The useful landscape: Strategies in times of crisis for better living always – Introductory report
Paolo Castelnovi
architect, Ligurian, conference organiser and landscapefor.eu website
Let us not ask what the landscape does for us, let us ask what we can do for the landscape.
This is how we declined the Kennedy motto at the end of the last century. Outrage at the banal transformation of landscapes that we believed to be eternal was generating the climate from which the European Convention later emerged. Since then we have become accustomed to considering the quality of the landscape an end, its protection almost belonging to ethics; we have worked to bring to light the value of landscapes, reading them as durable goods, to be defended beyond contingencies.
But what is the landscape good for?
We did not ask ourselves: it seemed so obvious to defend a public and identity asset that we ended up taking its role in the socio-cultural system for granted. We did not characterise the landscape for its usefulness, so that it would be recognised by everyone as an interesting tool for improving our being in the world.
It is also because of this self-referentiality that landscape has remained a niche topic, explored by enthusiasts, but rather foreign to militant politics: it is therefore never considered of primary importance in the agendas of decision-makers and in common perception, as is sometimes the case for environmental issues.
Today, needs are radically changing and desires are confused, shattered into a thousand individual situations. The socio-economic context is increasingly incapable of giving satisfactory guidance to those who are growing or want to change. The policies practised so far seem dull in the face of the loss of common feeling, under the pressure of a development model based on imbalances, to which unfortunately we have all become accustomed. When this dead-end model comes into crisis, glimmers are offered for an alternative design: for those who care about the common good, it becomes urgent to recognise generally shareable resources, which can form the basis of a new framework of democratic instruments, useful for our lasting well-being.
The sense of landscape appears to us as one of the widespread resources, particularly important for its potential ability to unite around an awareness of a common good.
In the governance of a territory or a city, or of cultural or environmental assets, there are now numerous cases of practices that prove capable of improving the operational efficiency of interventions, the socio-economic effectiveness of projects and their long-term management. But these particular, virtuous cases only take on exemplary, politically useful value if the specific interventions succeed in reverberating a general effect that can spread and have concrete effects in economies, whether local or networked.
It is a matter of finding the necessary space and time for the effects of specific experiments and initiatives to grow: a welcoming cultural habitat. Cultural milieus with a strong overall sense of landscape can constitute that kind of milieu, a ‘common place’, in which projects and interventions can be evaluated with conscious and shared criteria, historically available to each local community.
The consideration of the shared landscape as a common good is a fundamental stimulus and motive for taking part in projects that have a positive impact on the territory, for managing ‘gentle’ transformative processes over time: long, slow but also resilient, inclusive and little attacked by passing ideologies.
But in order to induce this perspective, the idea of landscape care must go up a slope, come out of the socio-cultural isolation that makes it a hobby for the elite. We must free ourselves from an image that is only monopolised by the protection of material aspects and the placing of restrictions on buildings in changing contexts. Instead, emphasis and authority must be given to the practical, positive and universally readable effects of strategic initiatives based on a common sense of landscape. And it is precisely those who consider the preservation of lasting values to be fundamental that must feel more motivated to increase the use of the sense of landscape as a strategic tool for the active practices of democracy, with economic and social weight.
In short, after having done the best we knew for the landscape, the time has come to make it clear what the landscape can do for us: let us empower the useful landscape.
Here, today, we begin by being told what landscape can be useful for: by those who manage the environment, agriculture and innovative production activities, cultural goods and activities, tourism and the local economy, and the maintenance of cities and urban edges. Not only that, but we will be told that a good idea of the landscape serves, and how much, to rethink both the teaching and the practice of designing public space, or the very criteria of participation, evaluation and financing of enterprises that aspire to quality: cultural, environmental and social. In short, let us be told what landscape is good for in politics. The one that is needed.
The right to the pleasure of living
Assessing the sense of landscape as a primary resource, of primary utility in the processes of economic land management, is not an act of faith or hope, but rests on an overall consideration of the socio-cultural processes in which we are immersed.
