Evaluation of Spatial Variables Related to the Provision of Essential Services in the Basilicata Region

Basilicata is composed by many small municipalities that offer poor accessibility to essential services. The key theme of this work is the evaluation of the endowment of these services, analyzing, in a GIS environment, their accessibility in terms of temporal distance. This work explores the specific issues and challenges for accessibility to internal areas and reflects on the future development prospects of the 131 Lucanian municipalities. The analysis was conducted on the basis of two types of information layers in relation to the totality of the municipalities: demographic structure of the population and provision of essential services, divided into 3 macro classes: education, health and mobility. Evaluations were thus extracted which provided a comparative-objective analysis of the presence of essential services. The result is a picture that shows serious difficulties linked to the socio-cultural and territorial fabric, the railway and motorway networks are profoundly lacking, showing a clear gap between the municipalities in terms of provision of services.