The historical consideration of the territory opens up a structural interpretation of the most enduring and resilient relationships and aspects that constitute the reference values of the inhabiting communities and their actions for more sustainable local development   .

1. THE ACTUALITY OF THE HISTORICAL TERRITORY

Various reasons contribute today to making the issue of historic centres, and more specifically of the historic territory, fully relevant again. In the first place, contemporary society seems inclined or to some extent compelled to refocus attention on the historic territory because it feels it is under threat: the transformations underway are clearly jeopardising that complex set of natural and cultural heritages, infrastructural resources, memories, intangible deposits and identity values, as well as economic and social values that form the territorial capital. The defence of this collective capital embedded in the territory features more and more often in the claims and programmes of ‘resistance’ of local communities, albeit ambiguously mixed with intentions of the opposite sign. The erosion of this capital, made evident by the disappearance of traditional landscapes and most of the surviving signs of the past, is felt as a kind of collective dispossession. Secondly, the focus on the historical territory is nourished by hopes or illusions about the possibility of taking root there, even innovative forms of endogenous and self-managed development, and of recovering and strengthening its heritage of values; hopes or illusions objectively fuelled by the growing role that territorial ‘specificities’, consolidated over centuries or millennia, are acquiring in the competitive dynamics unfolding on a global scale. The enhancement of natural-cultural specificities, not by chance, is often found in the strategic lines of territorial marketing programmes and sustainable development plans, not without more or less ambiguous alliances with the revalorisation of ‘local knowledge and flavours’, of typical products and wine and food tourism. If on a local scale the city, with its articulated historical centralities, can once again be thought of as the ‘engine’ of territorial development, on a global scale historical heritage is celebrated as a strategic resource of the ‘European dream’ to be contrasted with the American one, for the construction of that European identity for which the ‘enlarging’ Europe is still searching. Thirdly, the focus on the geographically and historically determined territory is driven by the need to make environmental policies more effective: the ‘territorialisation’ of environmental policies – i.e. the commitment to place them as close as possible to local realities, measuring them against the problems, peculiarities, needs and expectations of local communities – has been recognised with increasing emphasis from Rio (1992) to Bangkok (2004) as a compulsory step to improve their effectiveness.

But the topicality of the historical territory does not consist only in the importance that its defence and enhancement are assuming in contemporary economic, social and cultural dynamics. It also and above all consists in the current cultural significance it has for contemporary society. A meaning that, far from being always and only traceable to the values of the past, finds nourishment in processes of signification that are open and never concluded, which continually call into question the relationships of perception and knowledge, identification and appropriation, use and fruition between social formations and their territories of reference. The topicality that these processes continually recreate does not therefore arise from a simple temporal coincidence between social dynamics and given value systems, in some way recognised and fixed in the collective consciousness, but arises and evolves as a function of the continual revisiting of the relationships that link subjects and objects, society and territory. It is an actuality that closely recalls the ‘actuality of beauty’ theorised by Gadamer (1986), founded on the perennial and unquenchable contemporaneity between the observer and the work observed. It is in the actuality of the present that the contemporaneity of the relationship between the territory and its users is continuously reproduced. This contemporaneity implies the historical relativity of value judgements, around which the perception systems, images and expectations of the settled communities are built. Relativity reaffirmed by empirical evidence: suffice it to think of the transformation of the horrid into the ‘sublime’ in the ‘invention of the Alps’ between the 17th and 18th centuries, or of the naturalistic appreciation of marshes and wetlands, until the first half of the last century thought of as land to be reclaimed, or of the discovery of industrial archaeology, or of the emphasis on ‘cultural landscapes’, only since 1992 admitted by Unesco to be part of the world heritage of humanity. But the contemporary nature of the relationship between the land and its users also stimulates us to rethink the reasons and the meaning of conservation (of the natural-cultural heritage) and its traditional opposition to innovation: if conservation “is the privileged place of innovation” for contemporary society, then many of the conservation practices and the very concept of restoration must be called into question.