In the crisis, the catastrophic trend of consumerism frightens us in its terrible and powerful banality. We finally realise that there is no future for a social system that rests on a single impulse: to have access to a market that offers endless objects and services, without taking into account whether this offer responds to actual needs and desires. In the crisis, we become aware of the dictatorship of an increasingly less free market, dominated by an abstract, opaque and intangible capitalism, which in order to grow generates the waste and relocation of large quantities of resources, in a violent competition in search of the lowest price, hiding the social and environmental impact of real costs. We realise that we have gone along with this dynamic, that we have not resisted a model of competitive behaviour that this dynamic perpetuates, that isolates individuals and families, that shatters systems of consolidated social relations and disperses habits of encounter and exchange, those that the city traditionally nurtured.
But the city, which until yesterday exalted us to be the place of complexity, where diversity and innovation were metabolised, where serendipity made novelty and the very idea of the free market attractive, now, like the ‘free’ market, oppresses and frightens us, seems to obey pressures we do not understand, to close spaces we thought were now ours. We no longer see the opportunities for which our grandparents had moved from the countryside: it is as if we had lost the instructions for how to use innovative processes. As if we had fallen off the wave that people had ridden for three generations: now the transformations frighten us.
Thus, as the sense of indefinite ‘progress’ on which the democracy of the last two centuries has been founded blurs, when the perversity of the ‘implicit project’ in globalisation and the abstract market comes to the surface, it is spontaneous that, by contrast, we seek new ways, new balances.
That is why a daring fraction of young people take to the web in search of a new world. They are the new proletarians, who definitively detach their enterprises from the socio-cultural context in which they grew up (thinking that they are just chains) and, just as 100 years ago people went to the city and the factory, migrate to an immaterial and immemorial space, where they can recreate their identity and relationships.
But for everyone else, the web risks increasing the sense of bewilderment, of permanently wrecking them in an increasingly unrecognisable, liquid and multicultural magma of relationships. In the post-rural and post-industrial vacuum of environments that foster constructive relationships and develop a basic political culture, it is natural for men of goodwill to find the only situation suitable for meaningful action in the territory in which one lives. It is instinctive to turn to the ‘hard core’ of each community’s political heritage and social capital. Even if the reference to social capital is no longer in the form for which the term was coined [1] , in any case the resources from which to start are sought in the concrete and effective relations present on the local scale, those that are best known to be used for new cultural and economic enterprises.
It is in places perceived as ‘proper’, known affectively, that one finds the only opportunity to make one’s mark, to characterise long-lasting networks of knowledge and opinions, which existed before and will last after. Only there does it seem that collective projects acquire an inertia that makes them endure over time and one can be reassured about one’s children.
In our regions, a generation of experiments is gaining strength and spreading, disparate but seemingly united by a similar direction: to give space and time back to the values of the polis, in the historically sedimented sense of the term, in which both the social and aggregative value and the local dimension participate.
In these experiments, a sense of collective identity is being reconstructed that almost always develops from the specific situation that old and new inhabitants, whether indigenous, city(or land)-user or migrant, find themselves sharing.
We start, however, from a place or a network large enough to constitute itself as a container of diverse and unforeseen relations, but contained enough to make it possible to catalyse the available resources without having large forces and investments at the outset: we begin with small towns, metropolitan edges, inhabited countryside. Lands that are now home to uncertain and dispersed peoples, torn between nostalgia and frustration, who are seeking new identities, to satisfy a need for security for the future that until a few years ago was historically provided by the territory.
Only by tracing its fundamental characteristics can we understand its profound objectives and lend a hand to this type of ‘territorial’ action, which we consider epochal, but which is in its infancy fragile and in need of care:
A. Fear of the new and the myth of the enduring.
In the meantime, one almost always moves from a reaction, which only as it evolves does it become a project. The reaction to novelty is also the basis for the growing success of localist ideologies that play on the fear of the coexistence ‘at home’ of cultural and behavioural diversity. The consideration of diversity as an enemy, at most as a subject to be exploited, rests on a kind of egoic regression, in which it seems possible to survive in the long run by pretending not to change anything, limiting all endeavours to circumscribed interests as long as they can be controlled and implemented with the economic and socio-cultural mechanisms one is already familiar with.
