Why do so many different disciplines, politicians and social and cultural actors pay so much attention to the subject of landscape? Because landscape is not a private affair of cultural elites or professional categories. But there is a ‘landscape question’ that concerns contemporary society and invests political action, requiring acuity and complexity not unlike those that have characterised the ‘urban question’ for 50 years.
The evident attention that experts and specialists from the most diverse disciplines, as well as, to an increasing extent, politicians and social and cultural operators have been devoting to the subject of landscape for some years now, deserves an attempt at explanation. The fact that this issue reflects concerns, expectations and needs that are recognised as being of common and general interest, the fact that the landscape is not and cannot be considered a private affair of individual academies or cultural elites or professional categories. In other words, the fact that there is a ‘landscape question’ that concerns contemporary society and that invests political action with acuity and complexity not very different from those that have characterised the ‘urban question’ for thirty or forty years.
The international seminar, the proceedings of which are collected here, was but one of the many occasions on which, in Italy and abroad and in the most diverse venues, landscape was and is discussed. The evident attention that experts and specialists from the most diverse disciplines, as well as, to an increasing extent, politicians and social and cultural operators have been devoting to the topic of landscape for some years now, deserves an attempt at explanation, if one wishes to try to understand in what problematic context the reflections collected here are located. Wondering why the topic of landscape has become so much and so widely topical may perhaps also serve to clarify the aims and specific usefulness of the Turin Seminar and the interdisciplinary discussion that it was intended to initiate.
It may seem paradoxical that a debate, which promises to be restricted to specialists, mostly working in the academic sphere, should start from an acknowledgement of the political and social relevance of the landscape issue. Yet this is precisely the starting point: the fact that this issue reflects concerns, expectations and needs that are recognised as being of common and general interest, the fact that the landscape is not, cannot be considered a private affair of individual academies or cultural elites or professional categories. In other words, the fact that there is a ‘landscape question’ that concerns contemporary society and that invests political action with acuity and complexity not very different from those that have characterised the ‘urban question’ for thirty or forty years.
If one accepts this starting point, the logical path proposed by the seminar, substantially illustrated in Castelnovi’s extensive introductory report, can become comprehensible. It outlines a sequence of questions:
1, what are the topical reasons for the landscape issue? What political demands and social questions should the scientific and cultural world dealing with landscape try to answer?
2, Why is the landscape issue so culturally and scientifically complex? What theoretical apparatuses enable it to be tackled effectively? And above all, does it exist or does it make sense to attempt to construct ‘a theory’ of landscape?
3, what meaning does landscape take on for contemporary society and mankind? And above all, is there a common sense of landscape, an ability to share the experience of landscape that calls for public responsibility?
4, what sense, then, can the landscape project have? What specificity should be recognised in relation to the project of architecture, of the city, of the territory?
Clearly, such a sequence implies a convergence from the general themes towards the specific responsibilities of schools of architecture (such as the one that not coincidentally hosted the Seminar) and the disciplines that accompany and support design action. And conversely, this sequence implies the intention to constantly trace back from the practical problems of design to the more general political and cultural concerns that underlie these problems. This reciprocal interaction, which tends to link design action to social discourse, is obviously not peaceful and obvious. On the one hand, it reflects a conception of the world that is not neutral, nostalgic or resigned, not devoid of expectations of change and therefore of design hopes; a conception that is based on a critical analysis of the processes underway and that rejects the idea of a static and passive conservation of the heritage of values that our society has inherited from nature and history, which instead leads us to believe that, in general, “things cannot be left as they are”. Believing in that interaction means, on the other hand, assuming a conception of the project that is far removed from the autistic games of the architect (or town planner or landscape architect) entrenched in self-referentiality or in the arrogance of the creative act, very attentive instead to that “civil commitment” that already in the words of Defoe (1697) was to characterise the “projecting age”; it means thinking of the project as immersed in the turbulence and conflicts of social processes, capable of expressing the technical, scientific and professional responsibilities no less than the anxieties, hopes and fears of the communities that identify with it. It is in this twofold conception – destined to give a non-trivial meaning to two principles that have for some time now, under the impetus of the ‘environmentalist turn’, gained wide international recognition, that of conservation and that of responsibility – that the above-mentioned questions, on which our seminar has developed, find articulated motivations.
In trying to understand the current reasons for the landscape question, it is difficult to escape the temptation to look for them in the structural changes of contemporary society. With a brutal schematisation, one might think that, just as the “birth” of landscape has been placed in relation to the onset of capitalism (Cosgrove, 1984), so its current crisis, prelude to an announced “death” or radical metamorphosis, can and should be placed in relation to the crisis of mature, post-industrial and post-modern capitalism. And indeed, many aspects of late-modern or post-modern society – which characterise that “broad and profound change in the ‘structure of feeling'” mentioned by D. Harvey, 1993) – seem to be reflected in the questions and concerns regarding landscape. On the other hand, it would be foolish to underestimate the stringent relations that link the demand for landscape to the processes of internationalisation of markets and globalisation of economic, social and cultural dynamics, with their contradictory effects of homogenisation and unifying modernisation, on the one hand, and of exasperated specialisation, imbalances, inequalities and desperate search for identity, on the other. As A. Berque (1993) notes, “the spectacular growth in demand for landscape is not just an aestheticising drift of a satiated society; on the contrary, it is a sign that man tends to reconnect with the earth, which modernity had dissolved”. The ‘great illusion’ that animates the demand for landscape can be, in other words, linked to the anxiety of reconciliation with one’s own history and with nature, which arises as a reaction to the processes of uprooting and deterritorialisation, which tend to erase any relationship with places, and to the processes of ‘total urbanisation’, which tend to erase any direct relationship with nature. From this point of view, the “simulation” implicit in the current landscape offer (typically in tourism marketing: Raffestin, 1998) would be nothing more than the extreme expression of that “naturalisation of historical forms” that runs through the entire project of modernity, aimed at legitimising and making socially acceptable the processes of modernisation underway. In this sense, current landscape production, with its stereotypes and communicative mechanisms, presents clear analogies with those “normalising” operations of which the “invention” of the Alps, with the scientific objectification of their knowledge (De Rossi, 1998; Joutard, 1986), and, before that and in quite different terms, English “landscape gardening” (Gambino, 1989) constitute paradigmatic manifestations. But, paradoxically, it is on the expectations and fears determined by the ‘death’ of the landscape (in the broad meaning attributed to it by Dagognet et al., 1982) that it seems to build its responses.