2. FIELD DILATION

In order to attempt to understand the new relationships, it is necessary to pick up the thread of a line of reasoning that has run through the debates and reflections on the question of historic centres, resulting in the New Gubbio Charter of 1990. Proposing, thirty years later, an integrative update of the founding Charter of 1960, the National Association of Historic and Artistic Town Centres (ANCSA) stated at the time that the historic centre, “the area where the values of the civitas and the urbs are concentrated in every European city, constitutes at the same time the node of a wider settlement structure. This structure, interpreted in its centuries-long process of formation, must today be considered as ‘historical territory’, an overall expression of cultural identity and therefore subject in all its parts (existing city and periphery, built-up landscapes and rural territory) to an organic intervention strategy”. This statement synthetically marked the culmination of scientific, political and cultural elaborations that had forced us to progressively broaden our gaze from single monuments and cultural heritage to the settlement heritage of the existing city, to extended landscapes, to ‘territorial cultural systems’ and to the entire territory, finally, in the fullness of its historical and natural values and spatial articulations; and that consequently had dilated the sense and the field of the conservation option, “the foundation of all innovative action”, less and less reducible to the mere defensive preservation of existing values, more and more founded on the project, to be the privileged place of production of the new values of contemporary society. The very reasons for heritage conservation were changing, inseparable from the perceptions, expectations and territorial designs of populations and new rights of citizenship (of identity, nature and beauty). New relations were emerging, more complex and interactive, between conservation and development, between memories and innovation, between recognitions of value and design options. Preservation, it has been said, always presupposes – in varying degrees and forms depending on the nature, quality and state of the objects concerned – a certain innovative tension, even if only in terms of new attributions of meaning; and symmetrically, every authentic innovation proposes to contemporary society a growing commitment to conservation with regard to the sites and resources that constitute the very materials of the current processes of transformation. The production of new values cannot be separated from the continuous reworking of pre-existing ones (Gambino 1997). Thus, not a simple spatial expansion of the field of attention, not a mere change of scale, but a new philosophy of behaviour towards the historical and natural heritage and its relations with contemporary territories was affirmed, destined to have repercussions on the conceptions of the city, historic centres and the landscape, overturning many consolidated separations and opening up expectations for reform.

3. CHANGES IN THE CONTEXT

The broadening of the field of attention proposed by the 1990 Charter made it possible to perceive at an early stage (albeit without significant operational repercussions) some key aspects of the changes underway: changes that have nevertheless undergone dramatic acceleration in recent years. Special consideration must be given to the landscape, as an integral part (as stated in Article 2 of the 2004 Cultural Heritage and Landscape Code) of the cultural heritage. In spite of the attention that public administrations and public opinion itself seem to pay to the landscape issue not only in our country, one cannot avoid noting that the landscape heritage has undergone a disarming process of devastation and degradation over the last fifty years. Powerful factors of change – such as the expansion of cities and the spread of extra-urban settlements, the proliferation of infrastructures, agricultural industrialisation, productive reconversion and the development of tourism – have affected the entire territory, interacting with different outcomes, depending on the general characteristics of the environmental frameworks involved and the specific features determined, in the different contexts, by past historical developments. Those landscapes that still appeared relatively homogeneous in the middle of the last century, such as the types of landscape identified in Italy by Sestini (1957), have been traversed by transformation dynamics that have severed, often irreversibly, the pre-existing balances, cancelled the dense patterns of ancient productive articulations and the widespread signs of the work of the land, and dispersed an inestimable heritage of values. The homologating thrusts that have invested the countryside have oversimplified and trivialised the agrarian landscapes inherited from centuries of history and described by Sereni (1961), largely identifiable as unrepeatable ‘cultural landscapes’, dismantling their ecological networks (ditches, canals, hedges and trees, etc.), a precious guardian of biological diversity and ecosystem stability. Along the coasts, the distorted development of tourism has now affected almost everywhere the complex relationship, ecological and landscape, between the land and the sea, with pervasive effects much heavier than those caused by the ‘ecomonsters’ that occasionally attract media attention. In the unconfined urban and metropolitan peripheries and in the areas of settlement diffusion, the erosion of rural space is generally far from any attempt to give form and quality to the new living contexts, which are increasingly dominated by the physical emergencies of commercial, productive or technological ‘non-places’. No less indifference to the specificities of places and the values of ‘original landscapes’ characterises the imposing development of infrastructural apparatuses (from motorways to new railways, energy networks, etc.). And, on the other hand, the new differences produced by the innovative thrusts and specialisation of evolutionary trajectories, if they contribute to forming new ‘settlement environments’ as a result of unprecedented intersections between environmental frameworks, territorial matrices and settlement forms (Clementi et al. 1996), very rarely manage to design new credible landscapes capable of taking the place of those that have been altered or destroyed. A general, unfathomable loss of memory seems to characterise the territorial transformation of the last half century and closely links the question of landscape to that of historical heritage. And the memory game does not only concern the historical heritage but also the natural heritage, never unscathed by more or less stratified forms of anthropic reworking (Schama 1995).