But the purely reactionary attitude prevails only at times and does damage only for a few years, until the success of some project proves that overcoming that short-sightedness pays off, that in a globalised system it is not convenient to confine oneself, that to be on a lasting good footing one must be capable of metabolising novelties in that fertile set of relations, favoured by proximity and spatial interference, that we call local territory. By now, there are a thousand cases founded precisely on the most structural, deep-rooted local relationships, which show themselves capable of integrating indigenous and known factors with different capacities, imported from outside, to constitute the basic laboratory of innovations for better living, for a non-nostalgic future.
It is the widespread practices, even before the politically elaborated strategies, that signal the emergence of a new vitality at the local level. These are project behaviours, by small groups, often responding to immaterial needs or basic entrepreneurship, which first address simple consumer needs and requirements and gradually focus on new instruments of collective action, economic but not only, often directly aimed at the quality of life and, in the end, the pursuit of happiness.
B. From work to resource use.
In the twentieth century, these fundamental relations of civilised living found a ‘common place’ in work, but workers’ struggles were progressively reduced to the search for a secure occupation, desired only because of its correspondence with an income and not because work is itself a place of quality of life. On the other hand, the global overabundance of production devalues the driving force of the industrial economy, and makes it clear, even in a general view of development, that wage labour, indifferent to the products and services it produces, is not the main instrument for the quality of social life and the pursuit of personal happiness.
Today, the vital energies of those in search of a better quality of social life are increasingly directed towards giving voice and organisation to citizens as users (also, but not only, consumers). Also in these cases, as in the case of work-based actions, the initial driving force appears to be strictly economic, but from the outset, quantitative objectives are flanked by qualitative, often immaterial values. And in any case, outside the universe of work, measuring the use of resources, reasons for radical criticism of the dominant economic model are more likely to emerge.
C. The cultural quality of resource use.
We realise that the criteria of judgement for the economic choices of users and consumers, are only to a small extent accounting: cultural, pre-economic behaviour prevails. And all too late we realise the importance of culture for the consumer economy: it is precisely television and the web, planetary instruments of dissemination and persuasion, that give strength and inertia to the trend of deterritorialisation and globalisation.
But in the crisis, the cultural and power bloc synthesised in the dominance of the Gross Product as an indicator of development is cracked, and Quality or subjective Wellbeing is rediscovered within the framework of reference values.
By introducing well-being in comparison with an income indicator, a fundamental contradiction emerges: perhaps in the personal dimension the availability of income allows a feeling of well-being, with unlimited access to resources, but in the collective dimension, that availability alone does not create the conditions for the well-being of a community. Income or rents are an important but not sufficient factor for collective well-being and, above a certain threshold, are not even necessary.
Above a minimum threshold, other aspects of the overall economic system are shown to be more correlated with the rate of ‘widespread happiness’: for example, a consolidated and utilised social capital, which forms safety and solidarity networks in which the young grow, or a widespread capacity to enjoy cultural resources and historical memory, or a productive structure and uses in a balanced relationship with the environmental habitat.
These seem to be the factors that most affect the psychophysical health of daily life, generating the ‘fundamentals’ of the rate of perceived satisfaction of needs: they constitute that economic and cultural value that we call the ‘pleasure of living’.
D. Regaining a right to freedom.
The twentieth century, despite the tragedies that mark it, is certainly the century of the rediscovery of certain fundamental pleasures, brought to the right of individual freedom in the nascent democracies and the basis of the growing economies: from clothing to food, from sexual relations to access to information and communication, to culture, to mobility in the land.[2]
But the trend of quality of life in relation to housing has gone into reverse: it is not a question of freedom when cities lose all identity and quality of public space and when billions of people move from the countryside to urbanised, unlivable areas in three generations. And it is not a question of poverty: in this historical phase, the pleasure of living is one of the most neglected values even by the rich.
