake), to Campania and Basilicata regions (1980) and to
Molise region (2002), with limited or nil improvement in terms of labour
policies, social welfare or culture (Caporale, 2010).
However, as this blog consistently
attempts to highlight since its birth, contemporary global politics is demonstrating
that concepts such as “legal”/rules and “illegal” have always more overlaps than
differences, with the “legal”/rules using -while blaming- the “illegal” to
perpetrate social and spatial inequalities or to find a scapegoat for bypassing
public responsibilities. Wars, exploitation, neo-colonialism, racism, asylum-seekers
debate, civilization clash propaganda demonstrate this, every day and at each scale
and latitude. Italy is therefore perfectly framed within, but also exacerbates,
the common and contradictory democratic framework that we observe within the
global neoliberal society. No. Italy is not a black sheep within an innocent
and virtuous flock made by US, European Union, Australia, or puppet dictators
worldwide.
In addition, the
aforementioned statement does not consider the other side of disaster recovery
history in Italy. The country has seen impressive social mobilization, as born
in post-earthquake areas to claim democracy, participation, rights, and law
requirements, such as the struggle for work rights and prompt reconstruction in
Belice or Campania and Basilicata (Ventura, 2010), the bottom-up reconstruction
plans by some affected communities (Forino, 2015), the community resilience
initiatives (Fois and Forino, 2014), and the participatory practices (Calandra
2012) in L’Aquila, as well as the grassroots mobilization in Emilia Romagna
(Hajek, 2013). Hooper (2016) manages to trivialize, probably because he is not
aware of, the bottom up requests for transparency, democracy, and laws, in
opposition to the systematic corruption after disasters. Talking about “values of
a society” is therefore always problematic, particularly when trying to judge
an entire national system and its inhabitants in a wicked event such as a
disaster. Values are always individual, although mediated by the context in
which these are performed and experienced, and claiming that the values of the
Italian society are those of laziness, corruption, and bypassing rules is
stereotypical and discriminatory.
A missing social science
These articles are just two
among the numerous reports of the earthquake in Italy that have proposed a partial analysis to a complex issue such as a disaster. While hard scientists and professionals such as
seismologists, geologists, engineers, architects, planners, economists are
necessary figures to assist politics and policy-making in being effective, they
have to be supported by, and to mutually support, the analysis of social issues
that intervene within a disaster scenario and have contributed to shape
disaster literature for the past 80 years. Such analysis includes for example
history, development, specific needs within communities of people with
disability or children, communication, formal and informal network between
citizens and institutions (Ventura and Carnelli, 2015). Scientists and professionals
such as anthropologists, sociologists, communication and media experts,
geographers, and territorial scientists of any sort are fundamental in adding a
human and social perspective to disaster studies and actions, and particularly in
deconstructing partial and superficial narratives such as those aforementioned.
UPDATE: on 28th August, this post has been republished with some slight revisions in
the blog run by ENTITLE, a European network of research and training on political ecology. I strongly recommend this blog, particularly for readers interested in neoliberalism, development and environment. This is their
Facebook page. For Italian readers, an Italian version has been published on 29th August on the Facebook page
Protezione civile e riduzione del rischio da disastri, and has been uploaded on my Academia.
References
Alexander, D.E., (2013),
An evaluation of the medium-term recovery process after the 6 April 2009 earthquake in
L’Aquila, central Italy. Environmental Hazards, 12
(1), 60– 73.
Calandra, L. M. (2012). Territorio e democrazia. Un laboratorio di
geografia sociale nel doposisma aquilano. Edizioni L'Una.
Calvi, G. M., Spaziante, V. (2009). La ricostruzione tra provvisorio e
definitivo: il Progetto CASE. Progettazione sismica, 3,
227-252.
Caporale, A. (2010). Terremoti spa. Dall'Irpinia all'Aquila. Così i
politici sfruttano le disgrazie e dividono il paese. Rizzoli.
Fois, F., Forino, G.
(2014). The self‐built
ecovillage in L'Aquila, Italy: community resilience as a grassroots response to
environmental shock. Disasters, 38(4), 719-739.
Forino, G. (2015).
Disaster recovery: narrating the resilience process in the reconstruction of
L’Aquila (Italy). Geografisk Tidsskrift-Danish Journal of Geography, 115(1),
1-13.
Hajek, A., (2013),
Learning from L'Aquila: grassroots mobilization in post-earthquake
Emilia-Romagna. Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 18(5),
627-643.
Ventura S., (2010), Non sembrava
novembre quella sera, Mephite.
Ventura S., Carnelli, F., (eds.), (2015), Oltre il rischio sismico.
Valutare, comunicare e decidere oggi, Carocci.
