The plan denies abandonment – Abandonment in the vocabulary of territorial politics – Local development: promoveatur ut amoveatur? – Difficult to reignite the engines – Abandonment as an organic phase of the territorial process – Studying the induced processes of abandonment – From the narrative to the governance of abandonment – Abandonment as an agent for the economy, abandonment as an agent for culture
The plan denies abandonment
The planner’s vocabulary does not include the term ‘abandonment’. Sometimes, recently, attention is paid to ‘abandoned areas’: i.e. action is taken a posteriori, when the event of abandonment, neglected as it unfolds, leaves rubble, lifeless remnants. Like gravediggers.
Perhaps this ineptitude in reading and dealing with the process of abandonment depends on the historical period in which planning took on consistency as a government tool: the second half of the 20th century, in the face of the urgency of transformative processes, pervasive throughout the territory, provoked by the spread of industry, infrastructure and urbanisation.
Planning tried to ride the tiger of that modernisation, until yesterday it only dealt with urban development, without taking into account the complex territorial structure that was becoming unbalanced. Above all, the plans did not assume as a postulate what today seems obvious: in order to direct processes in a horizon of dynamic rebalancing, it is necessary to govern the tensions of both the part under pressure and the opposite part, in depression.
But it has not only been a matter of riding the dynamics of regional imbalances: in general, the violence of the processes of abandonment has never been taken into account, neither when these have invested the outskirts of the provinces, the lands that have always been less productive and more marginal, nor when abandonment has devastated social and productive centres. Nor is there any excuse with respect to the duration of the processes: phenomena with epochal accumulation times have been neglected, as in the case of mountain agriculture, but we have also found the historic centres, consolidated places of cultural development and economic rents, emptied and forgotten within the space of a generation (that of the post-war period). Planners are even more stunned when faced with the lightning-fast dynamics of abandonment of productive activities, the emptying of workers from industrial areas, and the volatility of work centres that characterises so many cities in recent years.
Abandonment in the vocabulary of the territorial politician
Thus, recently, abandonment has entered by force into the vocabulary of every local administrator, not only those in mountainous or underdeveloped regions. And when the mayor (or the regional president) has turned to the planning technician to find a remedy for the territory’s treacherous fragility, the impotence of the instruments of government has been revealed, the absence of basic strategies and adequate techniques when faced not with the pressure of transformation but with the decline of forces, the absence of initiatives, the degradation connected to the under-utilisation of resources and not to the wear and tear of overload.
Numerous systemic analyses of territorial dynamics have revealed, already for over a century, that the impressiveness of the processes of abandonment is the counterpart of the impetuousness of the processes of centralisation, brought about by industry and the growth of cities. Geography tells the story: the energies and resources to make cities and industries do not come from nowhere but from the drainage of widespread resources and energies, perhaps with low efficiency but nevertheless present in the territory.
Planning did not oppose this, but on the contrary encouraged the devastating effects of ‘pianurisation’ in the valleys, and in the plains the equally strong concentrations along transport axes (or rather nodes) are still promoted, premise and consequence of the progressive mobility of goods and people. Up to the current end of the line, when the potential relocation of every activity in any node, in an isotropic and indifferent network and in a horizon of globalisation, makes every settlement the premise for its abandonment.
Over time, the process has shattered like a fractal: it no longer affects only the north and south of the world and nations: from entire abandoned regions, it has moved on to devitalised areas that are increasingly close to and mixed with punctual or axial episodes of development. Thus, in an Italy made up of diffuse settlements, historically pertaining to a thousand micro-regions, the geography of the forces and weaknesses at play, of polarisations and their relative marginalities has been redesigned from within: a regional revolution, active for over a century, that today reveals itself in a thousand rivulets of dialectic flows of activity, accentuating the violence of the contrasts co-present within the radius of a few hundred metres.
Given this long and patented process, the inattention of Italian planning with respect to the ‘maudit’ side of twentieth-century development, which is now located in the immediate ‘back’ of metropolitan territories, bringing abandonment to the still tormented landscape of the suburbs, with unforeseen and above all unwanted resultanted effects, appears culpable.
