by Ipshita Karmakar, MCP’23
Italy is facing a rising decline in population and a consequent increase in building vacancy, particularly in remote shrinking villages that are distant from mega urban centers. A lack of administrative capacity curtails the ability of local governments to conduct door to door surveys to identify vacant lots and measure the rate of building decline. This project creates a spatial metric for identifying building abandonment using visual recognition techniques and visual indicators, and profiles building occupancy along a spectrum of complete occupation to complete ruination, in order to help local governments in remote villages identify rate of decline. It does so by creating a process of crowdsourcing qualitative and quantitative data, creating methods to ground truth the data, and generating ideas regarding abandoned properties through an integrated web platform. This study was conducted using the data gathered from a field visit to Centuripe, Sicily, and with the help of a survey of 50 lots collected by local stakeholders. The project used statistical methods to process quantitative data such as principal component analysis to detect clusters of visual indicators, and further visualized the data using interactive mapping.
This practicum enabled me to continue the work produced during Liminal’s ‘Rebuilding the Edge’ workshop that took place in the Apennine region over the summer. Co-conceptualized with M.Arch students Adriana Goirgis and Lauren Gideonse, the project conceptualizes a metric for estimating abandonment in shrinking towns using visual recognition techniques. I am grateful for the help of locals in Centuripe, who were instrumental in helping us with data collection that helped turn our ideas into tangible projects!
Ipshita Karmakar