'cause I, I built my life around you

First act of the new governor of Campania: stop the demolition of illegal buildings and settlements, to be enforced starting next week. here.

In Naples there's no real favela or bidonville, with the exclusion of some gypsy camps and some overcrowded informal buildings, mostly occupied by illegal immigrants. Still, there are a few areas that can be considered slums, such as decayed central historical areas and public housing residential peripheries. And there is, all around the urban centre, a whole city that has been built in the 1970s and 1980s, mostly on agricultural land, in violation of existing urban plans, composed of small constructions or single-family homes.

The majority of these buildings are not really informal. They are good-quality houses, that might even respect building standards, mostly built by firms connected to the Camorra for the local lower-middle class or for bigger entrepreneurs. They are illegal, because they have been built despite the land zonation and in the lack of sufficient infrastructures and public services. They basically are a form of investment, extremely efficient as a means of cleaning money from illegal sources, that relies on the fact that a local or national government will eventually be issuing an amnesty, and transform a construction lacking a planning permission into a perfectly legal (and way more valuable) property.

The population in the region has gone up by roughly 120,000 units since 2001, and, in the meanwhile, 60,000 illegal buildings have been built. They are not there to satisfy a fundamental right. They are pure business. And a rentable one, since they allow the externalization of a series of environmental and social costs on the rest of the community. I get a cheap house, or a good profit, or a low rent, somebody else (or even me and my family) in a not-so-uncertain future, will have to bear the consequences, in terms of poorer access to public services, lower environmental quality, loss of amenities and property value, social instability due to criminal organizations' increasing power, economic damages, injuries, death.

Landslide and earthquake risk, in particular, are positively related to urbanization rates, especially in areas where the constructions are not properly planned. That is to say that communities with high percentages of illegal housing are likely to suffer more victims and damages from events of a given intensity. And in the case of landslides, environmental degradation associated with urbanization is also a factor in increasing the frequency of the events themselves.

Campania, as a region, occupies 4,5% of the Italian surface, and has experienced about 14,5% of the landslide disasters ever recorded in the country, which probably make it the one national hydrogeological risk hotspot, with a notable concentration of deadly landslide events in the Naples province (red dots in the map). It has been the stage of the costliest earthquake ever recorded in Europe and will sooner or later have to face the inadequacy of the Vesuvius emergency plan, largely due to the area's over-urbanization and insufficiency of infrastructures.

The announced stop to the demolition of illegal buildings, which possibly preludes to a real amnesty, is not going to make things any better. It might actually encourage people to build even more, and even worse. Sadly enough, is not always possible to directly connect the dots between such an administrative act and its single consequences, and have politicians sued for their political responsibilities when a farmer is killed by a mudflow, or a journalist by a bullet. But such a way of managing the territory, being aware of the environmental and social situation of our area, are simply premeditated crimes. And a telling start of a new mandate.