But the landscape issue, under the impetus of environmentalist criticism, goes further: it lays bare some fundamental contradictions of the development processes that have asserted themselves above all in the second half of this century, their intrinsic and invincible ‘unsustainability’, i.e. the inability to continue over time without irreversibly jeopardising the survival of the heritage of resources that can be passed on to future generations. The erasure of the past, of memories and of natural and cultural heritage, is inevitably associated – in the landscape perspective – with threats to the future.
The critical interpretation of the development processes offered by the landscape paradigm does not imply, per se, any nostalgic vague of a mythical pre-industrial and pre-modern condition, even if the temptation to make the end of ‘beautiful landscapes’ coincide with the advent of industrialisation and the end of the rural world is recurrent (Greppi, 1991) in contemporary debate. It certainly induces one to distance oneself from those ideologies of modernity – more or less connected to the hybris of western culture (Bateson, 1972) – that have impregnated technical, professional and administrative culture, pandering to the unlimited and unconditional development of the processes of ‘domestication’ of the natural world, its progressive transformation into systems entirely dependent on anthropic action and therefore destined, when such action is interrupted, to enter into crisis or collapse. But such criticism is less and less likely to translate into a sterile defence of the status quo, or into the vain pursuit of an ecology illusorily removed from anthropic influence. On the contrary, the landscape paradigm forces us to review the conservation option, understanding it no longer as a limit to development (according to that opposition that had also had a healthy political and cultural contrast function in the 1970s), but as a challenge to innovation, indeed as the elective place of innovation for contemporary society (Gambino, 1997). Landscape conservation is only conceivable in an evolutionary key: as Bateson (1972) already warned, ‘if evolution without conservation is madness, conservation without evolution is death’.
The rethinking of the conservation option that has taken shape in recent years has certainly been stimulated by the tragic relevance of the processes of abandonment that have affected so many European rural landscapes, highlighting the ineffectiveness of purely defensive or obstructive measures against the consequent effects of degradation, destabilisation, disruption and impoverishment. This is what makes the idea of ‘separating things from their becoming’ manifestly unacceptable (Tiezzi, 1998). More generally, it seems evident that the importance assumed by the landscape question is directly linked to the dramatic worsening of environmental conditions, to the intensification and pervasive diffusion of environmental risks and threats. Although the social perception of these risks is still largely inadequate and above all incapable of producing radical turning points in political action, there is no doubt that the political and cultural debate of the last few decades has recorded a growing awareness of the links that link environmental problems to economic and social ones. Many knots have come to the boil: and while on the one hand the fragility and precariousness of current developments denounce their inconsistency with the attitudes and conditions of the environmental contexts in which they manifest themselves, on the other hand there is a growing awareness of the impossibility of ensuring ecosystem stabilisation and the effective defence of environmental specificities in the absence of appropriate forms of economic, social and cultural development, as the World Union for Nature has been warning for some years now (IUCN, 1996). Attempts, still timid and embryonic, to identify new paths of ‘sustainable development’ have generally highlighted complex interweavings of interactions between the economic and social problems of local systems and the requirements of ecological and environmental protection. It is these interweavings that currently constitute the crucial core of the landscape question.
In reality, the landscape paradigm captures the point of convergence of two fundamental orientations emerging at an international level. The extension, on the one hand, of the principle of conservation, from single objects of special relevance (monuments, things of historical or artistic interest, cultural heritage), to broad and complex realities such as historical centres or the ‘historical city’ in the strict sense, to the entire territory, in the globality of its historical and cultural values (Gubbio Charter: Ancsa, 1990). Attention to the landscape is accentuated in direct proportion to this dilation of the field, which progressively overwhelms every spatial frontier and every chronological discriminant, widening the gaze to extra-urban, agricultural and natural territories, and increasingly linking sensitivity for the past to concerns for the future. The extension of the principle of conservation, on the other hand, crosses a no less important orientation, which has taken off within the environmental movements and the culture of nature protection and which has gradually shifted the focus from the problems of protecting individual species or individual sites to those of protecting entire ecosystems and the global territory. The message of the ‘territorialisation’ of environmental policies, which strongly characterised the Rio Conference (UN, 1992) and the subsequent major international meetings, goes in this direction. The challenge that looms is to trigger conservation strategies that can be implemented in the various territorial realities, tackling their economic and social problems, involving local communities and affecting local resource use models and processes. With an admittedly excessive schematisation, it could be observed that while on the one hand heritage conservation policies are urged to leave the entirely man-made ‘built islands’ to invest the entire territory, symmetrically nature conservation policies are urged to leave the ‘natural islands’ to also invest the entire territory. It would certainly be naive to think that this dual orientation has cancelled the bitter bipolarity between nature and culture, between physis and logos, which still constitutes one of the most cumbersome legacies of the modern age and which finds its most conspicuous expression in the opposing stereotypes of the nature park and the historic centre (nature ghettoised in parks, culture in historic centres). And yet on both fronts there are rethinks and innovative experiences going in that direction: Suffice it to think of the new orientations that are emerging in park policies, even in countries such as those in Northern Europe or North America, which, thanks to the abundance of vast and uncontaminated natural spaces, have matured traditions of protection that disregard the stable human presence (and indeed in some cases presuppose the expulsion of all anthropic influence); or, conversely, of the importance that new urban and regional policies in Italy too tend to reserve for the landscape and the natural environment. Under the broad umbrella of ‘sustainability’, in particular of the action programme summarised in Agenda XXI (signed in Rio in 1992), there is now a series of different experiences, from urban ‘greening’, to the revisited ‘greenbelts’ and ‘greenways’, to the reclamation and recovery of vast mining or industrial complexes, to the landscape remodelling of extra-urban territory. And, insofar as this fruitful intersection forces reflection on the dynamic and continuous interaction between ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ processes, the landscape is called into question. Instances of cultural heritage protection and overall ecological safeguarding thus find in the landscape question a basic ground of convergence and confrontation. A confrontation, of course, not devoid of conflict: for example, the protection of biological diversity may, in certain situations, conflict with the protection of the cultural diversity that manifests itself in the landscape (it is no coincidence that in the recent document approved by the EU Ministers, 1998, the objective of protecting and enhancing landscape diversity is placed alongside that of biological diversity and not already included within it).
