“One-euro Houses” Initiative against Territorial Marginality in Italy: Commodification or Revitalization?

Abstract

The work critically explores a recently-emerged strategy of territorial regeneration for small towns at risk of depopulation in Italy, “One-euro houses”. Situated at the intersection between rural gentrification and the researches on real estate capitalism, the analysis is based on a place-based case-study in Troina, Sicily, to understand if the initiative supports socio-economic regeneration in small villages and/or marginal areas or, on the contrary, it fosters commodification/financialization of the real estate market as well as extractive dynamics. So, the paper scrutinizes how the local coalition of public and private actors mobilizes the initiative to deal with the challenges of the local development, thus highlighting the mismatch between their perception and the critical views of the academic and cultural debate.