XXth century rural villages in Italy, Portugal and Spain. Knowledge and valorisation

The knowledge of rural settlements built for agrarian colonization in Italy, Portugal and Spain by the Dictatorial Regimes is analysed. These villages realized a deep change in the landscape from “natural” to “built” by means of the construction of fields, infrastructures and social services. These settlements, sharing a common ideology and the morphological model of the Italian rural villages of the 1940s, developed in Spain and Portugal, according to different urban models. The archival research and the direct analysis by comparison of these urban models based on the house-lot of land relationship and the mutual distance relations is carried out, showing their inadequacy for the current way of life and actual productive activities. Particularly, in Italy, this has led to gradual depopulation up to total abandonment and decay of the building stock. New development strategies are proposed allowing the recovery of these settlements as evidence of a social and architectural era.