The Contribution of Architecture to the Definition of the Idea of Non-urban Space: Italian Countryside, from the Early Rural Reforms to the Present Post-rural Perspectives

Countryside and architecture are rarely presented jointly in discussing advancement and innovation in architectural design and they are usually discussed in different cultural contexts and scholars' specialisations (rationalism, vernacular, neo-realism, picturesque, etc.). Today in Italy and in several other regions globally, the integration of the rural and the urban no longer corresponds to just the close functional connection and spatial complementarity related to production of agricultural goods and city wealth. For a better understanding of the situation of life in contemporary Italian countryside, it would be interesting to trace historically the dynamics of a changing spatial pattern demonstrating that the implementation of the idea of rural life (non-urban space) has been built in and out of the city depending on the on-going planned or unplanned, public or private financial mechanism: the post war rural settlements, public housing programmes, the mass tourism investments and the private tourism initiatives of today.