4. THE EUROPEAN LANDSCAPE CONVENTION

In our country, the processes of degradation and destruction of the landscape and cultural heritage have been inadequately countered, more often tolerated or pandered to – in the name of often illusory expectations of development – by government apparatuses, at the national, regional and local levels. The political system and public opinion itself, despite the prodding of conservationist groups and associations, have only in recent years shown an awareness of what is at stake, of the seriousness of the risks and opportunities involved in landscape enhancement. But this is not just an Italian problem. In general, different European countries have tackled the landscape issue with very different and uncoordinated sensitivities, approaches, institutional instruments and government actions. The role of the landscape as a factor of European identity and the growing dependence of their landscape and environmental problems on European dynamics and policies have long posed the need for a European landscape policy. It is in this direction that the Council of Europe has moved in proposing the European Landscape Convention, signed in Florence in 2000 by the forty-five member countries and recently ratified also by our country. In this regard, the Convention provides some basic guidelines, which should ensure, on the one hand, the convergence of European sectorial policies (especially those with a greater impact on the landscape-environment, such as agricultural policies) and, on the other hand, the harmonisation of national landscape policies and their guidance and control systems. By politically consecrating the concepts mentioned above, the Convention commits the parties involved to some very important innovations. In particular: a) the clear and explicit affirmation that the objectives of landscape quality to be pursued do not concern a few pieces of landscape of undisputed value (such as natural beauties or scenic or panoramic emergencies) but concern the entire territory, “natural, rural, urban and peri-urban spaces […] terrestrial landscapes, inland waters and marine waters. It concerns both landscapes that can be considered exceptional, everyday landscapes and degraded landscapes” (art. 2); b) the full recognition of the complex significance of landscape as “part of the territory, as perceived by populations, whose character derives from the action of natural and/or human factors and their interrelationships” (art. 1a) and “an essential component of the living context of populations, an expression of the diversity of their common cultural and natural heritage and the foundation of their identity” (art. 5a); c) the systematic reference to the “subjects concerned” or “involved in the definition and implementation of landscape policies” also with regard to the assessment of landscape resources, which must “take into account the specific values attributed to them by the subjects and populations concerned” (Art. 5c, 6c) and the consequent consultation and participation procedures.

