The cities with a fascist foundation

With the famous “Discourse on the Ascension” (Milan 1927), and an article appropriately entitled “Displacing Cities” (1928), fascism laid the foundations for a policy of “disurbanization” that wanted to control urban growth, but at the same time to keep the countryside populated, at a time when an emptying of rural settlements was emerging.

At the end of 1928, the measure for “comprehensive remediation” had already been launched: to promote the economic and social rehabilitation of the country through the construction of great public works financed almost entirely by the State and destined to profoundly change the Italian territory thanks to remediation, drying and electrification, also with the aim of employing unspecialized labor.

After a careful observation of the growth of Italian cities, however, in the Twenty Years, and of the sequence of “new cities”, founded in fascist Italy from the first - Mussolinia of Sardinia, today Arborea (1928) - to the last - Torviscosa (1940) -, we are faced with the contradictions of fascism regarding the relationship between the city and the countryside, exalted from time to time according to convenience. A policy, therefore, based not so much on urban planning regulations as on police provisions for public security: the call for the forced movement of entire Ferrara families, arranged in 1933 for the population of the Sardinian region of the “redeemed” Nurra, which betrays the repressive nature of the control of population movements, especially with regard to the unwanted, is sufficient. The city-countryside combination (summarized in the motto “The land is redeemed, cities are founded”) was fought in vain on opposite sides even with restrictive laws on urban development, repeated until 1939.

Sardinia is in perfect line with the national trend not only for urban growth, but also and above all for the founding of the three new cities (Mussolinia, Fertilia and Carbonia), which at various stages testify to the decisive presence of the regime on the island, making it a sort of “laboratory for Italian architecture”.

Update

10/9/2023 - 15:56