ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how the demographic changes interact with the physical environment and the consolidated organisation of the Italian urban system, giving rise to new territorial patterns of the human settlements. Since the early decades after the World War II, the events that led Italy to a new economic and social development also determined a profound transformation in the urban structure. From when the circuits of national and international trade came to dominate regional and local ones, the cities have increasingly become the nodes of a system of relations that extend beyond their immediate outskirts. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the unremitting fall in births, the contraction in the size of households, the steady increase of the aged population and the overall fall in employment are symptoms of a forthcoming reversal of the trend in Italy’s demographic dynamics. Two aspects in particular appear to have a wealth of territorial effects.
