Territori marginali tra disagi e contrazione : prospettive di riuso del patrimonio del sud Salento

“The waste culture” is observable in land-government practices as in multiple other areas and dimensions of contemporaneity. Specifically, the research looks at housing policies, noting that in many cases the most immediate response to housing deprivation seems to be new construction. This contrasts with reuse policies, considering that urban contexts are characterized by the presence of interrupted construction sites, abandoned, and/or underutilized heritages as well as phenomena of shrinkage and thus settlement abandonment. At the same time, housing hardships are taking on new forms, difficulties are being exacerbated, and the numbers of struggling households are increasing as a result of the polycrisis and the subsequent tightening of socio-economic conditions. In this context, the paper promotes multi-scalar reuse perspectives of the existing public and private heritage in response to the housing issue starting from the qualitative observation of the polycentric, marginal and shrinking spatial structure of South Salento in Apulia.