I. Landscape as a confrontation ground

In the last decade, especially since the European Landscape Convention (EC, 2000), spatial planning experiences, government practices and international debate have given landscape a growing political and cultural relevance. The landscape has increasingly become, from a simple object of study, a frontier terrain, a terrain of clash or confrontation, challenging the culture of the territory by demanding new answers to partly ancient questions. This is particularly evident if – as in this conference – the topic of the relationship between landscape and tourism is addressed. Despite the easy consensus on the ‘positive’ interpretation of these relationships (and thus of the slogan that gives the conference its title: Landscape and Tourism), there is no doubt that these are potentially conflicting relationships: the disputes over landscape planning in Sardinia are eloquent proof of this. Just think of the basic paradox that characterises tourism: an activity that crucially depends on the richness and integrity of those same resources, natural and cultural, that it tends to devour. Experience and evaluative analyses have long highlighted many critical aspects. Among these is the unequal distribution of costs and benefits: in a spatial sense (the success of tourist resorts is often paid for by the abandonment of other areas, even neighbouring ones); in a social sense (benefits generally reward educated middle-class citizens, while penalties are often borne by peasants, mountain dwellers and other weaker groups); and in a temporal sense (many social or economic benefits manifest themselves over a long period of time, while costs or negative repercussions often do not wait). From an international perspective, the gap between local interests and needs and those manifested in global networks (particularly by large tour operators) is often such that it overwhelms the traditional opposition between economic benefits and environmental costs: in the forum recently hosted by the World Conservation Union, the question ‘to whom it benefits’ mercilessly challenged the idea that tourism development can still help underdeveloped countries take off, albeit at the cost of environmental damage. In the experience of many European regions, the environmental costs of tourism have been and still are heavily accentuated by the pressures that the real estate market (second homes, tourist resorts, large hotel complexes, marinas, etc.) exerts on the dynamics of tourism supply. In essence, the mechanisms of rent tend to exasperate the basic contradictions of tourism phenomenology, which tends on the one hand to promote economic, social, cultural and landscape “modernisation”, and on the other to crush innovative impulses under the weight of “inertial” conveniences. This is particularly evident in the experience of ‘major events’, which push, in the name of ’emergency’, to ‘let it rain on the parade’ – as typically happened in the 2006 Winter Olympics in the Turin area, which, despite declared good intentions, ended up favouring the large existing resorts, able to quickly make available an important capital of equipment, facilities and know-how (Bottero, 2007).

But the conflicts that landscape policies must face do not only concern tourism and major events. Complex syndromes of unresolved problems, criticalities, expectations and sufferings are configured, ambiguously intertwined with the new opportunities that are opening up, in the face of which it is legitimate to wonder whether we cannot speak of a ‘landscape question’ (which flanks and in part identifies with the ‘environmental question’), analogous to the ‘urban question’ that was debated in the 1970s. A landscape question that, by intersecting with the processes of globalisation, implies new risks and new threats looming over contemporary society and calls into question paradigms, statutes and consolidated conceptions in the most diverse disciplinary spheres, starting with that of geography, in which the very concept of landscape has taken full form. Reflection on the new landscapes of geography can usefully take as its starting point some crucial questions that landscape policies are facing today. Questions that surface in the international debate (the reference to UNESCO, which is committed to going well beyond the recognition, in 1992, of “cultural landscapes” among the sites eligible for inclusion in the World Heritage List: Feilden, Jokilehto, 2007) and all the more so in the framework of the European Landscape Convention (ECL), promoted in 2000 by the Council of Europe. But questions, also, that find precise confirmation in the consolidated Italian traditions of landscape protection, in the constitutional recognition (Constitution, art. 9) of the primacy accorded to such protection and in the tormented events of the reworking of the Cultural Heritage and Landscape Code (2004-2008). Questions, therefore, that territorial and landscape planning, in all contexts and at all levels, cannot avoid asking and that can be summarised as follows:

1. What values is landscape about? What are at stake in its protection and management?

2. Is it a question of recognising them or creating them? What is the point of preserving them?

3. Who are the actors involved in the management of the landscape heritage? And in what way?

2. Universal values or local territorial values?

The CEP enshrined the principle that the protection of the landscape – as an expression of local cultures and the foundation of their identities – does not concern a few areas of particular landscape value but the entire territory; and there is general agreement that this statement does not imply a mere spatial expansion of the field of observation, but forces us to rethink the relationship between landscapes and territory.