5. THE ‘RETICULAR’ RETHINKING OF THE TERRITORY

The innovative ideas of the Convention jointly reflect a conception of the relationship between landscape and territory that in no way allows landscape texts to be spatially isolated, separating them from their territorial context. The idea (not uncommon in common parlance) that landscapes are about open spaces, suburban territories or ‘natural beauty’ is completely alien to this conception. The landscape dimension is present within the historic centres and the compact city (in the various forms of townscape) no less than in the rural spaces and ‘urbanised countryside’ of settlement dispersion, in the deceptive spaces of the ville-nature coveted by inhabitants fleeing the cities, and in the large uninhabited but somewhat frequented natural spaces. The ‘dissolution of the city in the territorial networks’, crossed with the imposing processes of abandonment that have affected and continue to affect not only significant portions of mountain and hillside territories, but also important productive areas and obsolete disused plants ‘inside’ the city, has erased any possibility of dividing open spaces from those permanently occupied by man. If already for Cattaneo in the mid-nineteenth century ‘built-up landscapes’ were not only those occupied by houses and industries, but also those shaped by human settlement and its productive needs (typically, then, the Milanese countryside splendidly reorganised by the Teresian reforms), much more intricate and complex today are the landscapes of transition, the patchworks that temporarily draw the mobile frontiers of urban and metropolitan peri-urbanisation. The efforts that in many European cities, starting with London, are being made to rethink and update the idea of ‘green belts’, in the new perspectives of the networked city spread over the territory, testify to the difficulty of identifying new organisational logics, capable of integrating open and closed spaces, urban landscapes and rural landscapes, settlement dynamics and environmental dynamics. It is no coincidence that in the European experience, the construction of ecological networks – to counteract or reduce the ecological and landscape fragmentation of the territory, restoring a minimum of connectivity and permeability, especially in large urbanised areas – has taken on different and more complex purposes than the original, strictly biological ones (Ced-Ppn 2003). In the reticular city that looms on the new urban horizons, connection networks cannot only have biological functions, linking habitats and natural resources that risk insularity, but inevitably assume a denser and more complex meaning, integrating nature and culture by connecting different resources and values. There is a growing need to build new environmental infrastructures capable of innervating the entire territory, playing a supporting role no less important than that traditionally assigned to transport, communications or energy networks. But this need manifests itself not only ‘outward’ from the city, i.e. towards the territories of settlement dispersion and urban expansion, but also ‘inward’, i.e. into the meshes of the compact city. The growing interest in regeneration programmes aimed at ‘bringing nature back into the city’ (greening the city), in projects for the recovery and redevelopment of river strips and historically consolidated water systems, in the reuse of ‘urban voids’ and large disused areas that are not merely real estate, signals the maturing of a new awareness of the tangles of deficit that need to be removed. It is within this framework that the great theme of relational spaces in the historic city should be placed: of squares and streets, of places and their connections, of the river furrows that often cross it and of the urban greenery that allows it to breathe. Not mere contextual architecture, but a branched and complex connective system linking exterior and interior, historical heritage and environmental dynamics. It is perhaps no coincidence that attention to context has given way, in the disciplinary debate of the last decade, to attention to landscape, in the broad and inclusive meaning that has now established itself internationally. If in fact the notion of context, in its co-evolutionary version, helps to relate apparently unrelated facts, that of landscape goes further. As the foundation of local identities, landscape does not merely network those natural and cultural facts and processes that characterise environmental frameworks, but also ‘stages’, exhibits and spectacularises them. And it is precisely this spectacularisation – the landscape as ‘theatre’, in which actors act as spectators of themselves (Turri 1998) – that perhaps explains the media success that is recorded around events that create or repropose urban landscapes or large territorial landscapes.

6. HERITAGE PROTECTION IN THE LIGHT OF THE CULTURAL HERITAGE AND LANDSCAPE CODE

The broad vision proposed by the Florence Convention postulates a philosophy of behaviour towards cultural heritage and landscape that has not yet been adequately reflected in social practices and especially in public policies. The 2004 Cultural Heritage and Landscape Code itself only partly reflects this philosophy and hints at other models of behaviour. In the light of the orientations that can be observed at international level, one may wonder what problems of landscape and heritage policy are looming in our country after the entry into force of the new Cultural Heritage and Landscape Code. A first open problem concerns the latitude of the field of protection. If, in fact, the Code implicitly broadens the consideration of ‘landscape heritage’ to the whole territory (or more precisely to all the assets identified by landscape plans, even those not included among those ‘of notable public interest’ or among those falling within the categories corresponding to those already protected under Law 1497/1939 and the Galasso Law, art. 134), this expansion seems far removed from current practices and traditions of protection, especially in our country. It is no coincidence that even in the Code there is exclusive reference to ‘cultural heritage’ and ‘landscape heritage’ as distinct objects of protection and never to the systems of relations that bind them, structuring the territory. This is not surprising: the idea that the conservation option should extend to the entire territory seems, in reality, fragile and losing in the face of threats and impending risks, such as typically in Italy the rampant aggression of illegal building (encouraged by recurring amnesties) or the selling off of public assets (accelerated by the contested legislative measures of recent years). The urgency of the defence action seems to many conservation operators (and also to many detractors of the Code itself) to induce, more than yesterday, to concentrate efforts on the most valuable things – such as monuments, natural areas of greater value, or landscapes of exceptional value – or to try to ‘save what can be saved’. But you cannot save the landscape if you do not save the country. To detach monuments or ‘natural beauties’ from the variegated mosaic of humanised landscapes (albeit frequently disfigured or upset by recent transformations) that constitutes the true face of our and other European countries, means ignoring the profound reasons underlying the current demand for quality, the role of identity values and the territorial rootedness of local cultures, the constitutive relationship that binds people to places.

