14 - Conclusions: The ‘Italian Case’ from a Global Disaster Perspective

Summary

This edited book aimed at exploring to what extent disasters (and disaster recovery) change the affected places. The book argued that disasters change how people make sense of and perceive their place, how politics provides for the needs of the people, how different knowledges interact in managing affected places, as well as how organizations perform their everyday activities. The book provided a journey about these changes occurring into different post-disaster contexts in Italy. Its chapters focused on cases from the North to South of the country, from islands to mainland, and from rural to urban areas, covering a range of post-disaster environments after hazards occurred very recently (from earthquakes in 2016– 2017 to the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020) or decades ago (the Vesuvius eruption in 1944 or the Irpinia earthquake in 1980).

In Part I contributors shared their views on how case studies can illustrate main changes into society. In this regard, some contributors focused on the different perceptions about risk. As internationally demonstrated, risk and disaster perceptions must be taken into account to communicate and elaborate public actions and interventions (Alcántara-Ayala and Moreno, 2016). However, these perceptions highly vary across people and communities. In Chapter 1, Dall’Ò explored this variety, demonstrating the existence of different perceptions across local communities, experts and institutions about landslide risk in a mountain area of Northwest Italy. In this area, the struggle is how to build social and political consensus around landslide risk reduction measures. To do this, exploring the way risk is negotiated, understood, and both accepted and contested locally is important to undertake fruitful ways to implement disaster risk reduction.

Similarly, the other chapters of Part I explored people's feelings and emotions about affected places. In the well-known case of the L’Aquila earthquake in 2009, the ethnographic work of Bock (2022) demonstrated that the Italian government initially gave citizens a sense of hope about a successful reconstruction, by bringing mass media in the affected areas and rhetorically claiming ‘we will never leave you alone’, ‘we are with you’, ‘never more these tragedies!’, ‘housing for all as soon as possible’ (Forino and Carnelli, 2019).