Rethinking the Fascist Periphery. Mines, Autarky, and the Postindustrial Landscape of Carbonia

This article explores the history of Carbonia, a Fascist new town founded in 1938 in south-western Sardinia as a symbol of autarkic and industrial ambition. Built by the State-controlled Azienda Carboni Italiani (ACAI), Carbonia embodied the regime’s drive for energy self-sufficiency, merging rationalist architecture with extractive capitalism. Although located in a peripheral area of Italy, the “coal city” was central to Fascist autarkic and imperial discourse. Drawing on a wide range of sources and adopting transimperial and transnational perspectives, the article traces the urban, social, and political transformations of this company town: from its Fascist foundation and wartime crisis to the postwar struggles between leftist forces and corporate structures that retained control over its economic and urban assets. Accordingly, Carbonia’s material heritage forms a complex palimpsest of intertwined (post)Fascist and (post)industrial memories. The article therefore challenges an overly simplistic application of the «difficult heritage» paradigm to interpret these enduring material and symbolic traces. Instead, it proposes a more nuanced and entangled interpretative framework for understanding how architecture, political power, and economic transitions intersect in peripheral geographies. Carbonia emerges less as a relic of Fascist autarky than as a site of postindustrial discourse and social resilience, where multifaceted memories continue to shape heritage practices, political narratives, and spatial re-significations