The landscape of excellence and cultural assets from ‘unavailable heritage’ to use as a useful resource for a sustainable and innovative local economy model. Balanced utilisation processes are based on the one hand on knowledge and a sense of shared identity of one’s own territory as a fundamental part of the landscape and on the other on the formation of a new lever of technicians rooted in places but with the courage to design new uses consistent with ancient forms.

In Italy, cultural and environmental assets are for the most part considered ‘heritage not available’ for use, as if projects for use were contrary to conservation and led to the degradation of the asset itself. For some years now, however, the best local development programmes have been based precisely on the landscape and place assets as a useful resource for a sustainable and innovative local economy model. Moreover, as recognised by the IUC, the World Conservation Union, the most important environmental components are best preserved if they are embedded in balanced processes of use by conscious communities. Awareness that is based on knowledge and a sense of shared identity of one’s own territory as a fundamental part of the landscape and the courage to design new uses consistent with ancient forms.

1. After landscape plans

In Italy, the regime of rules has very long gestation periods: rules are implemented with a slowness that felts and sometimes mineralises the living contents that were also present in the spirit of the legislator. A perfect example: the Cultural Heritage Code, for the landscape part. Nine years after its adoption, 13 years after the European Convention (CEP), very few regional landscape plans have been fully approved, with an agreement signed with the Ministry (Mibac), and little is said in them about future management practices, perhaps because the horizon in which they will be implemented cannot even be defined.

On the other hand, practice is worth more than grammar: there are regions that have already arrived at the revision (or abrogation) of versions of the Landscape Plan considered by now outdated; others have focused their attention on parallel landscape management paths for specific areas (Unesco List, protected areas, etc.) neglecting everything else; the most neglectful are only now putting the pieces together to adopt a Plan.

The turmoil of this endless work can be explained by the Italian bad habit of considering all the strategies of knowledge, safeguard, planning and management of the landscape (what the law calls for as the product of joint action by the State and the Regions) to be enclosed in the regulatory act. Like the emperor who, after agreeing to commission a work from Amadeus, says with a weary air: ‘…this too is done’, so administrators and officials think to conclude the complex of attention due to the landscape with what in reality must be an inaugural act: the definition of the rules, contained in the Plan. So on those rules they weigh the commas for years, while they do not equip themselves to experiment and make operational, self-sufficient, economically and culturally sustainable the complex and multiple management activities that the protection and enhancement of the landscape require, in addition to the rules. The fragilities and obtuseness of the lack of concern for operational rationality, the absence of human and material resources for process management, and the latitude of managerial training are not only characteristic of landscape strategies, but are endemic in public administration. But for the landscape, which should begin to equip itself with operational tools now, in the midst of the crisis, these shortcomings risk provoking the blocking of all innovation and experimentation, even though provided for by law and plans.

In this desolate scenario, everyone plays by themselves: the Regions are practically carrying out their plans without feeling the need for a systematic comparison on methodologies, among themselves and with the Ministry; the site-specific activities (of UNESCO, FAI, local initiatives, the Ministry itself) are not operationally included in the overall planning strategies; even the landscape plans, while making laudable efforts to offer a structured framework of information on the state of places, do not present themselves as integrated and intersectoral strategic tools.

In short, landscape planning today seems condemned to a long quarantine: when the regional plans are approved they will coexist separately with the other sector plans (for the environment, agriculture, urban planning….) and will lack immediate operativeness both for management aspects and for the activation of proactive strategies, in the absence of investments (due to the crisis) and of organisational capacities of mixed public-private activities (due to the historical aporia on the subject).

There are no possible patches: a radical innovation is needed in the relations between planning (i.e. rules) and practices (i.e. management), between operating and controlling subjects, between competing sectors in the transformations of the landscape, from the economic ones, which press on the territory, to the cultural ones, which modify the outlook, the memory, the planning attitude. Therefore, it is important to start an exploration of the criteria and techniques that are being experimented to deal with landscape management issues. This is an urgent and necessary reconnaissance, precisely because the possible solutions are made impervious by the crisis and the lack of resources, but precisely for this reason they require an overall capacity for innovation, which is strategic both for the public administration and for all operators ‘of good will’, i.e. those willing to participate, each in their own way, in the qualification of the common good.