But the deficiency is perhaps even more serious: the emptiness of planning on the subject of abandonment does not seem to be due to a cultural lightness and technical-scientific knowledge (which in an acolyte of responsible intellectuals is already a serious deficiency) as much as it seems to be an ethical aporia and a strategic weakness, typical of modernity.
The investigations of sociologists such as Tournier, Galimberti or La Cecla [1] show that if we look at ourselves with some detachment, with an anthropologist’s eye, we realise that modernity has no liturgies for goodbyes, for separations, that it has removed death. In a world that attributes to innovation an aprioristically positive value, that only looks forward, to the ‘after’, the silence, the absence of care, at least ritual care, for what remains of the ‘before’, after the act, always dramatic, of change, is therefore at least suspicious.
[1] cf. Alain Touraine, 1992, Critique of Modernity, Paris, Fayard (tr.it. 1993, Saggiatore); Umberto Galimberti, 1998, Psyche and Techne. L’uomo nell’età della tecnica, Milan, Feltrinelli,
Franco La Cecla, 2000, Perdersi.L’uomo senza ambiente, Bari, Laterza, .
Franco la Cecla, 2003, Lasciami. Ignorance of leave-taking, Milan, Ponte alle Grazie
Local development: promoveatur ut amoveatur?
If modernisation really misunderstands abandonment, has removed its language and dynamics, then we cannot expect anything positive from planning instruments, at least as long as they are oriented by a partisan and exclusive ideology of the modern, which precludes any systematic and holistic attitude towards the territory and a framework of objectives oriented towards balance.
Rather than drawing a balanced frame of reference, a happy solution of magical, similar development for all is propagandistically proposed. Where one is forced to deal with goats and cabbages at the same time, when change involves one part of the territory modernising and the other part remaining in its previous state, it is always implied that sooner or later a lifeboat will come to the rescue of the remaining part. It is the vague promise that underlies many ‘local development’ programmes: don’t worry, we will soon be able to give you too, abandoned village, a small industrial zone, a ski lift, a tourist village.
In the face of a unified model of resource utilisation, most of the driven initiatives for local development in ‘backward’ areas end up resembling a bonsai of the transformations spontaneously activated in the capital cities. This makes the rupture of consolidated territorial systems capillary and pervasive and accelerates a path of renewal of the territorial order in which a thousand processes of abandonment are present.
If the residual energies and capacities for initiative are channelled into activities and models of resource use homologated by the urban-industrial (or post-industrial) model, with isolated episodes, at first even lively but almost completely indifferent to the specificities of local resources, a phase of new development is promoted but localism is removed. The territory remains inhabited, the processes of abandonment, even if they affect more and more, are not covering up, but the new organisation loses the internal relations between the parts, the consolidated system of resource use, rooted in local specificities, that made the previous development model resilient, crumbles.
If the territorial frame of reference is no longer considered the incubator, the breeding ground for individual initiatives, at the first crisis these find their only way of salvation in jumping on the lifeboat of the production of standardised goods and services: they think they are saving their companies by inserting them in global networks and they lose the local networks, the homeland that had protected them until then.
This produces the tragic trajectory that marks so many stories of entrepreneurs: stunted growth rooted in the territory and with production that is modest quantitatively but of excellence in terms of quality, sudden notoriety by accessing a global market that appreciates quality, growing and unsustainable demand for quality production with very high revenues, restructuring of the production cycle according to the size of the demand with progressive detachment from the territory and settling quality on standard levels, progressive dependence on the market with fragility of the production model and risk of crisis, at the moment of abandonment of traditional localisations and possible relocation to other territories with adaptation of production.
In order to be included in the process of standardised development, one must be willing to uproot oneself from the territory: if it were a process desired in some power centre, one would say promoveatur ut amoveatur.
