Geografia e storia nei territori sensibili: rischio, emergenza e memoria: prove di dialogo

Abstract

Our intention is to explore the practical meaning of certain key-words such as change, collapse, emergency, memory and risk, and how they may explain the links between the geography and history of sensitive areas. For non-experts, the notion of risk is many-faceted: when declined in a past sense as a myth, or a rejected, inconvenient declination of the future, in the present, it loses its intrinsic meaning and comes to refer to an emergency. This conjugation produces actions, within the space and time of the disaster, which are proper to the emergency: its unrepeatable past weakened and with an uncertain future, it emerges as a forceful vehicle of power, which takes all the decisions and enforces the procedures necessary for assessing technical necessities and conscious consensus. In "cases of emergency", the inhabitants involved are deprived of their part in decision-making, while the management of the emergency takes on an abstract and authoritarian form and seems unable to sense the threshold of tolerance of risk of the population. The immediate intervention is seen to be effective, but not in the mid-term, where public action does not take into account the possible alternatives or sustain the local people in their attempt to adapt.