2. Strategies for landscape practices

It is useful to start from the procedures and practices of attention to the landscape that we now consider positively, identifying, through their evaluation, some of the indispensable requirements for obtaining operational results in future institutional strategies of landscape management.

We can use as a virtuous sample the heterogeneous anthology of the interventions presented in the three selections for the Landscape Awards (biennial since 2009), both in the Italian competition, managed by Mibac, and in the European one (which compares the winners of the national competitions).

These are experiences (not projects but activities in progress, the first outcomes of which can be verified) marked by the broad sense of the term landscape that comes from the CEP, of which the Prize is one of the instruments envisaged, to provoke international comparison and debate.

In Italy, the overall experience of the Val di Cornia Parks won in 2009, with the experiment of sustainable budgeting of a protected area management body, with a strong integration of natural and cultural resources in the valorisation programmes. In 2011, the urban and territorial redevelopment experience in Carbonia, called Landscape-machine, won the Prize. This complex territorial redevelopment programme brought back to light the urban design of a founding city and the mining production apparatus that motivated it during the fascist period. A few days ago Libera’s work in the Corleone area was selected for the 2013 European candidacy. It is a pilot experience, now reproduced in several other situations, of territorial qualification, of the landscape and of the way of doing rural business in the South, starting from land confiscated from the mafia and assigned to social cooperatives, organised according to the model studied by Ciotti and his group.

In all cases, these are large-scale programmes that, through the management of landscape resources, have comprehensively changed the development prospects of neglected territorial areas, outlining an overall long-term qualification strategy that structurally transforms the sense of the landscape in the places on which it acts.

At a European level, these Italian experiences have received awards (with the second prize in 2009 and the first in 2011), testifying to the importance assigned by the Council of Europe to process governance, to the integration of different aspects in projects articulated between city and countryside, identity and tourism, safeguarding of assets and their valorisation in the vital processes of use. Beyond the winning projects, the first common denominator that emerges from the interventions selected for the Prize is the intermediate dimension of the areas involved. In fact, if, as in the tenders, we exclude the ‘wings’ (i.e. both the vast area of provinces and regions that have nominated their plans, and the specificity of the single ‘open air’ public work), these are mostly small protected areas, or small groups of municipalities.

They are subjects that have worked on the management of certain resources peculiar to the place, on opportunities provided by public strategies for infrastructures or recoveries, on programmes of territorial valorisation of valley or hill areas. This is a dimension unreachable by the stalactite of the programmes of the Regional Plans, because they are too detailed, but also far from the stalagmite of isolated interventions in the single place or of public works on the single asset.

Therefore, in the programmes that have been recognised as excellent for the qualification of the landscape, the two dimensions proper to institutional activity (the General Plan and the intervention with public works) are not suited to managing the essential aspects, of real added value. On the other hand, we all know that a single local administration has difficulty in tackling a complex programme, even if it is geographically small. In fact, the results can only be obtained with a major effort, both because of the size of the investments required and above all because of the inescapable need for strategic cooperation between several subjects, including public ones, responsible for different levels of scale: in addition to the municipalities, the cooperation of the state, the regions, but also the provinces (or other intermediate-level bodies, the need for which is strongly felt, despite the hasty indications of the spending review) is also needed. In short, putting the landscape at the centre of attention requires the identification of an appropriate level of scale, to which those operating in Italy are not accustomed. The second winning factor that emerges from the interventions selected for the Landscape Prize is the public-private integration of the actors, which, especially in the non-Italian competitors, proved to be fundamental not only to politically accredit projects and programmes, sharing them with local communities, but also to make their management sustainable.

Rather than burdening only public investment, the European model programme assigns voluntary operators with the tasks of supervision and maintenance (assigning an increasing role to cultural mediators and project ‘escorts’), supplements the incomes of operators in depressed areas with tourist circuits activated precisely in order to qualify the area’s image, and promotes and brings together under a single coordination different private or voluntary activities, which significantly reduces management costs.

