Architettura di resistenza nei Centri minori. Dalla crisi dello spazio allo spazio civico

The paper addresses the issue of depopulation in Italy’s inner areas, with particular attention to small municipalities in the southern regions, highlighting its social, cultural, and political implications. Building on the debate sparked by the National Strategic Plan for Inner Areas and on the criticisms raised by scholars, religious institutions, and civic associations, the text identifies the school as a fundamental stronghold of social cohesion and resistance to abandonment. In small towns, in fact, the school does not merely perform an educational function but represents an irreplaceable social infrastructure: a place of aggregation, cultural production, and citizenship-building, capable of holding together different generations and supporting families’ permanence in the territory. Its closure triggers processes of social desertification, accelerating depopulation and the loss of collective identity; conversely, its preservation and strengthening can activate dynamics of staying, attraction, and welcoming, configuring the school as a strategic lever for the regeneration of minor centers. Within this framework, the case study of Valledolmo (Sicily) is presented, where a research-action project promoted by the University of Palermo and the local administration led to the construction of a cultural pavilion serving the Liceo Classico M. Picone, reinterpreting the archetype of the bouleuterion as a civic and community space. The experience demonstrates how architecture, conceived as a civic and spatial device that supports the school as the beating heart of community life, together with the synergy among institutions, universities, and active citizenship, can activate processes of social and cultural regeneration capable of overturning the narrative of abandonment and restoring to inner areas a concrete perspective of hope and future.