For Landscape: from rules to the engaged recognition
The Piemonte Landscape Plan is the most mature effort of developing an operative paradigm to enhance landscape, making the best use of urban plans.
The attempt, despite the good intention of the law, shows the deep constraints of governmental regulation even though those rule are the result of the best regional urban an landscape legislation.
The history of the choices of the Piemonte Plan points out, besides the limits, an interesting scenario that remained undisclosed until now, which could inspire new partnerships for the landscape.
1. Landscape in the plan contributes to the loss of grip of universal rules
To recount the experimental approach of the Piedmont Landscape Plan, we start from afar, because the PPR attempts to address some issues that have been unresolved over the last 70 years in the Italian history of land management.
By a cyclical law that we only suspect, given its recurrence, many mechanisms for the functioning of society are losing their effectiveness and credibility, just as their institutional set-up seems to be consolidating and becoming ordinary practice. Now it is the turn of the reforms of some fifty years (10 plus 10 minus): schooling, healthcare, regional decentralisation are in structural crisis. Even the culture of town planning rules, coeval with those reforms in its fundamental laws, now systematically applied, is waning.
It is a process of sclerosis that has been taking place under the surface for over twenty years, which we must re-read in order to understand the reasons for the current stalemate, when on the one hand we can no longer rely on urban planning regulations to qualify public space, but on the other hand we have no other effective tools to channel individual planning energies to the common good of the city and the territory.
The ill-considered separation of town planning and design, consummated right into the course of study, has fostered the formation of a dual professionalism: that of the systematic application of rules to implement plans and that of circumventing them to make room for design. As if playing guards and thieves, for each of the two roles ethics, obsessions and cunning aimed against the other but co-participating in a sort of sacred representation, a ritual to which we are now becoming accustomed: the town planner preaches a neutral, orderly, nineteenth-century normality; the planner invokes the sign, the emergency, the rule as a contemporary expedient to make himself noticed.
In this exasperated dialectic, legitimised by the ‘high’ contrast between the project and the rule, the worst sloppiness and disregard for that common good that town planning in theory seeks to guarantee: the functional and identity quality of the city under construction. We verify, case by case, the inability of the rule to direct urban design towards quality when building and to limit its degradation when managing it.
On the other hand, it must be taken into account that the law obliges all municipalities to approve the master plan, in which standardised and parametric rules are applied to very diverse and characterised situations. This is due to the ‘necessity’ for the univocity of the standard: a technical and even moral myth of our time, whereas if anything, it would be more correct for the common good to require the same level of quality of services in the general interest, achieving it ‘naturally’ in ways that differ according to the different situations.
The inability of town planning to take into account the specificities of each place has been buffered with the sort of exemption that has been invented for A-zones (after long cultural and political battles), saving historic centres from the havoc wrought in the name of uniform city-building rules. But the same has not happened with the city expanding into the countryside.
On the other hand, in the last 30 years, certain qualities of open land have been defended by the environmentalist culture, which has led to respect for hitherto unknown values (in the post-war period, the PRG surrounded cities with ‘white zones’, hic sunt leones, non-urban land, considered solely as reserves available for future building plans). The environmentalist culture has made us strong with norms of respect and care, important but entirely a-planning, and a-local. The most widely used tool to manage the environmental relationship of new interventions, the ‘impact assessment’, theoretically examines the positive and negative effects of transformations, but in fact only considers (mostly in a useless and sweetened way) the negative effects of projects and plans. Each intervention is measured with standardised environmental impact indices and is necessarily considered harmful. In the assessment procedure, the public entity takes on the role of carer of a hopelessly chronically ill person, the territory, for which attempts are made to mitigate the worst consequences, trying to limit the incidence of the proposed actions, regardless.
But for the last twenty years or so, when town planning is a besieged fortress that resists by invoking the ethical quality of standards that are the same for all, a landscape culture has been coming forward that clears the way for subjectivity, exalts perceived quality and local specificities, and introduces among the tasks of the public hand also the promotion and enhancement and not only conservation. In practice, it is proposed to apply the attention paid to historic centres to the entire territory.
It is a fatal blow to the myth of the standard that, in the name of regulatory fairness, wipes out differences. The way in which general interest concerns are applied must be reviewed and a new ‘technique’ is required to enhance the territory while preserving its identity and local characteristics.
Here it is: the Piedmont landscape plan, more than ten years ago, moves from such a cultural, technical and political context, which awaits not only an innovative tool, but a logical paradigm and a methodological reference that curbs the aporias of town planning and land management in general.
However, a case of almost irresolvable double constraint arises: landscape and planning in the common interest require attention to the particular characteristics of individual places, while the regional plan acts on a scale that cannot take into account the specific situation.