The public hand (or that of the large foundations) is left with the fundamental task of one-off investments, major infrastructural or redevelopment interventions, and the start-up of management activities that, once launched, are, however, sustainable with modest support.

Here too, in Italy there is a need to study the methods, agreements, and roles that have been tried out in international virtuous solutions for the third sector, for the monitoring of voluntary activities, for regulating the responsibilities and advantages of a public-private relationship that has yet to be explored and experimented in the face of interests that now have to be integrated, coming from very heterogeneous backgrounds (schools, cultural and leisure associations, solidarity purchasing groups, ….).

A third factor of great interest, present in particular in non-Italian projects, is the prevalence of operational programme and feasibility aspects in time and budgeted ways over care for design, the importance assigned to practices and uses over physical containers and public works. This is true for both recovery and infrastructure interventions, and ends up assigning a relevant role to agreements with farmers and accommodation providers, to organisations of tourist circuits, to accompanying skills rather than to tenders and design competitions. In those programmes, intervention on real estate is instrumental to intervention on organisational and intangible aspects; compliance with time, budgets and feasibility standards prevails over the search for quality ‘regardless’. This reference model should not mean the abandonment of all interest in the physical and formal aspects of the landscape, but rather the need to accompany those operational capacities, which are not lacking in Italy, with those managerial and organisational ones, of which we are structurally and historically very deficient.

The fourth factor to be taken into account is the need to build networks for comparison, discussion and the circulation of good practices. This is an urgency that is emerging as virtuous landscape management experiences can be monitored: the most virtuous operators, engaged in complicated and long-term affairs of their management programmes, with an entrepreneurial focus on their own territory, tend to isolate themselves, to let local issues, even minute ones, prevail over the more complex dynamics in which they participate but only indirectly.

And then it has to be said: sustainable management has so far not paid off in terms of notoriety, narcissism satisfaction, media limelight. In times of stages occupied by wafflers, it is necessary to build agoras, fora where peers, who esteem each other, can confront each other: places where one has reason, not linked to personal vanity, to learn about the experiences of others and compare one’s own activities, each coming out of one’s own enclosure, to measure oneself against others and enrich the panorama of real experiences.

3. The strategic landscape for cultural heritage

The strategic lines outlined above are not confined to a sectoral logic, into which landscape should be relegated, but apply to outline a much more general policy on cultural heritage. In fact, those who are interested in cultural heritage, even if they are not grappling with immediate management problems, have by now come to the conclusion that widespread conservation requires a new social consideration of the value of heritage. But it is not enough for this thinking to reduce the dominance of the ideology of constraint: the effectiveness of an investment in the widespread sense of cultural ownership of cultural heritage, in the real situations and conditions in which we move, which we see, which constitute our everyday life, must occur. It seems to us that the social sharing of a strategy of heritage use can only pass through its valorisation in the landscape. So on the one hand we have to work on the relations of heritage with the settled and natural surroundings in which it is contextualised. On the other hand, a complex cultural investment awaits us, one that gives strength and operational capacity to the collective imagination, in which the role of perception and memory of assets is inserted. In short, it seems to us that the landscape, an inextricable synthesis of the image deposited in the collective memory and of the physical places that arouse it, is the integral container, the only one within which we can politically share overall balances on the effects of the use of the cultural heritage, in terms of social enhancement and economic and environmental sustainability.

On the other hand, the awareness of the structural relationship between nature and culture, contained since the definition of landscape in the CEP, seems already mature. Indeed, even the IUCN (the organisation that coordinates nature protection worldwide) has been promoting and favouring ‘cultural landscapes’ for some years now, as a type of protected area necessary for nature conservation, especially in countries where agriculture and nature are historically integrated in stabilised ecosystems.

With this in mind, a politically incisive strategic line takes shape, almost of necessity, that places the landscape at the centre of a new integrated outlook both for those working in the cultural heritage and land and environmental management sectors, and for those seeking better and more sustainable quality of life, work and leisure production models. On the one hand, for those who work in the sectors of cultural heritage and land management, in a public economy in a critical phase, it is now clear: worrying only about the restoration or rehabilitation of some of the assets leads to a concentration of costs that prevents the overall maintenance and recovery needs from being met, and thus risks the loss of any positive overall conservation effect.

