Minor rural building heritage and territorial features in local action group sud est barese area (Southern Italy)

In Apulia, minor rural buildings are normally affected by intense forms of abandonment and decay. These minor constructions are often reused in ways that are not in line with both their own characteristics and the territorial context that encloses them. These forms of deterioration often lead to disappearance of this heritage. This study is focused on the analysis of the minor rural building heritage and its relationship with the actual territory context of the Local Action Group Sud Est Barese (LAG SEB), made up of nine municipalities. The official cartography of Military Geographic Institute (IGM, 1:25 000), the Regional Technical Map (CTR, 1:5 000), the Informative Territorial System (SIT Puglia) database, and the Geographic Information System (GIS) software ArcMap ArcGis 10.5 were used in order to constitute the base cartography. To obtain information about localization of the rural buildings, IGM cartography has been used due to the greater number of contents related to the classification of buildings. Successively, the overlapping of IGM and CTR map data and the comparison of them with the digital orthophoto were useful to verify whether the buildings listed on IGM cartography still exist. All main territorial features were analyzed using datasets obtained from IGM, CTR and SIT Puglia databases. This work allowed to investigate the possible relationships between the typology and the distribution of minor rural buildings and the major territorial characteristics, such as land use, road network, orography, and karst formations. It was highlighted that, although all nine municipalities examined fall under the same LAG, these are very different from the point of view of territorial peculiarities and the use and enhancement of resources. Rural buildings in their territorial context near the coast show more diversified potentials, as these areas include different realities (urban centers, tourist and seasonal residential areas, production areas, etc.), while the innermost buildings are located in municipalities with a predominantly productive destination. The obtained results represent useful information to outline intervention policies, the implementation of which would serve to attempt to recover the building structures, or improve the quality and way of using them.