To avoid this split, it is necessary to move from a logic ‘by objects’ to a logic ‘by systems’, widening attention to the entire territory: this is the obligatory road to seize the differences, diversify the action of protection, respond differently, in the different situations, to the demand for quality. Unlike ‘cultural heritage’, which is a component of it, natural-cultural heritage is necessarily connected to the territory and its development processes. It is not ‘in’ the territory but ‘of’ the territory. Its valorisation only makes sense as a territorial valorisation. The use of the expression “territorial cultural system” in some European projects (Euromed, Delta Project, 2002) tends to make this connection explicit, proposing an operational articulation: a “territorial cultural system” can be defined as “the evolutionary relational context in which integrated cultural heritage valorisation projects can be effectively pursued, by networking the set of resources and local actors and developing the necessary synergies”. It is ‘heritage, in its different forms (tangible or intangible, dead or living) that provides development with a terrain. In fact, development could not take place detached from the soil […] Heritage constitutes in this sense a ‘local resource’ that only finds its raison d’être in integration with the dynamics of development” (de Varine 2002). A second problem, closely connected to the previous one, concerns the division between ‘cultural heritage’, to which the second and most conspicuous part of the Code is dedicated, and ‘landscape heritage’, to which the third part is dedicated. It is a division that is well understandable in the light of national conservation traditions, but difficult to sustain on a strictly scientific and cultural level (as already noted, the new conceptions of heritage tend rather to break down the old divisions and give landscape heritage a very broad and inclusive meaning) and difficult to practice on an applicative level. Suffice it to think of historical centres, practically absent from the 2004 Code if not reduced to the figure of ‘complex monuments’, clearly outdated by the debate of recent decades: they do not in fact appear in the albeit meticulous list of types of cultural heritage – art. 10 almost seems to deny their existence, when it instead explicitly mentions “public squares, streets, roads and other open urban spaces of artistic or historical interest”, as if the complex and integrating role of historic centres was exhausted in these – and they are explicitly excluded from the categories of landscape assets protected by law (Art. 142, c. 2, lett. a). However, it should be noted that recent amendments to the Code (Art. 136) have included historical centres and areas of archaeological interest among the areas of considerable public interest to be protected. Of course nothing precludes urban or landscape plans from dedicating special protection to specific historical centres, but it is curious that the Code, at least in its first version, does not grasp the general relevance of historical settlements – and in essence of the city, in all its historical articulations, including recent ones – as the basic structure of the territorial cultural heritage. A third and crucial problem concerns the separation between protection and valorisation, already introduced with the reform of Title V of the Constitution (art. 117), which distinguishes ‘the protection of the environment, the ecosystem and the cultural heritage’, the exclusive competence of the State, from the ‘valorisation of cultural and environmental heritage’, a matter of concurrent legislation between the State and the Regions. Despite the fact that there is no lack of references to the need to integrate protection and valorisation with the concerted action of State and Regions (and regardless of the uncertainties of interpretation: see Constitutional Court ruling no. 407/2002), it seems evident that in this regard the Code misses the most important appointment, that of the new relations between conservation and sustainable development. As has already been repeatedly observed, these relations are all the more close and conditioning the more conservation tends to extend to the whole territory, involving the areas and systems of marginality and abandonment, which now cover a large part of the national territory: here, not only can the measures of constraint and passive protection, if decoupled from the policies of investment and economic and social support, not only fail to contribute to territorial revalorisation, but in many cases cannot even be concretely applied (what constraints, for example, could ever stop the decay of terraced slopes or the pressing ruderization of mountain villages?). But the separation between protection and enhancement risks, even more generally, hiding a fundamental problem of our country, that of risk prevention. A problem that comes back into the media spotlight only on the occasion of catastrophic floods or landslides or major destructive earthquakes, especially those with human victims. Instead, it is a problem of a structural nature, in a country with a high and widespread hydrogeological risk and where a significant part of the building and urban heritage (including schools, hospitals, and essential public services) is old, fragile and vulnerable, in a condition far from safe. This links us to a fourth problem, that of the economic valorisation of the cultural and landscape heritage. Making the accounts of valorisation, in the sense we have just indicated, grasping the needs and the economic and social opportunities that it entails for the territories involved, is in fact the exact opposite of that ‘selling off’ that, according to many critics, the new Code risks propitiating or at least facilitating, in the direction already taken with previous measures such as law 112/2002 (Ancsa 2003) and in full harmony with the infamous amnesty measures. In fact, a valorisation of heritage aimed at reducing the penalties and risks present in the territory and increasing its added value requires a careful and integrated assessment of the costs and benefits, of the positive and negative externalities that the planned actions may produce, well beyond the areas and buildings directly involved. It is quite evident, in the light of daily experience not only in our country, that, in the face of rapid and significant economic returns for individual real estate operations, there may be collective costs, more or less monetisable, much more relevant in the medium and long term. It is above all the risk of this possible divarication (rather than a preconception adverse to the involvement of private parties in redevelopment processes) that induces one to view with suspicion those regulations, such as those on silence-consent for the purposes of decommunitisation, explicitly aimed at facilitating the alienation of publicly owned assets, reducing the systems of guarantees. Especially if, as the first experiences in applying the new regulations have shown, the objective is reduced to that of ‘making cash’ and attempting to heal the public accounts by throwing ‘family jewels’ on the market, and deliberately renouncing that integrated consideration of costs and benefits referred to above. Against the risk of disposals or sell-offs that waste or even destroy heritage resources, the curb provided by the Code in the form of the ‘verification of the cultural interest’ of the assets under discussion (art. 12) or the prior listing of ‘inalienable assets’ (art. 54) appears wholly inadequate, which once again shifts the focus from the system to the object, from the territory to the sector, from active and integrated valorisation to passive and episodic defence. This shift is all the more worrying in that it takes place in the absence of adequate knowledge of the real consistency of the assets concerned, which are presumably very significant, if we consider not only building properties, but also areas of civil and military state property.

