Abstract

Nowadays, some areas of Southern Italy appear to be «resistant to development». They are complex realities, which have also been affected by the current economic crisis: an example is Taranto, a city that has been «declining» for many years. The aim of this paper is to identify the narratives that underlie the policies implemented in the city, trying to highlight their ideological character as it emerges from the press and the discourse of citizens. These narratives speak about pollution, demographic shrinkage, the industrial crisis, social distress, urban decay and political corruption. The challenge, therefore, is to deconstruct the decline in order to build new narratives, changing the way to approach the critical issues, and trying to reconstruct «development needs» from the bottom, in this way contributing to an improvement of the quality of the urban environment.