6 - Afar from Vesuvius but Still at Risk: The Unstoppable Urbanization of the Naples Volcano’s Yellow Zone

Summary

Introduction: The urban enclosure of the volcano

Beyond its ‘natural’ features, the state of a territory always results from the interaction between the ecosystem and human beings, whereby ‘the environment is not a pure container, but is the product of man who “humanizes” it’ (Segaud, 2010, p 18). In this sense, space is a fundamental element ‘in the construction of individual and collective identities, in the codification and contextualization of time and history, and in the politics of interpersonal, community and intercultural relations’ (Oliver-Smith, 1996, p 308). This close relationship between humans and the environment is particularly evident in the case of ‘territories at risk’, such as those around a volcano, where the risk assessment by those who live there is always the result of a game of reciprocal cross-references (November, 2011, p 5). However much the choice to continue living in a ‘fragile’ space may seem, from the outside, to be a ‘bewildering’ and ‘illogical’ practice, it often sinks into a local logic (into another rationality) whose causes and motivations can be recognized, for example whose socio-historical-political process can be identified as the background. Risks are the result of a socio-historical process, so they should not be considered only in terms of the distance from an ‘hazardous source’ such as a volcano – as if the question of risk depended only on contiguity with it – but should be examined holistically to fully understand and manage them.

The Vesuvius volcano is considered one of the most dangerous in the world, mainly because of the magnitude of the so-called ‘exposed value’, one of the three elements of the algebraic equation with which risk is usually quantified, understood as the product of ‘hazard’ times and ‘vulnerability’ times, precisely, ‘exposed value’ (Ongarello, 2009, pp 30– 31). This factor – understood in terms of both human lives and material goods – has grown enormously over the past 80 years, that is, since the time of the last eruption in March 1944. If we consider the Vesuvian area as the one that currently falls within the so-called ‘red zone’ of the National Emergency Plan, its demographic growth has been steadily increasing since the last years of the 19th century thanks to the development of some small industries, such as coral and pasta; for example, in 1940 there were already around 350,000 residents (Gasparini, 2006).