A construction paradox in a little Italian paesino

After a long hiatus – brought about by the need to finish my thesis, and then to catch up with a life put on hold to finish said thesis, I have been inspired to revive this blog, following a two day visit to a small, lost paesino in the south of Italy, Molinara, with my father and grandparents. This is the place where my father was born, three years before being whisked away by his parents, to a far away land called Australia. That was almost sixty years ago.

It took us a day to get to Molinara from my home base of Paris: one taxi, one aeroplane, one bus, one train and one car. All those journeys later, I found myself in a small, quiet, pleasant village, half filled with another mode of life to my own, half filled with emptiness.

A strong sense of community life is present in Molinara. Like most small villages, everybody knows one another, they stop and talk as they bump into each other on one of the few streets. The church is still at the centre of this community – geographically and socially – and serves as one of the main places of meeting in the village. 

Interestingly, it also faces opposite the local council.

In stark contrast to the strong separation of church and state that pervades France, inscribed as much in space as in politics and ideology, there are crosses hanging on the walls of the council building, and an underground tunnel actually connects the building to the church, literally joining these two institutions together.

Renovation works, of which there are plenty (more on that later), seem to centre on the restoration or construction of this or that church. This church is for example one of the biggest (as yet unfinished, for lack of funding) construction projects in the village:

One particular feature which caught my eye was the town clock, which has been placed on the tower of the church. French geographer Henri Lefebvre writes about the arrival of "secularised space," where the cathedral still existed "but its tower no longer bore the symbols of knowledge and power; instead the freestanding campanile now dominate space - and would soon, as clock-tower, come to dominate time too" (1991:265). In contrast to Lefebvre's secularised space, when the church was refurbished thirty years ago, it was decided that the town clock would be added to its structure. In Molinara, the rhythm and pace of daily life are still shaped by religion - at least symbolically. 


Time does seem to move at a different pace here. Coming from the city, I found the efforts local people went to in terms of food preparation astounding, quite simply because, by city standards, there would be no time for such activities (or that time would have a price). In the city, it has become a novelty to see people involved in different stages of production along the food chain. 






Here it is a way of life – food is handled from the giardino...

...to the cucina...

...to the piatto

 All according to traditional recipes. I am actually a little ashamed to admit how novel, and even unnatural, it felt to eat fruit and nuts directly from trees, so distant is my food supply chain from the nature in which it was produced!

Another example was the restaurant that included a fully-fledged lab to cure its own prosciutto. I assumed the restaurant supplied other stores in the region, however the owner assured me that they cured the meat purely for their own use at the restaurant. 

The construction paradox

A picturesque village of obvious beauty, today 1200 people live in Molinara – which is significantly lower than it its heyday in the 1960s, when it had a population of approximately 3500 people. I could feel the small size of the village everywhere – even a walk through the cemetery stood out for the relatively small collection of surnames that decorated its tombstones. According to my cousin, that number is getting smaller and smaller. Young people just don’t stick around – with few options for education in the region, and even less for jobs, they are pulled towards urban centres. The population is ageing (1% of it died in July-August this year alone). My cousin is convinced that one day in the not too distant future, Molinara will become an abandoned village – a bunch of relics and houses, many unfinished, filled only with the ghosts of a departed community.

Of course, this is a familiar story. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of villages like Molinara in Europe, indeed, in the world. However, besides an obvious love of working the ground and producing food, there is one very striking feature in Molinara: the construction paradox. 

Everywhere one turns, there are a number of abandoned houses, right alongside a number of new houses that have been built. 

Disintegration and construction, side by side, a random patchwork of habitation and abandonment.

In fact, eighty per cent of houses in Molinara are abandoned. There is an abundance of space, and no pressing need to preserve it. Once people move away, or die, there is no demand for their old homes. People coming back, moving out, moving on, can just pack up one house and build another. The population is shrinking, but the number of homes is increasing.

What is driving this construction boom? 

Part of it has to do with restoring homes destroyed in a major earthquake in the 1960s (but for whom? Noone knows). 









The most striking example is a brand new hotel - refurbished by the council, with beautiful stonework craftmanship, it now sits vacant, an empty decoration. For all the effort poured into this place, it has never been used (apparently it was intended for the many relatives that come to visit their families in Molinara, overlooking the fact that these relatives stay in the big houses of their family members).It all keeps people very busy, creates a strong construction market, provides employment, enables the council to pour something into Molinara. But it lacks an obvious narrative for how this material progress is linked to the progress of the community that resides there.

Some places go up but are never finished. Their owners have run out of money. 

And so they sit there, part of the landscape, symbols of material dreams not realised.

It seems then that this mass exodus is accompanied by something else: the importing of technology, of customs from other places, of values? Much of this change is hardly surprising. For example, my Nonno remarked that when he left Molinara, every house had a donkey. Today, every house has a car. Nespresso machines have also found their way into some Molinara kitchens (much more to my surprise), despite the strong, traditional coffee culture that prevails.

But what about construction? Is this too somehow a product of industrialisation, urbanisation? Or something else? 

Having spent pretty much all my life in cities, and the last nine years in a major capital city of Europe, I have observed first hand some of the implications of the processes of urbanisation within the urban centres that are becoming overpopulated, forever accommodating more and more construction, and functioning as centres of attraction. Yet the picture of the global processes ushering people into cities is more complete when one also comes into contact with the places that people are leaving.

Likewise, if one only observes the shrinking nature of Molinara’s population from within the village, this trend appears inevitable, unavoidable, a natural but unfortunate course of history. It is as though some invisible thread is pulling people away, one by one. There’s nothing here for youth, one resident told me. Molinara has no industry, no jobs said another. To stay, one would have to be dedicated to this place, to starting something here.

It is when one considers changes and forces at the global level that what is happening in Molinara does not appear as an inevitability, but rather as part of a global process of urbanisation, the increasing concentration of people within urban centres. In this bigger picture, cities appear as magnets, pulling people away into the places where study, jobs, opportunity, potential and dreams reside.

Are those dreams the same ones that encourage i Molinaresi to build their houses?

Locals feel a sense of loss, and of helplessness. Noone wants their village to disappear, but what is the solution, if there is one? Some visitors suggest that tourism is the answer. But this does not sit well with me. Is this the future of the thousands of villages facing extinction? Commodifying its culture, turning every day life in the village into a spectacle for a happily paying public? Why when these old towns start to fade away does the idea to transform its traditional ways into a show seem the only way out? What does it say about the potential of places outside of the city to contribute to the advancement of society, as opposed to being its entertainment, its time out from the real world?

Surely the qualities manifested by these residents in their everyday activities – patience, attention to detail, hospitality, care, worship, nurturing – all these things could be harnessed into something more?

In addition to pulling people away from villages, does the global trend towards urbanisation, which concentrates knowledge, wealth and power into urban centres, create an assumption, as well as an effect, that what is left in the village has nothing to offer society? According to this logic, knowledge is not generated in small villages, nor is industry (or not a lot of it). And villagers do not seem to look at themselves that way either. When I asked where the local library was, I was told that there was no real use for libraries here, apart from some books for primary and middle school students.

What are these places revealing about broader urbanisation processes? That is a question that I’d like to think about a bit more. But going even further, I think a really important question to ask is, how can villages like this contribute to local as well as global prosperity? Is there room left for their contribution? And how can local communities harness this?