The paradigm implicit in the 1972 UNESCO Convention does not seem adequate to grasp these new relationships. In fact, it revolves around the concept of ‘outstanding universal values’ and refers to goods or sites of intrinsic relevance, authenticity and integrity, as such distinguishable from their context, called upon to represent and celebrate a heritage that belongs to the whole of humanity, without constraints of ownership, belonging or identity to local communities. In part, this paradigm has so far also been reflected in the logic with which the World Conservation Union has promoted nature conservation policies and, more specifically, protected natural areas policies. These refer to six categories, the fifth of which (widespread in European countries) are ‘protected landscapes’, in which the long-standing interaction between man and nature has produced areas of distinctive character, significant ecological, biological, scenic or cultural value (IUCN, 1994). Although there is currently an important shift of focus within the IUCN from individual areas to their ‘connecting networks’ (IUCN, 2003, 2004), the concept of protected landscapes, as interpreted in most European experiences (Gambino, Talamo, Thomasset, 2008), seems to be largely similar to that of cultural landscapes considered by UNESCO.

It is only with the European Landscape Convention that an explicitly “territorialist” approach is proposed, which shifts the emphasis from individual landscapes (the “islands of value”, the “excellences”, the areas of intrinsic and exceptional value) to the widespread landscape heritage in all its local articulations. It is in this new paradigm that the complex and pervasive significance of local landscape values gains strength and the necessary reference to the perceptions, expectations and management responsibilities of the populations directly affected is outlined. Landscape protection ceases to propose itself in the name of universal principles alone (the safeguarding of the cultural heritage of all humanity, as in the UNESCO Convention, or the conservation of biodiversity as in the IUCN scheme) to place itself instead at the centre of local claims in favour of the quality and sustainability of the living environment of populations, the defence of local cultures and their identity foundations. The social demand for landscape, in this interpretative key, is closely linked to the affirmation of the demands of local development and the inalienable rights of local populations, including those concerning the quality and beauty of places.

However, despite the media success of ‘localist’ rhetoric and the strong territorialist impetus given by the CEP, the issue of landscape certainly cannot be addressed without a clear and explicit reference to basic principles and universal values. On the contrary, the worrying “retreat of universal values” in the face of the particularisms of groups and communities (Touraine, 2008), the shattering of identity values and the dramatic explosion of “armed identities” (Remotti, 1996) and fideistic statements increasingly place landscape at the centre of clashes of values. Local and universal values are not necessarily opposed, but their protection may require different, potentially conflicting strategies. The integration of landscape options into spatial policy and governance (explicitly called for by the CEP) involves difficult arbitrages and requires answering questions such as the following:

– How can the recognition of universal landscape values (such as those that determine inclusion in World Heritage lists) be reconciled with the recognition of local identity values pursued by the CEP?

– How does one reconcile the logic of ‘excellence’, of landscape assets of intrinsic and undisputed prestige (as such detachable from the real country) with that of diversified values spread throughout the territory, and of value systems that are an inseparable part of the territory?

– How can the defence of natural values and biodiversity be reconciled with the defence of aesthetic and symbolic values (of which, for example, the 2004 Code implicitly states the priority)?

To rediscover the value of the landscape, moving away from the sterile opposition between local and universal values, we need to rethink the relationship with the territory, between seen and experienced, between the incessant production of new landscape images and representations and the underlying processes of territorialisation. In this expanded horizon, clashes of values must increasingly give way to a reasoned and transparent confrontation of the rights at stake.