The paper partly resumes, with corrections and additions, the one presented by the author under the title European Landscape Policies at the conference organised by the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan, 1-2 October 2004) on the theme On the city today; as well as the one presented under the title Historical heritage and landscape at the ANCSA national conference (Bergamo, 13 May 2006) on Open spaces in historical contexts.

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Iucn 2005 International Union for Conservation of Nature, Proceedings of the Members‘ Business Assembly, 3rd World Conservation Congress (Bangkok, 17-25 November 2004), Iucn, Gland 2005

In the mid-19th century, Cattaneo’s ‘built-up landscapes’ were not only those occupied by houses and industries, but also those shaped by human settlement and its production needs. If already for Cattaneo, in the mid-19th century, ‘built-up landscapes’ were not only those occupied by houses and industries, but also those shaped by human settlement and its productive needs (typically, then, the Milanese countryside, splendidly reorganised by the Teresian reforms), much more intricate and complex today are the landscapes of transition, the patchworks that temporarily draw the mobile frontiers of urban and metropolitan peri-urbanisation.

The efforts being made in many European cities, starting with London, to rethink and implement the idea of ‘green belts’ in the new perspectives of the networked city spread over the territory, testify to the difficulty of identifying new organisational logics capable of integrating open and closed spaces, urban landscapes and rural areas, settlement dynamics and environmental dynamics. It is no coincidence that in the European experience, the construction of ecological networks – to counteract or reduce the ecological and landscape fragmentation of the territory, restoring a minimum of connectivity and permeability, especially in large urbanised areas – has taken on different and more complex aims than the original, strictly biological ones (CED-PPN 2003). In the reticular city that is emerging in the new urban horizons, connection networks cannot only have bio-logical functions, linking habitats and national resources.

The need for new environmental infrastructures capable of innervating the entire territory is increasingly felt, playing a supporting role no less important than the one traditionally assigned to the networks of the territory. There is an increasing need for new environmental infrastructures capable of innervating the entire territory, playing a supporting role no less important than that traditionally assigned to transport, communication or energy networks. However, this need does not only manifest itself ‘outwards’ from the city, i.e. towards the territories of settlement dispersion and urban expansion, but also ‘inwards’, i.e. in the meshes of the compact city. The growing interest in regeneration programmes to ‘bring nature back into the city’ (greening the city), in projects for the regeneration and redevelopment of river belts and

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