Agri-industrial dynamics and settlement heritage at risk. The case of the Albenga sub-region

The Albenga agricultural plain, together with the hilly territory of the valleys that converge into it, to- day is one of the most dynamic economic areas in Liguria. The long-standing tradition that has seen this peculiar regional area characterized by a strong agricultural component (competitive at national level and not only) has profoundly modified, starting from the post-war period, the settlement structures of the entire urban region, historically identifiable in the city of Albenga and in the settlements connect- ed to it, as one of the most ancient Ligurian settlement environments. The intensive use of the land for agricultural purposes and then for productive and tertiary functions of the plain has determined the det- riment of the more inland (in abandonment) valleys. Land take, conflicts in land use, environmental instability, abandonment of small inner villages, give back today the picture of a territory that is experi- encing an environmental-settlement crisis that threatens the possibility of maintaining balanced eco- nomic and social arrangements. So, the urbanization and the agri-industrialization processes of recent decades has radically changed the original morphology of territorial systems. Recognize the traces of long-term urban form, first of all at a large scale (and then at the medium territoral scale), can help land planning actors in order to make settlements more sustainable and resilient. The aim of the paper is, in a fist step, to analyze the long-term urban plan for the territory of Albenga area. Settlements are analyz- ed together with the basic territorial structures that have generated them during the historic long peri- od. The study starts from the diachronic reading of cycles of territorial development that have gradually formed the present settlement. The matrix elements that determine the shape of the settlements are, in the first instance, the paths and the plots (including land uses), detectable by comparing different his- torical maps. Subsequently the different built forms are classified into “morpho-territorial typologies”. The representation of the settlement into different temporal stages is the result of processing carried out through the use of GIS and simulation models based on cellular automata and multi-agent systems. In a second step the contribution, starting from the the infra-regional scale, the contribution attempts a re- construction of settlement dynamics during the period 1981-2020 which tends to highlight the constant loss of patrimonial value of the valley settlements (abandonment of the villages and shrinking of agri- cultural production areas, economic impoverishment of the most internal areas), is associated with an analysis of the local economic cycles which led to a transition from a condition of balanced polycen- trism to a dissipative dispersion. The relationships that link economic dynamics (socio-economic pro- duction models), which in turn generate specific patterns of land uses and spatial configurations of the settlement constitutes the central nucleus of an infra-regional metabolic model centered on the assets and the risks associated with them.