In the face of this broad confluence of interests, it is not surprising that the “political” relevance of the landscape has found, first in some national legislations, and then also at an international level, formal recognition. The Resolution on the landscape approved in 1998 by the Council of Europe (EC, 1998) leaves no doubt as to the legal consecration of the political-cultural role attributed to the landscape, as “foundation of the cultural and local identity of populations, essential component of the quality of life and expression of the richness and diversity of the cultural, ecological, social and economic heritage”. It is an affirmation that is all the more decisive in that it applies not just to particular landscapes of special “cultural” importance (the resolution does not in fact concern only “cultural landscapes”, if by this expression is meant those landscapes in which anthropic action has been particularly energetic and transformative), but to the entire variegated range of landscape configurations that characterise the European territory. And even more relevant is the European Resolution, if one considers the principle explicitly established according to which the landscape must be systematically taken into account in all urban, territorial, agricultural, social, economic and cultural policies and in other sectoral policies capable of affecting it. We are, as is evident, a long way from those substantially elitist or hedonistic conceptions (the defence of “a few objects for a few users”, as Emiliani put it) that in Italy had also found hospitality in Law 1497 of 1939, in many other respects an important and anticipatory law. But we are also far from those conceptions, reductively flattened on “naturalistic” aspects, that had found expression in the (albeit glorious) traditions of North American “landscape planning”. The political consecration of the landscape therefore inevitably marks the demise of many traditional conceptions and forces scientific reflection and technical elaboration to come to terms with the complexity of the landscape question.
The landscape crossroads
The density and variety of interests converging in the landscape question cannot therefore fail to correspond to the complexity it presents in terms of epistemology. Landscape has always – particularly since the great Humboldtian turn in the middle of the last century – been a place of interdisciplinary convergence, a crossroads of different knowledge, discourses and linguistic games. The appeal to a wide range of different scientific contributions constitutes one of the characterising features of North American ‘landscape planning’, especially starting from the vast programme aimed at ‘designing with nature’ (‘Design with Nature’, McHarg, 1969) developed in the 1960s. Even the Italian experience of landscape planning triggered by Law 431 of 1985, despite the lack of practical results, testifies to the generalised recourse to interdisciplinary and, increasingly, transdisciplinary research for the understanding and treatment of landscape problems. The very seminar referred to here constitutes yet another proof of this, not only for the variety of contributions directly made, but even more so for the variety of those evoked, for the very wide range of thematic areas inevitably touched upon.
But at the same time, the landscape theme is the place of bifurcating paths, the node of origin of different research directions and programmes, the point of tension of different and not infrequently conflicting interpretations and design proposals. This seems inherent to the very character of the landscape theme (“landscape is not a closed circle, but an unfolding”, already for Dardel, 1952). However, it must be noted that different schools, which have been measuring themselves with the theme of landscape for some time, have developed interpretative apparatuses, theories and methods of analysis between which it is often difficult to recognise coherent relationships or even just the possibility of intercommunication. Even before the lack of a shared landscape paradigm, one feels the lack of a common reference system, or of commonly accepted definitions, even in the sphere of experiences linked to the same legislative matrix, such as Italian landscape planning under Law 431/1985 (Gambi, 1986). In the understandable effort of that specialised deepening that allows the frontiers of knowledge to advance, protective fences have often been erected around the various disciplinary areas, which can give the impression of a sort of “allotment” of the landscape: each school takes “its” landscape. Not infrequently, individual schools defend their own vision of landscape as the only valid and credible one, rejecting all contamination and confrontation. Indeed, it is curious to observe that often – even in the course of the seminar presented here – the arguments with which certain theoretical and methodological approaches are combated are the same as those with which they are defended as an alternative to others: see, for example, some of the arguments of the polemic against the “imperialism of the earth sciences” (Quaini, 1998) that are reversed in the polemics against “aestheticising approaches” (Conti, 1997). The risk of reductivism implicit in the “confinement” of landscape research programmes – or the risk, to use Tricart’s (1985) words, of “seeing the trees and losing sight of the forest” – is all too well known on a theoretical level. And yet it must be recognised that dealing with the complexity of the landscape question is extremely difficult as soon as one attempts to go beyond metaphors and statements of principle. What does it mean, in concrete territorial realities, to restore importance to the identity and quality of places, environmental specificities and local cultures or endogenous development processes, with a holistic and comprehensive approach? There are certainly important theories that provide meaningful answers to questions such as these. But is there or is it worth searching for a general theory of landscape, capable of considering all its most important aspects? To what extent can the landscape question be ‘shared’? Under what conditions can the complexity of landscape really be managed with an interdisciplinary approach?
An attempt at an answer can only start from the observation of the pluralism of the disciplinary matrices historically engaged in research and reflection on the landscape: from geography, geology, geomorphology, pedology, ecology, natural sciences, agronomy, economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, semiology, aesthetics, history, art history, architecture, urban planning, territorial analysis and planning… The role of the various matrices has been and is, moreover, very different: essentially oriented towards analysis for some and towards the project for others, it has above all changed in the course of history, including recent history, and has been different in the various cultures. The difference, emphasised by Steiner (1998) between landscape (landshaft, landschap, etc.) and landscape (paysage, pajsage, etc.) also marks a marked difference in the weight assigned to the various disciplinary matrices. A clear prevalence of ecology and the earth sciences in the culture of “landscape”, also due to the importance of the relationship with “land” at the roots of American democracy (Steiner, 1998), which cannot be separated from the profound influence of the myths of nature, which mark the specific origins of American civilisation, pre-existing colonisation (Schama, 1995); a clear prevalence, at least up to a certain date, of geography and the human sciences in the culture of “landscape”. But it is undeniable the hegemonic role assumed, also in the Italian and European experience and especially starting from the 1960s or 1970s, by Landscape Ecology, in which the North American traditions of “landscape planning” also converge (Steiner et al., 1988). Underlying the success of Landscape Ecology is certainly the fact that it has offered an organic and systematic theoretical framework, capable of largely “explaining” landscape phenomenology through objective scientific analysis. The faith in the exact sciences, which had allowed McHarg (taking up the lessons of the Leopolds, the Odums, Angus Hill and Philip Lewis: McHarg, 1966) to polemically advocate “ecological determinism” against the economicist orientations of “planning”, proved successful in the following decades against the confused impressionism of aestheticising approaches, the descriptivism of certain geographical approaches or the planning arbitrariness of “landscape architecture”. It has been able to ally itself with the ideological contestation of the violence implicit in “maitriser la nature” (typically in Marcuse), it has called into question the cultural foundations of the aesthetic manipulation of nature (the “plaisir superbe de forcer la nature”, as Saint Simon said about Versailles), it has effectively countered the “amenagement du territoire” guided by functionalist logics: in Italy, it has given breath to the reaffirmation of the reasons for planning (starting with the environment and landscape) against the tendencies towards wild deregulation, ‘contracted urbanism’ and ‘project-based policies’. What is more, the ecological orientation has strongly emphasised that already mentioned need not to detach landscapes from the real country, landscape texts from their environmental context.
