ABSTRACT
The idea to sell abandoned Sicilian houses for one Euro caused a global media sensation. Local mayors who offered quasi-ruins were inundated with thousands of e-mails from all over the world. People connected with the idea to recreate a life in the periphery of Italy. Sicily is a space of possibility, with a largely functioning infrastructure, for foreigners who want to engage with a new life and an environment adept for producing zero-kilometer food. But the one Euro house project is thus far not based on a retopian development scheme, rather most of the projects are guided by the same market logics that made Sicily peripheral in the first place. Through a reallocation of real estate from market-based exchange value to commons-based use and encounter value, the potential of the island can be explored in a different way. The crisis triangle – depopulation of the periphery, development of a useless class, obsolete social welfare systems – can be undone if Sicily, or other European peripheral regions, engage with socially innovative regional projects that are substituting social assistance with land donation schemes. Integrated into the imaginary reconstitution of society, a new prefigurative project has to establish new horizons of possibility on a practice-based level.