The overall territorial repercussions of restoration work must be broadened and made more perceptible and, above all, a social balance sheet of the results of the interventions must become compulsory. In a regime of scarce resources, intervention choices must refer to an evaluation of the expected effects and a tangible utility of the investments for conservation must be demonstrated.

If a systematic evaluation of the outcomes of interventions on the two aspects of the landscape (tangible and intangible) is conducted, the ‘political necessity’ to extend the maintenance of the territory, and thus to occupy more resources and widespread attention, but also to make individual restorations and maintenance itself less costly and more feasible, becomes evident. In any case, even a reduction in unit costs will not suffice: we must move away from a logic of total public burden of maintenance activities, and favour interventions that mobilise private activities and resources. But above all, we must plan profitable and innovative uses of the heritage as a whole, in which maintenance is part of the very process of ordinary activities and productive uses, as it has always been historically.

It is now clear that the thesis that the usefulness of conservation coincides with the preservation for posterity of the ‘testimony of things’ cannot be sustained, given that over time the landscape in which ‘things’ are inserted ineluctably changes the sense and value of that testimony. If one reasons from the landscape, the absolute paradigms of the preservation of property fall away and a relativistic evaluation of interventions in relation to places and times is adopted. It becomes essential, for conservation strategies, to read and make legible the relationships that link assets to places and to strengthen those that still connect their times with our times.

In short, the conceptual reorganisation brought about by landscape thinking entails a conversion of specialists in restoration, museum management and protected areas. They are asked to abandon the defence of increasingly limited reserves, which they would like to maintain as the place of the orthodoxies of protection, and instead to put their precious expertise into play for heritage and land management activities for which the effectiveness for the quality of cultural life, local communities’ sense of identity and awareness of their own history is verified, step by step.

On the other hand, for those who seek better and more sustainable productive models of a quality of life, work and leisure, the challenge of territorial enterprise looms, participation in strategic actions not so much based on profit and rents (public and private) as on

– the recognition, systemisation and image promotion of the physical and cultural resources present, at least in trace, in the territory. This is why it is necessary to initiate processes to restructure territorial knowledge, which has been neglected up to now in the face of specialist and sectoral knowledge. In order to understand the values attributed to aspects of landscape and heritage, the integrations between knowledge and resources at risk of obsolescence, which form the backbone of traditional ways of living, producing and enjoying, must be explored. The structural reading of traditional ways of using the territory should be linked to innovative know-how, referring to the new capacities for initiative, promoting those that manage to synthesise local roots with global networks and provide space for congruent solutions to problems that today provoke Manichaean clashes, between the advocates of ‘unquestionable’ interventions and the ‘no’ signs;

– the promotion of a ‘public style’ of design and use, characterised by a sober operational, technical, behavioural and economic balance of activities, attentive to the footprint on irreproducible components, such as fertile soil, water or signs of history, but also to modes of cultural enjoyment that allow widespread enjoyment of assets with low impact and low management costs, the reduction of spatial and temporal concentrations, reducing events and favouring local organisational modes, accepting less professionalism but promoting a broader seasonal span and a longer time horizon;

– an innovative capacity to network cultural assets and services and to coordinate their management, which must not only inform, but also allow evaluations, help in projects and strategic choices, favouring the confrontation between the views of traditionally distant and poorly integrated operational subjects and an asset of users who are often ill-informed and ill-prepared to be involved in participatory processes;

– the ability to establish public-private agreements on strategic and demanding programmes, in which the public hand makes available (not sells!) its resources against medium- to long-term private management commitments. The business model that such agreements favour is linked to the provision of ad hoc services and the management of local cultural and environmental resources, pursuing, with different declinations on a case-by-case basis, general interest objectives of the same order as those that led to the revolution in agricultural management or the provision of city services a century ago. These are historical models of public-private cooperation that have shown widespread benefits, with a solidity and increase in value over the centuries, defying wars and economic crises and helping to keep the collective imagination cohesive with the construction of the urban landscape, in which all Italians feel they have participated in the 150 years of their country’s history.