But the systemic vision offered by Landscape Ecology, despite presenting itself as a totalising paradigm (ecology as a global frame of reference), does not seem able to respond on its own to the questions raised by the landscape question, in all its complexity. It leaves in the shadows some key aspects of this question, some dimensions of landscape, whose importance has emerged strongly especially in recent decades, stimulating new methodological approaches and investing other disciplinary matrices.
1) The first dimension to which the debate and research of the 1980s and 1990s drew attention is the socio-economic one. This attention is not in itself in contrast with the theoretical framework of Landscape Ecology, which from C.Troll,1939, to Naveh, Forman, Godron and others, makes explicit reference to the presence and action of man (“no ecosystem can be studied without referring to man”, for McHarg,1981, p.110; and even more explicit words used by Giacomini and Romani, 1982, p.59, affirming the need to “extend the principles of natural resource protection to the most anthropised areas and to increasingly involve humans in nature conservation” (…) “through an integrated process between conservation, restoration of natural expressions and planning of human activities”). On the other hand, there are no ecosystems that are not at least partly modified by human culture (Schama, 1995). However, leaving aside certain environmentalist claims to distinguish landscape from manscape (i.e. the human landscape), it would be difficult to find in most plans and research based on Landscape Ecology that attention to social and productive processes that landscape management in the perspective of sustainable development entails. In this perspective, the terrain to be explored – with more appropriate tools of analysis – is that which concerns that complex interweaving of interactions and reverberations between economic and social dynamics and landscape transformation processes, which constitute the “hard core” of the landscape issue. An interweaving that affects global dynamics: see, for example, the concerns that have emerged at a European level about the disappearance of “small-scale landscapes” – such as “bocages”, “hedgerow landscapes”, our promiscuous crops, etc. – under the impact of modernisation. – under the impact of modernisation and agricultural industrialisation, supported by the same EU policies (Ministry of Housing, the Netherlands, 1989). But the intertwining presents itself in even more acute forms in local dynamics: how can the landscape of the Cinque Terre be defended without agriculture? How to safeguard the landscape diversity of the Alps without maintaining and renewing agricultural and pastoral activities? How can peri-urban landscapes be redeveloped without affecting current patterns of use of space and time? Minimally effective landscape protection seems impossible if the role of man as landscape ‘producer’ is not brought back to the centre and the historically intervening separation between ‘producer’ and ‘inhabitant’ is not addressed. If landscape protection and design are placed in tow of current economic and productive models and their evolutionary tendencies, there is indeed the risk that they will be reduced to a “cosmetic”, decorative action (the “landscaping” stigmatised by Steiner, 1998, as the “bastard” child of landscape architecture), ultimately contributing to the consolidation of those same models and tendencies. The problem is particularly evident in the case of agrarian landscapes, both insofar as they are typically ‘built-up’ landscapes (i.e. shaped by anthropic action according to precise models and programmes of cultivation use, according to the expression Cattaneo used in the middle of the last century), and insofar as they are particularly exposed to structural changes in economic and social scenarios. But the problem is a general one: it is enough to think of tourist areas (where tourism can represent the basic economic activity to pay for maintenance activities and allow the survival of local cultures and, at the same time, the main source of environmental impacts and landscape degradation) or the areas of ancient industrialisation to be recovered and reclaimed: the radical landscape transformation initiated by the IBA in Emscher Park in the heart of the Ruhr has its keystone in the promotion of a complex and articulated set of economic, social and cultural operations.
2) The second dimension of the landscape whose growing importance is being felt concerns historical and cultural aspects. These, too, do not, in principle, entail any reasons for conflict with ecological theory and research, which have long emphasised how much the structure and functioning of ecosystems depend on past events; on the other hand, the ecological perspective itself, in the thinking of scholars such as Bateson or Lorenz, expands to encompass cultural processes as well. However, it is certainly not in the sphere of Landscape Ecology that the most promising theoretical and methodological developments concerning these aspects are to be found, and indeed for some (Romani, 1994) they are to be considered quite extraneous to ecological analysis. The contribution of history and historical geography, on the other hand, has proved to be fundamental, especially in the case of Italy and other European countries, whose landscapes are directly based on the history of habitation and complex processes of acculturation (“memories in which the history of man’s territorial designs is recorded and synthesised”, as Sereni, 1961, put it), regardless of whether man is still present. The excavation of territorial palimpsests using the methods of landscape archaeology (Sereno, 1983) brings to light the deep traits, latent geometries, and transformative rules of landscape texts, while the historical perspective illuminates the underlying processes, that which is unseen and which is often more important than what is immediately graspable with the eye (Gambi, 1961). On the other hand, the cultural significance of landscape – explicitly referred to in the Council of Europe Resolution – goes beyond its own historical reasons. Not only because “even the landscapes that we believe to be most independent of our culture may, on closer observation, turn out instead to be its product”, but also because, more generally, the common landscape tradition “is built on a rich deposit of myths, memories and obsessions” (Schama, 1995). The contributions of cultural anthropology, environmental sociology and humanistic geography, which imply “the definitive overcoming, in European culture, of the traditional opposition between myth and logos” (Quaini, 1992), are, moreover, connected to the founding thought of the geographical landscape, according to which “in order to embrace nature in all its sublime majesty, it is not enough to keep to external phenomena, it is necessary to show how it reverberates within man and how, by virtue of this reflection, it sometimes peoples the caliginous fields of myth with graceful images, and sometimes develops the noble germ of the arts” (Humboldt, 1860, II, p. 2).2). It is then that the cultural significance of landscape is to be grasped in reference not only to the ‘sentina fabularum’ constituted by the opinions and conceptions of the world that precede and orientate exploration and research, but also to the dynamic and continually renewed relationship between research and invention (the New World properly ‘invented’ by von Humboldt within the framework of contemporary cosmography). It is in this broad sense that Simmel’s (1912) thought should also be understood, according to which “landscape is not yet given when things of all kinds spread out, one next to the other, on a piece of land and are seen immediately together”, but is “a real spiritual process that alone transforms all this and produces the landscape”. Or in other words, this is the pregnant meaning of expressions like the one according to which “every landscape is a cultural elaboration of a specific natural environment” (Sereno, 1983), or like the one according to which landscapes are nature adapted by culture (which in turn is human nature modified by technology: Steiner, 1998).