Difficult to reignite engines
So neither the plan nor the market respond to territorial valorisation strategies; on the contrary, they are accomplices to the processes of ‘deterritorialisation’. It is not by chance that today local administrations, structurally representative of the reasons of the territory, when they are caught in the unsustainable pincers of the blackmail of individual companies (or exploitation or abandonment!), resort to policies of patching up, of the least worst, challenging the supporters of self-styled ‘comprehensive’ plans, which however only deal with ‘development’ and do not know how to operate in crises.
In the storm of deterritorialisation, it is increasingly easy to assign the dignity of organisational strategy to managerial and operational aspects, to last-minute bargaining that postpones events, that pro-tempore fixes the most violent emergencies. And practice becomes grammar: not only in the face of catastrophe, but increasingly in even ordinary conditions, we take refuge in governance instead of (and not as a complement to) government. Management capacity seems to be an alternative route to the spiky rigidity of planning, which moreover does not reward constant and strenuous efforts against exploitation, preventing abandonment.
Mayors concerned about their territory are beginning to ask the plan engineer: but why do I have to limit building in the centre if everything else is emptying out, why rules to prevent activity in a small part of the municipality, if in all other parts activity ceases of its own accord?
Not all development programmes are so geared towards eradication and unsustainability, but it is a fact that even for the hypotheses of sustainable and land-related development, the conceptual and operational tools that have hitherto been used to guide fast and impetuous processes are attempted. And even the most recent local development projects, which should be suitable for weak regions, in which inclusive programming (performing, as the managers say), aimed at flexibility to local initiatives, an alternative to rigid planning, are stranded in the face of structural processes of abandonment. This is powerlessness in relation to the stage: one does not have the tools to set a dull system in motion, while the promotion of development is effective when it acts on somewhat functioning engines: impoverished systems yes, but with the connections of the territorial system still active and to be revalued.
So, in order to govern a territory with advanced processes of abandonment, a new frame of reference is needed: one cannot reuse those tried and tested for situations of overbearing development, as one used to do for young children with the clothes worn by older siblings.
Hence, if one hypothesises an inverse and complementary land-government strategy to that which seeks to ride out development phases, it is necessary to think about the abandonment process itself, its operational characteristics, its dynamics and inertia.
Abandonment as an organic phase of the territorial process
It is essential to distinguish between the process and the event.
If we consider abandonment as an event, which disturbs a pre-established order, we cannot but assess its critical aspects and to some extent its irreversibility, effects that are almost never governable in a phase strategy. That is, abandonment is a crisis that interrupts the ordinary processes present in the territory, of whatever kind they may be: of management, governance, communication… . In a static consideration of the socio-economic and cultural assets of the territory, processes are not addressed and we are powerless in the face of events: this happens in the case of floods, infrastructure blockages, deschooling, and even more so in the case of abandonment. In these terms, abandonment, when it occurs, determines by definition a catastrophic and ungovernable crisis, which legitimises the surrender of every planner.
The processes cannot be properly addressed if the symptoms that denounce them are considered disturbances of a stable order, in reference to which the efforts of land governance are directed towards its restoration: as one does with a body agitated by an illness. Thus land government tends towards the restoration of inertial situations, the restoration of pre-existing orders to changes, it does not examine the possible different evolutionary paths of the known system until an event resolves continuity without appeal.
If anything, planning acts innovatively on the consequences of abandonment, on the aftermath of catastrophe, on the chaos that Prigogine places at the origin of great natural renewals[1].
If abandonment is part of the events that constitute a point of no return, in assonance with Prigogine it is assumed that it generates a chaotic situation, from which a new order with rules and paradigms that cannot be foreseen today is being established.
After abandonment, the territory and the resource become brute, unstructured matter, to which the design of a plan with pre-established paradigms and canons can perhaps be more easily applied. This is the case expected by the revolutionary, where abandonment ‘clears the air’, leaves a new world, apparently without a past influencing the future, in which one thinks one can apply the naive and fierce model of the abstract, utopian plan. This perspective pleases the modern thinker just as much as the modern architect likes to be able to demolish all traces of pre-existence in order to place his building on a blank sheet of paper, reckoning only with himself.