3. Recognition or creation of values?

Plans and programmes in recent decades have increasingly pursued the objective of ‘starting again from the environment and the landscape’ as the basis or pre-condition on which to build land transformation choices. The ‘structural’ interpretation of the territory, the recognition of its stable or permanent features, the reconstruction of the ‘statutes of places’, the identification of the so-called ‘invariants’, have taken on the meaning of a ‘prejudicial recognition of values’ that transformation choices cannot question. In some regions, this meaning has also been reflected in the legislative apparatus. This attribution of a more or less explicit “regulatory” value to the recognition of landscape characteristics and values has required and continues to require an attempt at a holistic reading and understanding of the territory of which the landscape itself is the dynamic and evolving expression. A reading that could not fail to recall the suggestions of geographical thought, starting at least with von Humboldt (1860; Quaini, 1992), but that cannot avoid being confronted with the other specialist developments that have consolidated over the last century in various disciplinary fields: in particular with the hegemonic role of landscape ecology – especially after the turning point of the 1960s in which the ‘new determinism’ of McHarg (1966) and others, such as Forman and Godron (1986), Steiner (1994) loomed large – with the solidity of historical and archaeological investigations, with the stimulating provocations of economists, agronomists, sociologists and anthropologists, with the ‘incursions’ of architects and town planners, with the new developments of aesthetic and semiological analyses. Developments and in-depth studies that have fostered a ‘scientific’ approach to the question of the landscape, helping to overcome the confused impressionism of protection options and the nostalgic vague ideas of a pre-industrial and pre-modern past, as well as the planning arrogance implicit in the ‘plaisir superbe de maitriser la nature’. It is an approach that tends to consolidate and that entails a multilateral “interpretation”, which cannot arise from the simple juxtaposition of multiple disciplinary readings, but requires them to interact, confronting and fertilising each other and converging in a unitary interpretative framework. Notwithstanding the difficulties that stand in the way of any attempt at inter- or trans-disciplinary reconnaissance, efforts in this direction make it possible to root landscape protection and management choices in concrete territorial realities, motivating, arguing and justifying them in relation to every other choice of transformation and development. But the environment and landscape are never ‘a given’, fixed and immutable, they are never separable from their becoming. Even in the presence of the most untouchable values, even in the face of the ‘outstanding universal values’ that merit inclusion in the World Heritage of Humanity, conservation action and protection measures must be confronted with change: change in the physical data of the environment and landscape, or also and above all in the ways in which these data are perceived and interpreted in the irrepressible actuality of the present. This directly concerns ‘cultural’ landscapes, such as a large part of the agrarian landscapes inherited from the past, whose landscape interest arises not so much from the coherent representation of current agroforestry activities, but rather from the memory or nostalgia of past ones: a desire for landscape that stems from the nostalgia of the territory (Raffestin, 2007). But the incessant change in the landscape’s relationship with the territory affects all landscapes: “even the landscapes that we believe to be most independent of our culture may, upon closer observation, instead turn out to be its product” (Schama, 1995).

This draws attention to the cultural role of landscape as a process of signification (Barthes, 1985) and social communication (Eco, 1975). If the dual foundation – natural and cultural – of landscape experience is recognised, it must also be acknowledged that the sign system constituted by the sensitive substance of the landscape cannot in any way be reduced to a ‘given’ set of meanings. Landscape semiosis is an always open process, in which the dynamics of things – the ecosphere – is inseparable from the dynamics of meanings – the semiosphere – and therefore from the social processes in which this is produced (Dematteis, 1998). The complexity of the landscape is manifested precisely in the irrepressible openness of the processes of signification that it manages to activate, in the multiplicity and unpredictability of the semantic approaches. On the other hand, this dynamic openness invests the intrinsic ambiguity of the landscape, its capacity to allude both to things and their image, to res extensa and res cogitans; an ambiguity that should not be confused with the semantic uncertainties of the term and that appears fertile precisely because it keeps its meaning open and metaphorical: if reduced to an objectifiable and neutrally quantifiable reality, the landscape would lose its primary meaning of “interactive process, cross-observation between ideas and materiality” (Bertrand, 1998).

