Territorial inequalities: the theory of urban life cycle applied to sub-municipality demographic dynamics

Depopulation is a widespread process in Italy, a country where the population reached its peak around 2014, according to demographic forecasts by Istat. However, it is known that this process follows different spatial patterns: alongside areas characterized by systematic depopulation, there are others where the phenomenon appears as a new event, along with few territories where the population is conversely increasing. Generally, depopulation is observed at the municipal level; in this contribution, instead, the phenomenon is captured by distinguishing, within the municipal unit, the inhabited centre (the main one) from the periphery, a detail rarely considered in studies carried out on the topic. This is indeed a territorial partition for which the data is little used, not available except during census surveys, and difficult to adopt as it is often subject to territorial variations that are hard to manage. The objective of the work proposed here is to verify whether the demographic trend of the two sub-municipal partitions referred to - the main centre of a municipality and its periphery - in two regions, Latium and Umbria, both in the centre of the country and characterized by very different dynamics regarding sub-municipal demographics, follows the pattern of the city life cycle theory. For each municipality we built a path inside the theoretical spatial scheme. To our knowledge, this framework is being used for the first time to identify a typical trend in sub-municipal demographics. Starting from the analysis of the population trend from 1991 to 2021 in the main inhabited centre and in the periphery of the 470 municipalities of the two regions, results are obtained that partially confirm the sequentiality of the population dynamics, in the last period especially in Latium, less so in Umbria, at least according to the life cycle theory that identifies the phases of centralization, decentralization, depopulation, and re-population.