Vice versa, a focus on the processes of abandonment tends to consider their premises and maturation within an overall context, allows one to study the causes and perhaps the remedies of the imbalance while it is forming, when it has not yet assumed the speed and irreversible orientation of the critical event.
Looking at the world and history from this perspective, one realises that every social situation is unbalanced, is permanently in the process of abandonment for some areas or activities, and vice versa and simultaneously of re-appropriation for others, as scholars of human territoriality read punctually.[2]
But it is not enough to adopt a dynamic vision of territorial situations, to appreciate processes, in order to take control of the outcomes: it is necessary to master the frame of reference within which the process is inserted, and of the process to assess well in advance the organic dynamics or, vice versa, those that are potentially critical with respect to that frame. In territorial terms: it is necessary to consider whether the impoverishment of energies and resources, in progress in a given activity or in a given type of site, is functional to the overall vitality of the local sphere in which these activities and sites are inserted, or whether vice versa it diminishes the potential for adaptation of the quality of life and therefore the autonomy of the sphere as a whole.[3]
In this logic, abandonment is not a-priori an insult to the development and quality of life of the society that experiences it, but should be considered, process by process, in its potentialities and repercussions, in the prospects that it opens up by freeing resources that have remained caged within uses that have been superseded by the rest of social practices, or vice versa in the potentialities that are lost by disarticulating organisations and behaviours that were irreplaceable in giving value to those activities or places.
[1] cf. Ilya Prigogine, Isabella Stengers,1979, The New Alliance. Metamorphosis of Science,(tr.it. 1981 Einaudi )
Ilya Progogine, Gregoire Nicolis,1989, La complessità. Explorations in the new fields of science, Freeman and Company,(tr.it. 1991 Einaudi )
[2] cf. Claude Raffestin, Dario LOPRENO, Yvan PASTEUR, 1995 Géopolitique et histoire, Lausanne, Payot et Paris, Payot,
Alberto Magnaghi, 1990, Il territorio dell’abitare, Franco Angeli,
[3] on autonomy there is an important debate underway, also ignited by perverse political interpretations. It seems important to start again from classical and institutional references: from Carlo Cattaneo to the Council of Europe Charter of Local Self-Government of 1989 to the European Declaration of Salamanca of 2001
Studying the induced processes of abandonment
Clearly, these considerations make sense if they relate to a logic that carves out the undifferentiated and extended territory, focusing on the local level, that in which each region with a consolidated socio-cultural identity is recognised as a unit of reference. Equally, we must emphasise the relativity of time to which we refer: we are concerned with the ‘social’ level of history, which recognises those interactive processes, rich in returns and balances, that Braudel places in the middle between ‘geographical’ history, of the ecosystem and its millenary inertia, and ‘biographical’ history, of individual events, subject to the accidents, injustices or fortunes of short time, short even if sometimes experienced by a man in an unbalanced manner, without rebalances and counterbalances. [1]
Abandonment can be a traumatic event in a biographical history (it often is), while it can actually constitute a ‘growth crisis’ in the social history of a region, to the point of being irrelevant in the ‘geographical’ time of the general ecosystem.
Therefore, in a local and social history dimension, instead of thinking of abandonment as a disease of a healthy body, it is perhaps more useful to try to treat it as an organic phase that is always present in vital dynamics: the exhalation that balances the inhalation in the breathing of the territory.
It is useful to continue the metaphor of breathing for a while, because it reveals the partiality of our operational approaches, based on a culture of inhalation alone, of polarisation and management of concentrated energies and resources: up to now, the target of the plan is the administration of the territory starting from the production pole, the city centre, the infrastructural node. Everything changes, for the planner, if the target is the valorisation of the territory as a place invested by organic rhythms of functioning, where at the same time processes of abandonment and concentration act and rebalance themselves. Only in this way does the target of the plan finally become the administration of the territory as a whole, and include, alongside strategies for enhancement, the management of the irrepressible (because vital) processes of abandonment of activities or locations.
This does not, however, mean ‘abandoning abandonment’, but evaluating the processes, within a local social base that is aware not only of the individual resources but of the integrated system at its disposal, of its necessarily unbalancing internal dynamics, and of the balances to be continually reconstituted between stability and innovation.
