The historic abandoned settlement as a potential strategic resource for a sustainable reception for immigrants

In European countries, in the face of a settlement growing demand coming from migrants seeking asylum and better living conditions, there are large part of territory in growing state of neglect. These are areas that were historically inhabited but they have experienced a progressive depopulation due to, even these, migratory phenomena, inside the same country and towards the more economically developed ones.They are mostly located in mountain areas of great landscape and environmental value and they have inside themselves, small historical settlements in a progressive state of neglect. Their size changes from area to area and it is proportionated to the amount of land that small local communities have spontaneously made cultivable over time. Today, in the conditions in which they are, they represent a cultural and real estate heritage, which is godforsaken and it risks to be definitively lost. The scenario is therefore the one of a strong contradiction between a sizeable presence of uninhabited places endangered and a demand, more and more considerable, of places where it’s possible to live for a better future. A housing demand, which can’t be exhausted with temporary shelter structures but it requires stability for long periods or even permanently, so housing and employment. The last one, if possible, has to be in productive sectors that are not very different from the ones of their countries of origin that are basically primary, such as agro-forestry-pastoral type. As well, on the other side, it is unthinkable that the abandoned places, even when they have a high naturalistic, environmental and panoramic value, they can be only a tourism destination. Their rescue can take place mostly under one condition, that they may return to be permanently inhabited and they may be productive with forms of development that are suitable for the available local resources.This state of affairs represent a strategic potential which is able to conciliate demand and supply. The strategic value is in the opportunity that the demand offers the chance to activate, before it is too late, a recovery process of the abandoned heritage settlement which has to be genuinely sustainable. The operation as a whole could be economically but also socially sustainable in terms of integration for small groups in communities with small dimensions which are more manageable. The whole situation could guarantee the physical and mental health of the people and, at the same time, the safety of the natural environments without interrupting the anthropization process done up to here. In this regard the authors present a case-study of one of their research carried out in the mountain area of the Province of Teramo in the region of Abruzzo in Italy. The territory, which is the object of the study, is a ''wide area”, for the most part included in the Gran Sasso National Park and in Monti della Laga, which covers an area of 1200 km2 and has inside 134 "villages" which are settlements of small and medium dimensions, in a state of partial or total neglect. The study was focused on a sample area that is representative of the entire settlement system and it produced a "pilot project" of integrated restoration that is conceived as a driving force of a re-anthropization process, which is based on the enhancement and promotion of the local abandoned and potential resources. Its possibility of realization could find a strategic support in the planned and politically managed fulfilment of the compatible quotas of the growing housing demand coming from the immigration flows.