Abstract

The article analyses the way by which the metropolitan area around Naples - a great chaotic and degraded conurbation - has been growing during the last six decades. The author highlights the failure of the national and local public institutions in answering to the social demand of increasing services and collective goods. This circumstance has left large space to the role of criminal organisations in the rule of the area. The national "territorial question", meeting with these aspects, has produced in Campania specific negative implications such as a large-scale illegal housing development and the traffic of both urban and industrial waste.