Abandonment can be managed as a strategically positive process if it entails local spin-offs in terms of greater freedom of reuse of resources: what happens, for example, with the end of large unitary estates – experienced as abandonment by historical families – to the advantage of greater distribution and enlargement of the social base. If, on the contrary, abandonment entails expropriation of local enterprise capacity (to the benefit of outsiders) and consequent loss of relations between the abandoned places or activities and the rest of the socio-economic network of the area, then the process leads to a decrease in autonomy, in the development potential of the local network and, probably, in the long run, in the quality of life. Obviously, the actual processes lie in complex positions situated between the two previous exemplary extremes.
[1] cf. Fernand Braudel, 1949, the memorable preface to Mediterranean Civilisation and Empires in the Age of Philip II,(tr.it. 1953 Einaudi)
From narrative to the government of abandonment
It becomes evident, at this point, that the ability to recognise the real extent of ongoing territorial processes, including those of abandonment, is a politically decisive action.
But in any case, the criteria that direct this recognition should be inspired by Bertoldo: neither merely localist (to neglect the modern belonging of the whole territory to supra-regional networks) nor globalising (to overlook the legitimate cultural and historical ownership of places and resources); neither too excited by ‘événementielle’ history (which with Braudel we find incapable of overcoming the ‘hot’ events of specific years and biographies), nor cold records of human events, considered only microbial work in superhuman organisms.
In order to understand the extent of abandonments in the history of the territory in time, a different path than that of the traditional historian (or geographer or economist) seems necessary. A stimulus to pick up the edges of Braudel’s enigma into one comes from Ricoeur’s proposal, who, precisely by criticising Braudel’s work, relaunches history as a place of narration, of the capacity to tell, which unravels by placing human experiences (those of ‘biographical’ history) at the centre, but develops by inserting them into the more complex and organic context of ‘social’ or even ‘geographical’ history. The rules of storytelling, of human interpretation, Ricoeur insinuates, are the amalgam and the lubricant that makes time passed comprehensible to us and allows for an emotional reconnection with our time and possible future. [1]
In recent years, implicitly following Ricoeur, we have vaccinated ourselves against the indifference of our children by being told about the thousands of personal dramas of abandonments, migrations and diasporas that have plagued the territory in the 20th century. Places are now familiar to us more because we are aware of the stories of those who lost them than because of their current representative force; but we still need to make the social history of the territory our own, leaving behind the individual dimension and structuring the tale of individuals into a collective tale, of generations and landscapes.
Only in this way can biographical and sentimental tales, composed in a plural and integrated system, become a ‘useful’ tale of the territory, made up of abandonments and recognitions, of growths and erosions, that testimony which can be the breeding ground of the plan, the scenario within which to situate local government strategies, continuing the infinite story (and its tale) in the best possible way.
The structuring of the tale of abandonment may prove to be a first stage in the methodological work to renew the techniques of the plan, starting from the recomposition of an idea of integrated territory.
We have contradictory models of mythical narration: Robinson Crusoe, abandoned, re-founded his own civilisation using the wreckage of other abandonments as a resource; on the contrary, many foundation myths start from the sacrifice (i.e. the abandonment) of what was most precious in the founders’ possession (animals, land, children). Certainly between abandonment and rebirth lies an archetypal knot, a biographical and social skin-switching that has catalysed human interest.
And if instead of a resource and an exemplary life we refer to a territory, the theme becomes even more complicated: what is the spatial and temporal dimension that makes us realise that there is an abandoned place? Does it take a region, or is a settlement in a region, or is an activity in a settlement enough? Does it have to last so long that one loses the memory of the previous age, or is it enough for one behaviour to stop?
But more generally, can one narrate a process of abandonment from physical places, or does one have to start from settled communities?
Implicitly, the reference of the ‘useful’ narrative is the territorial community, whose changing way of relating to places must be understood: except for physical extinction, the ‘abandoner’ continues to belong to a community that continues to inhabit the territory, also using, more or less organically, its abandoned parts.