3) This brings us closer to a third dimension of landscape, the semiotic and aesthetic one, which, completely absent from ecological analysis, is perhaps the one on which there has been a livelier awakening of interest in recent years. If the cultural role of landscape – of every landscape, regardless of the quality of its cultural content – is recognised, it is because it is regarded as a process of signification (Barthes, 1985) and, therefore, as a phenomenon of social communication (Eco, 1975). In itself, the recognition of the cultural role and aesthetic function of landscape is certainly not new. In fact, the landscape occupies a prominent place in the history of art (Clark, 1976) and even its most primitive descriptions, such as prehistoric graffiti, have been interpreted as artistic expressions and irreplaceable ‘cultural’ testimonies (Jellicoe, 1987). In Italy in particular, Croce’s assimilation of ‘natural beauty’ to artistic beauty, in the uniqueness of poetic communication, is the basis of the legislation for landscape protection (L. 778/1922, L. 1497/1939) which, with subsequent additions, is still in force today. And also in Great Britain and the United States, especially since the 1970s, interest in the aesthetic values of the landscape (or more precisely the ‘scenic’ or visual ones) has stimulated a vast production of plans and research. On the other hand, the awareness of the irreducibility of aesthetic judgement in the understanding of landscape is part of that “return to aesthetics (towards a science that preserves values)” (Tiezzi, 1998, p.19) that has long since taken on a much broader significance.
But the semiological interpretation of landscape (albeit still “timid and reckless”: Barthes, 1966) demands much more. Indeed, if one recognises the dual foundation – natural and cultural – of the landscape experience, one must also recognise that the sign system constituted by the sensitive substance of the landscape cannot in any way be translated into a “given” set of meanings: landscape semiosis is an always open process (Dematteis, 1998). A process that is all the more open insofar as the transformative dynamics detach signs from their original meanings, progressively widening the ambiguous spaces of the historical plots (Olmo, 1991) on which the landscape experience is built, accentuating the detachment between traces and the project (on the other hand, as Derrida, 1998, quoted in this same volume by Isola, notes, “the trace relates to what we call the future no less than to what we call the past”). The dynamics of things – the ecosphere – is inseparable from the dynamics of meanings – the semiophere – and thus from the social processes in which this is produced (Dematteis, 1998). But, if this is true, then the landscape cannot be the cognitively perfect one (Socco, 1998a) that the earth sciences tend to propose to us. It is a space of open semiosis, not enclosable in the scientific semioses of the various disciplines. Its complexity is manifested, well before in the plurality of its contents, in the irrepressible openness of the processes of signification that it manages to activate, in the multiplicity and unpredictability of its semantic approaches. It is in this dynamic openness that its symbolic and metaphorical functions, its mythical and memorial deposits, its narrative functions and its properly aesthetic functions are located and must be investigated. It is in this direction that some stimulating equations still recently proposed perhaps acquire more precise meaning. Thus, if the landscape is theatre (Turri, 1997), it is not, however, a “given” theatre, with its fixed scenes and immobile backdrops, where only the actors and spectators can change; self-representation, which allows local actors to “distance themselves” from the events represented by becoming spectators of themselves, continually reconstructs the theatre itself, or at least the meaning it takes on for those who participate in various ways in the theatrical action. Thus also, if “landscape is nature that reveals itself aesthetically” (Ritter, 1994), the aesthetic contemplation that allows us to define it (Isola, 1998) cannot be translated either into an autistic and solitary closure (which would isolate the individual experience from the process of signification and its relations with the social processes of the context), or into a preordained and somehow imposed ritual, as in the stereotyped models of tourist fruition.
The meaning of landscape
a. Polysemy and holistic understanding.
The three lines of research mentioned above (to varying degrees represented in the seminar illustrated here) are sufficiently indicative of scientific solicitations that cannot be adequately reflected either, on the one hand, in the more consolidated theoretical matrices and conceptual frameworks, such as that of Landscape Ecology, or, on the other, in the simple broadening of the range of disciplines involved in the landscape question. It is not so much a question of considering a few more aspects, but of rethinking the whole landscape question in more complex terms. If this is true, here is a first partial answer to the question we had posed, whether it is useful and possible to attempt to construct a general theory of landscape, and how else can the complexity of landscape be approached holistically. As things stand, a ‘weak’ yet already very challenging hypothesis can be advanced: that it is possible and appropriate to ‘network’ the various interpretations and seek maximum interaction between the different lines of research, so that they can enrich each other. While this hypothesis makes it possible to respect the pluralism of disciplinary approaches, it also requires that points of intersection and convergence be identified and that the ‘linguistic agreements’ necessary for intercommunication be established. It is interesting to note that, in part, this is precisely what is already being done or attempted in innovative landscape planning experiences: for example, with recourse to “trans-sectoral evaluative grids” that host the confluence and favour the interaction of evaluative analyses carried out within the ambit of the various disciplines (Gambino, 1996, 1997). But here we hypothesise something more and different: the possibility, that is, that the cross-fertilisation of lines of research will retroact on the conceptual apparatuses and interpretative frameworks developed in the various disciplinary fields, so that the various contributions can contribute more effectively to a holistic understanding of the landscape. This hypothesis reflects the idea that there is or may be a common interest in the treatment of the landscape issue; that the landscape assumes or may assume such an overall significance for contemporary society that it invests public responsibility and requires a collective commitment. It is an idea supported by the political consecration decided by the Council of Europe. But what is this significance?