2. The response to the normative ubris of the Code: rules by areas, rules by goods
The 2004 Cultural Heritage Code addresses landscape by moving from a discontinuous evolution of the concept and its operational definitions. On the one hand, it was necessary to metabolise the historical definition, which considers a select few landscapes as unrepeatable assets and attempts to preserve ‘living’ qualities by naively applying the provisions of other cultural, immovable assets. On the other hand, it has had to cope with the irruption of environmental aspects brought about by the Galasso law, which subjects more than a third of the territory to attention, and then by the European Convention, which considers every ‘single part’ of the territory as landscape.
The specific controversy surrounding the Ministry of Cultural Heritage in the early 2000s should also be considered, which was subjected to intense criticism for the subjectivity of its authorisation controls, and for the lack of explicit reference criteria and argumentation in its evaluations. The uncontrollable procedure of the controllers became unsustainable in the face of the dizzying and heterogeneous increase in the number of cases to be authorised.
In short, a formalisation of the terms of the authorisation procedure was politically required.
With the Code, the challenge is taken up and an effort is made to combine ad hoc attention, to the specifics of places and assets, with a normalising regulatory instrumentation, by categories, which is proper to urban plans.
It is like picking up violets with boxing gloves: the Enlightenment law, which is the same for everyone, is not compatible with the holistic and planning consideration that is required to assess the thousands of situations in which each asset finds itself. Imposing uniform attentions to everything within 150 metres of the banks of a river immediately appears as a crude choice to be perfected, which cannot always be escaped with the axe of absolute denial of all intervention.
However, the code chooses to standardise everything, declining with different orders of prescriptions to objects of varying complexity and size and shifting the technical burden onto regional plans.
They are required to identify landscape areas as a suitable dimension to distinguish the different characteristics of the territory, and are ordered to prepare specific regulations of use at that scale: an unprecedented invention, both because use has never been the specific subject of regulations, and because the territorial dimension of the areas eludes effective regulations in terms of legal constraint.
On the other hand, the opportunity of the Regional Plans is also used to obtain a filing for each of the constrained assets that may contain ‘prescriptions intended to ensure the conservation of the values expressed’, and the same is requested for the areas of landscape interest of the Galasso law, even though it is known that they cover over 40% of the territory and cannot be specifically regulated, unless we are the officials of the Map of the Empire on a 1:1 scale, of Borgesian memory.
In the drafting of the Piedmont Landscape Plan, in 2007, we found ourselves experimenting with the (then) new procedure identified by the Code, trying to disentangle the congeries of required regulatory slopes.
In the end, different regulatory instruments coexist:
– a very precise specification for each constrained landscape asset, the so-called ‘constraint dressing’, which fulfils the requirement of making explicit the criteria of care to be followed in any intervention on those specific sites, at the cost of a ponderous but unfortunately necessarily static (and therefore inadequate as time passes) descriptive effort;
– a generic indication of the overall aspects to be taken into account in the landscape areas (on average 18/20 municipalities large) and in the “landscape units” composing them, which are much smaller in size and identify contexts subject to homogeneous transformation processes, with attention guidelines and the referral of verification of regulatory effectiveness to the vast area or local plans;
– a regulation by “components” (of the regional landscape structure), a category of the Piedmontese Plan that also includes the landscape and environmental assets of the Code deriving from the Galasso Law: territorial belts to be specified in their boundaries and rules of attention to be declined in a prescriptive manner in local plans, for each type of asset.
It is a complex regulatory framework, which copes with the set of indications of the Code, but which in fact dribbles the double constraint of general homogeneity/local specificity, leaving to the Provinces and Municipalities the burden of the local declination of the rules for the areas and the specification of the parts of the territory to which they are to be applied for the components.
3. The interpretation and recognition of identity relations and local strategies
In order to help local authorities overcome the difficulties and limits of the regulatory side imposed by the Code, the Piedmont Plan tackles the landscape theme with a multitasking approach. Roberto Gambino, scientific coordinator of the Plan, proposes a paradigmatic tripartition, after having experimented it in other plans of vast areas. In this approach, the regulatory function is not the summit at which the whole Plan is intended, but is accompanied, in equal measure, by the strategic and cognitive functions.
The role of the strategic function assigns to the regional plan the task that lies at the heart of European plans, which are often stingy with rules and instead focus on the coordination and promotion of strategic local action programmes and best practices. This is an opening for programming and political understanding between the various sectors, which could bear splendid fruit over the years, even if for now each regional office continues to plan on its own account.