On the other hand, perhaps there is no abandoned territory in Italy, just as there is no natural territory. It is the network of co-presences in the territory and the different duration of biographical events with respect to changes in the landscape that prevent us from considering a place abandoned.
If we want to use the narratives of abandoned territorial practices, ways of using resources that are no longer used, we must take into account the duration of intangible ties, the sense of ownership (especially cultural and identity) that is established between places and inhabitants), which lasts long beyond uses. In order to think of a government of the territory adapted to the processes of abandonment, we must not overlook the difference between the times of communities and those of the territory. We are dealing with rhythms that at certain stages are not very synchronous, in which processes generate unexpected existential and political voids: whose territory is abandoned (culturally speaking)? or rather: despite being abandoned by practices, does it continue to be part of a community’s territorial identity?
The theme is not abstract: for example, it can be the key to interpreting the numerous conflicts between inhabitants and park authorities, which are accused by the inhabitants of imposing rules alien to local traditions, effectively giving away the ‘naturalised’ (i.e. abandoned) territory to abstract citizens, i.e. outsiders.
To attempt to explore this issue further, a distinction must be made between economy and culture.
[1] crf. Paul Ricoeur, 1983, Time and Tale, (tr.it. Jaca Book, Milan 1983-1987)
Abandonment as agent for the economy, abandonment as agent for culture
Abandonment in economic terms entails a new availability of the good, ready to be used as a resource for new projects also on the basis of its low cost, but if this is true for a natural good (e.g. a fragment of an ecosystem, or a mineral resource), it is not true for a cultural resource: if one abandons a territorial know how, it is a dry loss: the new use has to rely on a completely new know how, and in the cultural system of the community the loss is not compensated for by anything.
So an abandonment in the cultural system creates the conditions for a revolutionary event, for an abrupt change, which in time is stored as a scar whose fabric is not rebuilt.
On the other hand, the economy is also held back by culture: our system, which does not contemplate abandonment, and even less does it contemplate it as a transformative step towards new models of development, anchors the good to a property regime that lasts indefinitely, regardless of abandonment. This stems from an original flaw in the legal system of property ownership, which does not recognise the natural share of ownership to be allocated to the community that participated in creating the value and that should take it back once the use is over. In any case, our legislation makes any reuse after abandonment very difficult, mainly because of the difficulty of relating to the legal owners, who are often unavailable or difficult to detach from the mere ownership of the property.
All of this in disciplinary terms and in terms of governing the territory cannot be done without a project, and this entails governing the landscape, i.e. the relationship between the territory and the community’s perception of it.[1] It is starting from this perception, corroborated by an awareness of the vicissitudes of abandonment and reconquest that have shaped the landscape, that the cultural and therefore the operational owners of the resources must be recovered.
It is only through a recognition of the cultural ownership of resources, which lasts far beyond the abandonment of practices and uses, that their valorisation prospects can be discussed: in their traditional use, if it is possible to recover it in innovative terms, and if not with new uses but included within the perimeter of the cultural capacities of the territory, within the overall landscape sense of those who recognise themselves in that territory.
Everything comes back to the initial theme, of recognising oneself, of understanding the collective identity even within processes of abandonment.
In the theme of recognition there is the theme of forgiveness (again with Ricoeur [2]). Without forgiveness the story cannot be told, it is thesis and deformation. Forgiveness is an essential part of any re- (-reconciliation, -recognition, but also -volution)
This can only come from a cultural and economic practice of forgiveness, of agreement ‘in spite of’, of the ability to forget accumulated imbalances. In all this, abandonment is essential: it is also a matter of abandonment of initial claims, of the project, necessary to be able to truly recognise the territory as it is, today.
[1] A reference for the new ‘political’ role of landscape: the definition of the European Landscape Convention (2000): ‘Landscape’ designates a certain part of territory, as perceived by populations, whose character derives from the action of natural and/or human factors and their interrelationships.
[2] cf. Paul Ricoeur, 2000, Remembering, Forgetting, Forgiving. L’enigma del passato (ed it. il Mulino, 2004)