The question is far from trivial, since there is no agreement between or even within the various disciplines as to what the term landscape (or the quasi-equivalent English term) should mean. In the course of the seminar, some of the many definitions proposed by the various schools were recalled, which it is not the case here to recall. However, there seems to be a broad convergence in recognising that, even beyond the theoretical cages still used today, the landscape experience has a dual foundation – natural and cultural – and that in the landscape the ecosphere and semiosphere (Dematteis), or geosphere-biosphere and noosphere-gnosphere (Calzolari) inevitably intersect. This recognition does not mitigate and indeed accentuates the ambiguities and interpretative tensions inherent in the very concept of landscape.
b. Subjectivity and objectivity
First of all, one cannot ignore its intrinsic ambiguity (what Farinelli, 1991, calls its “wit”), its allusion to both a piece of land and its representation, to things and their image, to “res extensa” and “res cogitans”. It is an ambiguity that should not be confused with the semantic uncertainties of the term, and which appears useful and fertile (Gambino, 1994a) precisely because it keeps the meaning of landscape open and metaphorical, rejecting the objectifying seductions of the sciences of the earth and of a certain historicism, without claiming regression to pure aestheticising visualism or ascientific impressionism. It draws attention to the relationships between real processes and the processes of perception and representation, with uncovered references to the mechanisms of “bisociation” studied by Koestler, 1964 (the irony of Don Quixote, founded on the endemic double meaning and the continuous confrontation of reality and fantasy), to the poetic transpositions of landscape painting up to the artifices of the “Claude-glass” used in the 18th century (Schama, 1995) and Magritte’s trompe l’oeil.
But it is precisely this ambiguity that forces one to confront the ineliminable tension between the subjectivity and objectivity of landscape. The dualism country/landscape or place/representation (Dagognet, 1982) inevitably recalls this tension, which challenges the certainties and anxieties of objectification of the scientific approach and which manifests itself on several levels. Naturally, it is the very objectivity of scientific observation that must be questioned, in this as in other fields of analysis. The idea that the landscape can constitute the motionless and inert object of a neutral and disinterested observer, capable of grasping its essence with absolute objectivity, has been and is undoubtedly useful in politically and legally legitimising protective action. As will be recalled, the re-cognitive character of the value attributions made with the landscape planning that developed in Italy after Law 431/1985 clearly distinguished them from the conformative constraints deriving from traditional urban planning choices, also from the point of view of the non-indemnifiable nature of the protection constraints. But it is an idea that is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the evolution of contemporary scientific thought, with the growing awareness of the intrinsic fluidity and provisionality of every cognitive advancement and the inevitable dependence of every evaluative judgement on the pre-judgments of the observer and the preference systems of the social context. One can debate whether, as has been observed (Todorov, 1990) the crumbling of certainties and loss of innocence of scientific knowledge reflects the clash between the ‘monologues’ of the natural sciences and the ‘dialogical principle’ of the social sciences. But more specifically, many doubts can be raised about the possible autonomy of scientific observation in the face of the very nature of landscape experience. The idea that there can be scientific knowledge somehow separate and different from the various forms of landscape experience and knowledge seems to imply an extremely reductive conception of the meaning of landscape for contemporary society. Reduced to an objectifiable and neutrally quantifiable reality, landscape would lose its primary meaning as an “interactive process, a cross-observation between ideas and materiality” (Bertrand, 1998). A symbolic mediation between society and territory, landscape links historical consciousness and collective memories to expectations and projects of change in social space. “In this sense, the landscape is the privileged place of a reflection tending to include in the same problematic different modes of knowledge, aesthetic, scientific, ordinary” (Mondada et al.,1992).
c. Hypertextuality and common sense
This consideration leads one to shift attention from the subjectivity inherent in disinterested scientific observation to that inherent in the user, directly engaged in the landscape experience. This is a theme on which a conspicuous cloud of questions seems to gather, closely linked to the peculiarities of this experience. To the fact, certainly, that it is a multi-sensorial experience: if it is true that the visual landscape dominates and “visuality is the most important means by which people interact with their surroundings” (Steiner, 1998, quoting Tuan, 1974, according to whom we are essentially visual animals), recent studies on the soundscape attest to the fundamental role it played in ancient times in systems of social intercommunication (Giametta et al., 1998; Anzani, 1993). But what counts above all is the fact that the landscape surrounds the user, forces him to participate, compels him to an active perception (Zube et al., 1982), obliges him to choose continuously (fruition as a journey, or as navigation): to choose at least the point of view, which is indispensable for the landscape to exist (Caprettini, 1998), when not even “constitutive” (as in the great seascapes of the Dutch realistic landscape of the 17th century: Clark, 1976). And it is precisely this intrinsic freedom of the landscape experience, this dependence of fruition on the user’s choices, this multidirectionality of reading favoured by the “extraordinary co-presence of textual data, stories, documents, drifts, biographies of repertoires” (Pavia, 1996) that looms in the post-modern perspective, in short, this “hypertextuality” implicit in every landscape text (Cassatella, 1998), seems to take the subjectivity of this experience to its extreme consequences, seems to prefigure its radical irreversible atomisation. Nomadism and uprooting would characterise the solitary navigation of each single user, subtracted from any rule of concordance and intercomprehensibility, always totally “alienating”: a logic perfectly corresponding to that which guides the representations offered by GIS, devoid, unlike traditional maps, of centre and pre-established points of view, capable of describing a totally deterritorialised “space of flows”. But can the landscape really disperse into an incoherent myriad of individual experiences? Would such an atomised landscape still ‘make sense’? Or would this not be precisely the heralded ‘death of landscape’? Can the landscape renounce any ‘principle of order’, if even its aesthetic function, as a privileged form of social communication, responds anthropologically to a tendency towards order and ‘poignancy’ (Eibl-Eibesfeldt,1994), if its very ‘legibility’ presupposes the inscription of a code in the materiality of places?