But the innovative task is assigned to the cognitive function: from the ancillary and prior service role, to which it is condemned in the rest of town and country planning, to a role of interpretative proposal, which attempts to provide municipalities and provinces with systematic and in-progress tools to overcome the problems of local specificity, which cannot be tackled on a regional scale, and the rigidity of general rules, which are often useless or harmful on a local scale.
The plan’s proposal is one of inter-institutional collaboration. With a cultural action, of recognition of their heritage according to the interpretative model proposed by the regional plan, municipalities and provinces should be able to articulate, in a shared and politically credible way, the rules that in the plan define in a general and schematic way the methods of landscape protection and enhancement.
It is proposed to municipalities and provinces, as part of the planned adjustment of their spatial governance tools, to complete the survey and interpretation of the values present according to the new model prepared for the regional plan, which attempts to facilitate ad hoc planning, where it respects the local landscape and the systemic relations of the vast area, for the first time defined and partly identified.
The proposed framework of investigation is aimed at declining the values of the territory so that they are recognised at different scales and at facilitating the local implementation of the plan through ad hoc rules and strategies, in particular by highlighting unpublished but fundamental interpretative strands for the landscape:
- the role of local relations,
Thus the focus is on the relationships (of homogeneity or complementarity) between the various elements present, stimulating the recognition of the value of each emergency (a castle, a waterfall, a skyscraper,) or each fabric (a vineyard slope, a holiday resort, a system of historic ridge nuclei,) not in itself but as the product of an effect of position, environmental situation, historical process or built arrangement that lead to the valorisation not only of the object in question but above all of its relationships with the local or temporal context. The lists of buildings and places traditionally used to delineate area characterisations are replaced by system (natural and/or historical) indications that make the relational rules to be followed more easily understandable;
- the role of supra-local networks,
whereby the fundamental connections of the environmental, historical and functional networks that, at a supra-local level, draw the great distinctive features of the regional landscape (ecological corridors, historical infrastructures, great visual relationships, …) are traced, and it is requested that the valorisation of these connections, which are so relevant at such a large scale that they are often not perceived at a local level, be instead taken as the basis for the localisation choices of local territorial transformations;
- structural interpretation and articulation into components,
whereby an outline of the fundamental relationships of the regional landscape (the structure) is sketched in order to make it possible to distinguish the specific aspects for which a part of it (a component) is to be protected and enhanced. A river is of interest not so much as a body of water but for the curvilinear sign that makes it recognisable, for the continuity of the vegetation belt around it, for the role it plays as an ecological corridor. That is why it is of great interest not to rectify it, not to peel back its banks, not to interrupt it by damming it or placing an insurmountable barrier. By understanding the structural role of the components on a case-by-case basis, it is possible to distinguish and make understandable the attentions to be paid, and, without going too far in generic prohibitions, it is possible to define the most appropriate compensation and mitigation conditions for cases of impact;
- the role of transformative dynamics,
by which the territory is articulated, recognising the state of ongoing transformation processes, often completely independent of the relational and structural values highlighted in the rest of the survey. Thus the temporal dimension is brought into landscape management, recognising the existence of processes of continuous production of landscapes, shared by the populations even if they have little identity, quite different from those crystallised in the plan. Thus places are identified as basic units of the landscape, from those in which transformation processes are accelerated and are producing completely new arrangements, suburbs in which the continuous change of forms is an important part of the perception of the landscape, to all the intermediate grades up to the stable ones, where even the smallest change is perceived as a serious alteration. By understanding the dynamics underway, it is possible to identify the interventions necessary to stabilise the processes, to reduce the ‘noise’ generated by continuous change, and thus to bring attention and a sense of identity back to the structural aspects of the territory.
In these terms, the operative hypothesis underlying the PPR is that the cognitive framework and its method, adopted as an engine for local investigation and interpretation, can become the viaticum for declining the general rules on the territory. The regional machine should favour the efforts of each local authority to recognise the qualities of its territory, according to the structural and relational approaches of the PPR. On that basis, good practices should be tried out and procedures facilitated to design the new PRGs, as the Region had already attempted with the Indirizzi di qualità paesaggistica degli insedimenti, which remained an academic exercise also because they had no operational connections with ordinary planning procedures.
But the process must spread, it cannot remain an office task, a bureaucratic duty to be fulfilled in order to vary the same old PRG. It is necessary to call upon those, and there are many of them, to lend a hand, who in any case are dedicating their businesses, their free time, and their political action to the landscape, to historical and environmental relations, and to local characteristics. With them, recognition becomes not a scholastic and technical task, but an industrious process, full of projects, also favouring individuals who use their territory well. In short, for the industrious recognition of characterising landscape relations it is necessary to put the active landscape to good use, as I tried to outline in the article published in the last issue of this magazine.