These findings, if on the one hand induce one to use with caution the aforementioned and widely used concept of “structural invariant”, on the other hand draw attention to the intrinsically “projectual” character of the landscape: they explain in what sense it can be stated that there is no landscape without project (Bertrand, 1998). If it is true, as the CEP states, that the landscape is the expression of the diversity of the natural and cultural heritage of populations and the foundation of their identity, and that therefore every landscape has an intrinsic cultural value (even in the absence of an ‘explicit’ project and a coherent set of intentional choices, such as those that construct the cultural landscapes recognised by UNESCO), one must ask oneself whether or to what extent the cultural recognition of landscapes can disregard value choices or consequent valorisation strategies. Indeed, it seems evident that the preservation of landscape values, if on the one hand it finds its foundation in the structural interpretation mentioned above, on the other hand it cannot avoid referring to a more or less explicit valorisation strategy: structural recognitions and strategic visions of change play distinct but complementary roles. What significance does the ‘conservation’ of the landscape take on in this processual perspective? To what extent can the preservation of recognised values be distinguished from the creation of new values? What precise meaning can be attributed to the ‘innovative’ conservation of the landscape, to a conservation that can be thought of not only as a cage of constraints but as a ‘privileged place of innovation’ (ANCSA, 1990)? And what role do the games of memory and the nostalgia of the past play in this, in the face of the impulses towards the project, towards new codes of order to be imprinted in the materiality of places and in the views projected onto them?

4. Objectivity or subjectivity of landscape?

In the CEP perspective, an effective and not merely binding defence of landscape values cannot avoid referring to a social project, based on the perception and expectations of local communities and actors. A project that does not merely record neutrally the protection needs arising from the recognition of values in the field, but reflects more or less tacit value options and contributes to pursuing the “territorial designs” (Sereni, 1961) of more or less vast communities. A project, therefore, that even when applied in territories that have not experienced radical changes in the “original” landscapes, involves a creation of values and brings into question the relations of the landscape with the social formations that inhabit, live and work it. Relationships of identification and appropriation, before that of production and use, which construct and continually re-propose the “territoriality” of the landscape, in its deepest meaning (Raffestin, 1998).

The consideration of these relationships, required by the CEP, emphasises the ‘subjective’ dimension of landscape, over and above the ‘objectivity’

scientifically of its geomorphological, ecological, historical, urban data, etc. On the other hand, the tension between subjectivity and objectivity seems ineliminable from the landscape experience: the intrinsic freedom of this experience, the fact that the landscape surrounds the user and forces him to participate by forcing him to an active perception (Zube, Sell, Taylor, 1982) and obliging him to at least choose his point of view, seem to destine contemporary landscapes to an increasingly individualised use, almost like hypertexts (Cassatella, 2001). This does not prevent empirical evidence from attesting to the role of the landscape in social communication, its function of orientation (Lynch, 1971), its irreplaceable contribution to ensuring that men “do not each live in their own little island”, creating bonds that unite us through “our silent contact with things when they are not yet spoken” (Merleau Ponty, 1993), its ability to express “a common sense that creates a silent and latent bond between each individual and social group and the rest of humankind and its geographical environments” (Dematteis, 1998). But the unpredictable complexity of the interactions between the natural and cultural processes that shape the landscape, the new forms of mobility and tourist use of the landscape and natural spaces, the progressive disappearance of traditional social referents and the emergence of new actors and new modes of landscape production, weaken the possibility of recognising the ‘common sense’ of the landscape, of managing its ‘hyper-textuality’ and of identifying the new subjects that can take care of it. The landscape “of the inhabitants”, which refers to the territory of dwelling (Magnaghi, 1990) in which the Heideggerian equation between dwelling and building is inverted, risks becoming an abstraction.

At the same time, any claim to a supra-local order runs the risk of opposing or suffocating the democratic instances of local communities seeking to base their own identity assertions on the appropriation and defence of the landscape. The ‘objectifying’ recognition of supra-local values risks suffocating the landscape as a space of identity, highlighting the opposition between the visions and interests of outsiders and insiders (Cosgrove, 1984). On the other hand, it is clear that identity is built on diversity and therefore presupposes otherness (Telaretti, 1997); the recognition of the identity of places is based on the experience of the elsewhere and the different, which also involves outsiders, observers and landscape users, as is typically the case with tourism.

How then is it possible to reconcile the rational objectivity of recognition and consequent protective measures with the inescapable subjectivity of local perceptions and expectations? How can we avoid, on the one hand, the arrogance of plans and expert knowledge, the self-referentiality of projects that descend from above and, on the other, the fragmentation of defence actions and the autistic closure of local systems?

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