Across the whole of Italy there are at least 550,000 vulnerable buildings, constructed illegally or otherwise in disregard of anti-seismic regulations, scattered across the 648 Italian municipalities where the risk of earthquakes is consistently high. To address the building stock alone — that is, to bring these buildings up to standard — an investment of 36.8 billion euros would be required, with an overall impact on the economy estimated at around 129 billion euros. These are the very high figures published by Casa Italia, the body set up by the government following the earthquakes that struck central Italy repeatedly within the space of a year. The financial effort required is considerable, but particularly following the recent Ischia earthquake, which caused collapses despite a magnitude no greater than 4, the government has promised to act as soon as possible with a plan to demolish illegally built structures.

What the report says

According to the Casa Italia report, addressing safety does not simply mean reducing the damage caused by future events, but also has positive implications for competitiveness and quality of life in our country:

"from an environmental perspective, by improving the quality of the building stock — which is often dated — it is possible to simultaneously improve the overall safety of urban systems and the energy performance of individual buildings, reducing the polluting emissions associated with heating and cooling;

from a cultural perspective, given that seismic events, landslides and floods do not only destroy people and things, but also parts of a cultural heritage that is unique in the world and cannot be regenerated;

from an economic perspective, consider the positive multiplier effect that could be generated in a structurally crisis-ridden sector such as construction by a large-scale programme of interventions in the housing sector."

These considerations are widely shared not only among technical experts, but also in the political debate in the media. Yet, Casa Italia asks in the report, what is missing to truly launch a decisive drive to promote safety? The most common answer points to a lack of the necessary financial resources, even though the latest Stability Law sent a strong signal of government commitment with the "seismic bonus", which, if applied solely to buildings in the 648 highest-risk municipalities, would impose a cost on the state of almost 25 billion euros. The availability of financial resources is, however, a necessary but not sufficient condition. What is also needed is to "ensure that investments are effective (meaning genuinely capable of improving the country's safety) and efficient (meaning they avoid wasting the resources used)".

A demolition plan

A further 5.2 billion euros has been invested in seismic risk prevention, 2 billion of which specifically to fund the Casa Italia project. On the subject of illegal construction, the government cannot remain idle after the shock of Ischia: from Raffaele Cantone, president of the anti-corruption authority, to Justice Minister Andrea Orlando, everyone agrees that a national demolition plan is needed. "We need to break down the common front between total abuses, partial abuses, small-scale developments and outright eyesores — a front that municipalities and regions rarely manage to distance themselves from," said Orlando, adding that "a law is needed that says: let us transform what already exists, bringing it up to standard in terms of seismic, thermal, hydrogeological and landscape criteria, and let us not build new houses where they are not necessary, wasting yet more land." Such a law is, in theory, already ready: a bill aimed at the progressive reduction of land consumption, up to a definitive halt to new construction by 2050, was approved by the Chamber more than a year ago, but since then it has not been discussed in the Senate.