Abandoning the Apennines? The anthropo-systemic value of the Italian inner areas within the 2016-17 seismic crater

This paper aims at contributing to the academic and political debate about the future of inner areas, which swings between the request for public policies designed to reverse their socioeconomic marginalisation on the one hand, and the request for their abandonment on the other hand. After having discussed the rationale underpinning these opposite views, we propose to contextualise the notion of territorial capital to inner areas. This theoretical approach, labelled as Anthropo-systemic approach, results into an empirical methodology aimed at quantifying, when possible, the monetary value of the territorial assets included in the Italian inner areas of the 2016-17 seismic crater. Results suggest that the abandoning option is a mistaken strategy, even when the sole public budget is considered, and call for a new generation of policies where human presence is a factor of identification, regeneration, and activation of local capital.