With these requirements, tests are being made not only for a new planning of intervention and management for assets and the landscape, but to develop criteria for another economy, another potential for developing the quality of life in local contexts.

By experimenting with management processes with these criteria, we can glimpse ways out of the cathartic process to which the institutional and economic crisis is leading us, which is leading entities to disinvest in the cultural sector or even to liquidate their heritage, budgeted as a cost centre and devoid of positive projects.

In short, faced with the last fires of a generation that has only designed things and not their uses and impacts, and has not measured the strategic effectiveness of its investments, either in a cultural sense or in an economic or social sense, the new cultural and environmental project uses the landscape as an aggregating and valorising factor and bases its novelty

– on the awareness of a territorial and economic responsibility of any action to qualify heritage,

– on the extension of innovation and proposal not only to things but also to the behaviour of users and operators,

– on the involvement of capital traditionally committed ‘against’ land quality and heritage, whose ‘short ways’ to rents are finally drying up.

4. The new subjects of the useful landscape

The greatest effort ahead of us is precisely to systematise skills and responsibilities (which almost always already exist and only need to be reframed) in integrated projects that in any case involve cooperation between different players (public and private, from different sectors, chain integration, etc.). Integration between different subjects is all the more profitable the more heterogeneous and complementary their respective sectors of origin are, but for this to happen, the subjects must already be won over to the idea of the landscape as useful to the functionality of the territory and the quality of life, to the need for skills and strategies to experience its effects in the management of common goods.

Each on his or her own account must be motivated. Therefore, when we think about who is interested in promoting skills for the useful landscape, we do not identify functional categories but types of strategic attitudes and truly ‘political’ interests. For example:

The local administrator who considers it strategic for his or her municipality to address land management issues on a supra-local and cross-sectoral scale, seeking solutions in which the containment of management costs is combined with the provision of new quality services, such as:

– the reorganisation of services and public space, based both on rationalisation requirements and on a sharing with the population of the identity and functional values actually required,

– the involvement of public-private operators to elaborate an identity design and a quality fruition model of the built edges, marginal areas and urban voids, with low consumption of fertile soil and with good redevelopment of peripheral public spaces

– the involvement of school operators, non-profit associations or contracted operators for the maintenance and enhancement of cultural heritage for uses and activities of general interest. Historical examples: the management model of Emilian cities from 1950 to 2000; today: episodic experiments (Cascina Cuccagna in Milan, municipalities in the Adige valley in Trentino or neighbourhoods in the Turin belt). In times of crisis: the local administrator who places quality requirements such as sustainability of maintenance costs in the management of public space, including green areas, on projects in his or her territory, or who tries to develop programmes for the valorisation of public real estate that are economically sustainable without selling it off. The manager of protected areas (parks, Unesco heritage, etc.) who, precisely in order to achieve the objectives of environmental conservation and enhancement, considers it strategic to address the issues of cultural landscapes and the integration of landscape and fruition between nature and culture, seeking economically sustainable solutions, in which the containment of management costs is combined with the provision of new services, such as

– the organisation of a tourism and leisure offer that presents, in an integrated manner and with a unified ‘brand’, aspects of didactic visits, opportunities for low-equipment sports, play and adventure proposals for children and the enjoyment of cultural and landscape assets, also with a programme of events and performing arts experiences,

– the formation of an alternative offer of accommodation to the traditional one, with the reuse of underused structures, the installation of temporary structures for assisted stays in semi-natural places, the formation of ‘basic’ agritourism networks and experimentation in agricultural production. Historical examples: some French parks of international renown for sports and activities; today, in Italy: parks such as the Po River and the Collina Torinese, those in Val di Cornia or Salento. In times of crisis: the manager who, faced with the drastic reduction of budget transfers, works to make the organisation’s activities economically sustainable, resorting to alliances with non-profit organisations or sponsored initiatives, but also to economic activities, monitoring their impact.