The hypertextuality implicit in the landscapes of post-modernity does not impose a resigned acceptance of every loss of meaning. On the contrary, one may consider that the landscape is called upon today more than ever to perform that essential function of “orientation” that Lynch (1971) had already highlighted. If it is true that the landscape is an obligatory passage for the understanding of the world, perhaps its role consists precisely in manifesting that “concordance” that ensures 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 said” (Merleau Ponty, 1993, cited in Dematteis, 1998). The plurality, openness and unpredictability of the meanings offered by landscape texts do not prevent us from grasping, as Dematteis points out, a “common sense” of the landscape (or rather of the “proto-landscape”, to follow Berque, 1995), which “creates a silent and latent link between each individual and social group and the rest of humankind and its geographical environments”, a potentially global sense of belonging (“global sense of place”: Massey, 1993, cited in Dematteis, 1998) that effectively opposes the homologising trends underway.
d. Identity and otherness
It is from this common sense, however difficult to specify, that we should perhaps start to address another fundamental tension in landscape experience, that between identity and otherness, diversity and interculturality. In landscape research and planning in recent decades, the theme of identity occupies a prominent place. It evokes attention to local geomorphological and ecological peculiarities (also in terms of biodiversity), to historical, aesthetic and cultural specificities (the ‘statute of places’), to the systems of relations that locally bind certain groups or communities to the territories in which they live or carry out their activities. Rightly or wrongly, the landscape has been understood as a space of identity, called upon to play a role of defensive aggregation and countering transformative trends and heterodirected development processes that erode the roots, memories and very recognisability of local communities. Under the broad banner of sustainable development, the valorisation of local landscape identities has been welded to attempts to consolidate, revive or promote local economic systems capable of beating the paths of endogenous and self-organised development. The contrast between the visions and interests of insiders and outsiders – already well argued in historical perspective by Cosgrove, 1984 – has thus taken on a strong political, economic and socio-cultural emphasis. There has been no lack of evidence of this in tourism marketing (with the instrumental use of landscape stereotypes), as well as in urban and territorial marketing (in the context of enhancing symbolic capital and environmental appeal). Nor can it be denied that the strenuous defence of one’s own diversity and systems of belonging, against the suppressing violence of globalising tendencies, can feed the spirit of exclusion, localist closures (the ‘drawbridges’ that are lowered at night to protect certain North American communities from possible ‘incursions’), the call for new forms of violence (Isola, 1998), as is tragically evident in the ‘armed identities’ (Remotti, 1996) that manifest themselves on the international scene. But, more generally, it is necessary to articulate the theme of identity more comprehensively. At the centre of attention is the intriguing relationship between identity and otherness, and thus between the places where identity is grasped and the networks along which otherness is encountered. Identity is constituted on diversity and therefore presupposes otherness (Castelnovi, 1998; Remotti, 1996); and, just as identity and otherness seem to represent two complementary and mutually irreducible polarities of landscape experience, places and networks seem to be linked by an indissoluble complementarity (Gambino, 1994b). This complementarity is at the basis of any possible attempt to articulate landscape texts, in particular to recognise ‘landscape units’, distinguishable from one another precisely because they have their own identity and internal cohesion. In the studies for the Valle d’Aosta Territorial Landscape Plan or in those for the Euganean Hills Park Plan, landscape units are defined as areas characterised by specific systems of relations (ecological, functional, historical, cultural and perceptive) between heterogeneous components, which give them a recognisable identity that distinguishes them from the context. The recognition of identity is based on the experience of the elsewhere and the different (Telaretti, 1997), just as the appreciation of diversity presupposes the ability to read, recognise and thus distinguish different identities. Inversely, feelings of identity and belonging detached from sensitivity to diversity lead to nostalgic and regressive closures and exclusionary behaviour, just as the search for the elsewhere and the different, detached from attention to specific and local identities, leads to homologation and repressive colonisation, based on the virtualisation of the landscape experience (the landscapes invented by tourism marketing are “illusory landscapes, traversed, not inhabited”: Raffestin, 1998). But this implies that:
- the problem of identity does not only concern insiders, inhabitants or local actors, but also outsiders, observers and ‘landscape users’, insofar as they are engaged in the experience of the different (as is typically the case with tourism);
- the landscape experience is subject to significant changes, to the extent that the growth of mobility and opportunities for communication, exchange and confrontation reduces or undermines territorial rootedness and transforms local inhabitants and actors themselves into ‘landscape users’, into ‘tourists at home’.
There is no doubt that “in the face of the flood wave of a tourism that is totally indifferent to signs and values”, the central role of the local inhabitant-producer in the construction and maintenance of the landscape must be jealously defended (Quaini, 1998); this defence is indeed even more important if we take into account the overall economic and social dimension of the landscape question, recalled in section 2.2. But it is also true that the defence of identity features cannot be thought of as a private affair of local people, but as a wider responsibility that concerns anyone who can take care of them (the “care-takers”: Poli, 1998) and in particular those who approach them with full awareness of their distinctive value (Castelnovi, 1998). The dispute that a few years ago pitted Messner, who on behalf of Mountain Wilderness, hanging from the ropes of the glacier cableway, demanded better protection of Mont Blanc, against the President of the Valle d’Aosta Region, who claimed it belonged to the local communities, is sufficiently emblematic. The growing importance accorded to the experience of travelling and crossing in the fruition of the landscape is also justified, as long as one does not forget the primordial meaning of the journey, as the discovery and knowledge of places and cultural realities endowed with their own specific identity: Kundera’s metaphorical distinction between the chemin, which invites one to stop, and the route, which invites one to move, is valid here (Quaini, 1998). It is in this sense that, in the wake of the profound changes in the modalities of contemporary living, the landscape – like the mirror reality, the city – seems destined increasingly to qualify as the space of interculturality (Castelnovi, 1998), of confrontation and contamination, of conflict and mutual enrichment.
What projects for the landscape?
