Security, Risk and Vulnerability

Title: Sustainability and environmental risk from historical perspectives: the roots of rural abandonment and present effects

Teachers: Anna Maria Stagno, Roberta Cevasco, Rebekka Dossche, Ivano Rellini, Sabina Ghislandi, Chiara Molinari

Email:  anna.stagno@unige.it

Duration: 8 hours  course and 16 hours assisted exercises

Credits: 5 CFU

When:  Between April and June 2025

Where: Via Balbi 4, 3rd floor seminar rooms, via del Campo 59r, different places for fieldworks

CV: Risk, Climate Change and Sustainable Development

Exam: Small report and small presentation (max 30 min) on how the concepts presented in the course can be used/extended for the research of the involved PhD student.

Abstract:
The course will analyse the processes of abandonment in their historical dimension and the close relationships between social, environmental and economical processes, showing to which extent the consideration of these interrelations could contribute to build a sustainable development of rural and mountain areas.
The depopulation and abandonment of mountain areas, with their environmental and social consequences, are a priority on the agenda of national and European governments in the coming years. In the last years, it became evident that a common perspective is necessary to address all the aspects of abandonment and marginalisation of mountain areas in all their complexity and interdependence. The course will introduce to methods to investigate the process of abandonment from an historical perspective, thus considering the multiple meaning of environmental resource management practices: not only their environmental and productive dimension, but also the social ones. The aims is to offer an overview to approaches to consider together social change with landscape transformation.  The course will combine the complementary approaches of social micro-history and environmental and rural archaeology and will present the methodologies to develop historical-environmental approach and sustainable and environmental risk, considering the changes in practices and management of environmental resource and their relationship with the organisation of local communities and population dynamics.

Program:
-    The social dimension of the landscape: historical ecological perspectives and historic landscape characterization
-    Abandonment as historical process: field evidence (rural archaeology and historical cartography)
-    The study of environmental dynamics: botanical and geoarchaeological surveys
-    How to build policies to promote locally-based sustainable development through historical perspectives