The operator in cultural networks and management who considers it strategic to generate a ‘system effect’ of culture in the territory, targeting itinerant tourism or in any case a mobile public, seeking solutions in which cost containment is combined with the provision of new services, such as

– the intersectorial integration of the offer of goods systems, reinforcing the appeal of single-sector circuits (the Romanesque, the Etruscan Tombs, etc.) in quality landscape contexts rich in places, panoramas, equipment,

– integrating the offer of events with that of assets, with the ability to root performing arts initiatives, exhibitions or multimedia events in identity places, making them systematic appointments. Historical examples: the Spoleto festival; today: the Taranta in Salento.

In times of crisis: the operator who, in conditions of scarce resources, seeks territorial and systemic effectiveness by ‘spreading’ repeatable initiatives in different places, networking already existing local initiatives, constituting an integrated and unitary offer capable of referring to a target not only local. The industrial entrepreneur, alone or better associated, who considers the organisation and quality of the territory of his own district strategic for his own productive and commercial efficiency, seeking, together with the local authorities, the added value of services such as

– the legibility of the image, also physical, of a positive landscape insertion of its activities,

– the qualification of production relations deriving from living in places rich in identity and gratifying offers, which attract intelligences and keep creative energies in the territory. Historical examples, Olivetti’s Ivrea; today: the companies promoting the French Ville Metropole, such as Montpellier or Lille. In times of crisis: the entrepreneur who, in agreement with the local authority, identifies the public goods his employees care about and prefers, at equal cost, to invest in them, instead of distributing individual benefits.

The rural entrepreneur, alone or associated, who considers a close connection between production and landscape as strategic, seeking solutions in which cost containment is combined with the provision of new quality services and a communication capacity aimed at

– establish direct and systematic contacts with consumers (also individual or better associated) to make them appreciate the quality of their products (direct sales, zero km, agri-tourism, organic markets)

– promote opportunities for ‘citizens’ to enjoy the rural landscape, as a stimulus for the drastic shortening of the supply chain and the marketing of ‘cultural’ values linked to plant production (food but also construction, energy, leisure, health). Historical examples: Garden City as conceived more than a century ago in England; today: peri-urban production initiatives, organised gardens, the system of household parcels spread around the major French cities. In times of crisis: the peri-urban farmer who knows how to communicate an offer of savings and quality not only of products but of places for leisure, particularly for young people and the elderly.

The operator in urban regeneration processes, generally involved in a public-private decision-making context, who considers strategic the option of building only to achieve quality living and public space effects, looking for solutions in which cost containment is combined with the provision of new urban landscape performance, such as the themes

– of the edges, of green fronts (river, mountain), of urban gates, which from marginal places can become centres of centrality if the specificities of the sites, the recognised signs and the role of the places in the consolidated collective imagination are enhanced.

– of the identity landscape within the city, constituted by the system of public places, which from being secondary and complementary to building projects become their qualitative driving force, generating added value with respect to a demand not only for residential but also for tertiary and productive activities. Historical examples: the experimental neighbourhoods in Europe since the 1930s; today: the Catalan Llei de Barris, which has promoted more than 100 interventions to qualify the public space of entire neighbourhoods, with widespread results of growth in real estate values and demand, many times greater than the initial investment. In times of crisis, with deadlocked real estate markets and non-existent demand for industrial locations, the public-private operator working on the qualification of public spaces (in particular existing green spaces and squares), to improve the urban quality offer of new suburban settlements and make it possible to access new segments of demand (both residential and tertiary/production).

The banking foundation, in particular with local circuits (people’s banks, savings banks, cooperative and rural credit banks), which considers interventions on the cultural heritage strategic to its mission but which wants to verify the outcomes on the quality of life and on the perception of the population, and applying criteria of efficiency and effectiveness of the services, is directed towards promoting specific interventions, which give visibility for a broader target audience to initiatives of

– local development based on the tourist use of cultural or environmental resources,

– qualification of the use of cultural or environmental sites and assets.

In times of crisis, the banking foundation which, in addition to containing investments, accompanies policies to enhance the value and usability of rehabilitation and restoration work already started or completed, initiatives for their perception by the public, or for the enlargement of the public with the inclusion of interventions in circuits or processes of widespread and extended visibility.