The demand for the landscape that is felt in contemporary society is not only the result of nostalgia and mistrust in the future, but reflects, albeit amidst many contradictions, the need to regain contact with places and to ‘re-inhabit the land’, rediscovering its identity values (natural and cultural), respecting and enhancing its diversity. Despite the variety of interests, sensitivities and cultural attitudes, a widely shared concern seems to be maturing regarding the processes of degradation and transformation that counteract that need: a concern that invests public responsibilities in land management and planning, which are required to start from the explicit recognition of these values. Scientific analysis and landscape planning have therefore assumed this fundamental re-cognitive function. But, as noted, there is no such thing as a neutral and truly objective reconnaissance, every evaluative judgement reflects pre-judgments, intentions and preferences, it conceals a project. This is particularly true for landscape, which urges the user to an active perception and expresses, at the same time, an intentional order, albeit readable and fungible in a plurality of ways. The idea-knowledge-interpretation-judgement-design cycle (Calzolari, 1998) is continuously traversed in both directions. There is a design dimension from which no landscape experience can really be separated. There is no landscape without a project (Bertrand, 1998).
But, if it is true that the landscape is never “given”, because its meaning and values are defined in the present, according to the fears, expectations and intentions of its social context; if it is true that there is no “genius loci” truly independent of the way in which places are seen and considered by their possible inhabitants-users; if it is true that “the happiness we can draw from our places, we must be the ones to place it in them” (Isola, 1998); what is the concrete role of the project? A paradoxical dilemma seems to imprison the landscape project: the more effectively it interprets the landscape’s spaces of freedom and creativity, striving to make sense of its systems of signs and redirect the processes that animate it, the more it runs the risk of stiffening the landscape experience in a prefigured order, of anticipating the unpredictable and unexpected, of fixing what cannot be fixed, of closing a discourse that must remain open, or even of saying the unspeakable, violating its mystery. Of course, a landscape is not a garden. But the dilemma does not only concern the semiotic, aesthetic or cultural dimension of the landscape: it, on closer inspection, recurs in the ecological dimension and in the economic and social dimension (how to trigger innovative processes in local systems, discounting the autonomy and unpredictability of their reactions to external stimuli?). Nor can the dilemma be dispelled by taking refuge in the perennial sacredness of its constitutive essence, since the sacred and the arcane also manifest themselves in the actuality of contemporary culture.
In order to get out of the dilemma of design, it is necessary to rethink its role in the entire cycle of landscape production and use, starting from the observation that an effective assumption of design responsibility (which in particular rejects the resignation of “leaving things as they are” and the imbecile relativism whereby “everything is the same”, as Isola warns) is not obliged to translate into planning arrogance or technocratic violence. On the contrary, the responsibility of restoring sense and quality to living spaces and reorienting the processes by which the land becomes territory entails the ability to re-learn how to “contextualise” planning action, to grasp and measure its impact on complex dynamics, which – as daily experience shows – can increasingly take on destructive or downright catastrophic characteristics. Humility with respect to that “something infinitely more extensive and fluctuating” (Simmel, 1912), which continually intertwines with the specific realities on which the project focuses, humility with respect to time (of the long times of nature), does not reduce but rather accentuates the responsibilities of the project: it does not force one to undergo environmental determinism, but induces one to design “with nature” as McHarg asked, or, more understandably, to “collaborate with the earth and with time”, to use the beautiful expression that M. Yourcenar puts into the mouth of M. McHarg’s “The Earth and Time”.Yourcenar puts in Hadrian’s mouth. A greater historical awareness and a greater environmental awareness are necessary today if we want to prevent the ‘Promethean impetus’ that (according to the confident image of Gottmann, 1970) has fuelled the urban adventure over the centuries, from corroding the territories in which we live and destroying the planet.
This difficult conjugation of courage and humility certainly shifts the hermeneutic relationship of the project with “understanding”, and accentuates the role of “foundational descriptions” and “identity narratives” in orienting planning processes (Quaini, 1998) on the basis of the expectations and collective projects that mature locally. In the most recent experience of landscape planning, it is easy to see that the weakening of the “normative” function corresponds to the emphasis on the rhetorical and argumentative function, on the role that oriented descriptions, evaluative analyses, and the same project images can play in social communication and, in particular, in identity aggregation processes. The idea seems to be spreading that the strength of the landscape project does not reside in its “vis cogendi” – even if it cannot shirk a regulatory function that is nowadays clamoured for by the economic operators themselves – but in its capacity to animate and orientate social confrontation, to stimulate interests, to highlight the stakes, the synergies that can be activated and the foreseeable outcomes of possible choices.
Even more so than urban and territorial planning, landscape planning necessarily seems to be part of that dialogical and cooperative perspective, in which different actors and institutions are called upon to collaborate, which has been attracting international attention for some years now and is also advocated by the conservationist front (Iucn, 1996). But the crucial issue concerns the relationship of the landscape project with the overall planning and governance processes of the territory: in other words, the “specific” role of the landscape project. Its “diversity”, supported with conviction by quite a few scholars (Maniglio Calcagno, 1998), seems to find theoretical recognition within the broad framework of Landscape Ecology. And indeed the comparison of landscape projects with current design practices concerning the city and the territory highlights significant differences, especially in two key aspects: the greater weight given to evaluative analyses and the importance of interdisciplinary work. This justifies reluctance and perplexity towards methodological proposals and institutional approaches (such as, for example, in Italy certain reform proposals tending to totally reabsorb landscape and environmental issues into all-encompassing urban and territorial plans), in which the landscape project risks becoming “one” of the contents of urban and territorial planning. And yet it is clear, in the light of all that has been said above, that the landscape issue cannot be effectively addressed simply by “flanking” current planning practices with the landscape project, autonomously conceived and managed. In order for the landscape to truly constitute a “design resource”, it is necessary that the landscape paradigm fertilises, crossing them at all levels, precisely the current design practices (Dematteis, 1998). In this sense, to distinguish the landscape project from the architectural project (in the strict sense of the term) may be misleading, and may lead to the reductive visions of the landscape that have been repeatedly contested during this seminar. The fruitfulness of the landscape paradigm, for the purposes of promoting a better quality of living, is not so much expressed in the construction of autonomous and separate projects, but rather in the explicit comparison of value options, objectives and interests on which strategies of continuous transformation of the territory are defined.
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