Society (primarily western society) does not invest in the quality of the land where it spends most of its time; on the contrary, it increasingly deteriorates it. With our development model we pollute our capital cities and live barricaded in private spaces being afraid of public space (everything that had been the driving force behind the leap forward of Western civilisation itself), we destroy our memories and the balanced relationship with nature that the rural era had guaranteed us.
In short, as no bird does, we shit in our own nest.
But there is worse: in a paradoxical way, we attribute to that nest, which we deteriorate every day, a very high exchange value. We lock the entire economy of the western world around the market value of houses and cities that we ourselves participate in devaluing, that we will not be able to maintain because they are environmentally unsustainable, that we will not want to maintain because they are ugly, because we do not recognise ourselves in them. When we wake up, we will look at all this as one looks at the tyrannical idol of a lost civilisation: one cannot help but think ‘how crazy they were to get lost behind this malevolent object, which they themselves constructed’.
This aporia of the value system in our development model cannot be reformed with adjustments: the lack of social, cultural and economic investment in enjoyable living causes a structural imbalance, a contradiction only matched by the selfishness of generations that unsustainably consume resources and do not have children for fear of handing them a worse world.
Those who realise these perverse dynamics and have the courage not to lose themselves in lamentations and to seek solutions with cheerfulness and goodwill can gather their projects on the ground in a slogan:
We claim the right to the pleasure of living
In its radical simplicity, this Euro-Mediterranean declination of the American Declaration of Independence’s Right to Happiness traces innovative directions starting from deep, sedimented values, which the current system of references has neglected or even repressed, chained as it is to the obsessive production-consumption pair.
E. Working to enjoy and make people enjoy the land.
In short, in order to resist the negative effects of a global process, which invests the world with an extraordinary wave of deterritorialisation and waste of resources, we find ourselves giving political and existential depth to a contemporary version of that ‘building that cultivates, and cultivating that which grows’, of ‘taking care of the things around us, of the contexts’ (historical and geographical) in which we live, which for Heidegger is the meaning of dwelling.
If we avoid the easy echoes of these words, which reduce the condition of dwelling to an introverted relationship between rural places and permanent inhabitants, a legacy of the 19th-20th century Heimat, we can read a more general tension that also applies to our urban and multicultural world.
In fact, even in our boundless urbanised regions, the determination of small but widespread groups to cultivate the progressions of their own needs, to base projects on the conscious use of available resources, to rely for the management of projects on the ‘accountability’ that can only be counted on in a known context, with the permanent involvement of many, is now tangible.
All in all, one can read the outline of a political and social process that favours the new territorialisation of goodwill projects, which respond to a profound demand for the quality of living, which is largely unsatisfied. This perspective makes it possible to experiment with new economic balances, starting from agriculture, from receptivity, from innovative services to individuals and businesses, from products for living with lower costs and better performance, almost always reducing the monetary values at stake in favour of values that cannot be monetised, but are nevertheless enjoyable in terms of quality of life.
It necessarily starts with a cultural and psychological enterprise, both as users and as producers: it is indeed an enterprise to discover the pleasure of living in our time, when work and non-work are always intertwined and qualify or humiliate each other, and in our space, where complexity and interactions prevail, and conflicts and potentialities are thickened in the same places.
The first step in that undertaking is the revision of one’s behaviour, economic and otherwise, which today is sedimented in such a way as to reduce sensitivity in favour of routines, to prevent any enjoyable novelty in order to free up time and places, to adopt the same cowardly technique that is adopted for the pleasure of living: relocation to more convenient shores. The first realisation of our masochism comes on a Friday afternoon in spring, when we ask ourselves what is the point of getting into our cars to queue up on the roads to the Rivieras, to get away from where we live.
But it is not all in the behaviour: the pleasure of living, of which in Italy we have been masters, has always manifested itself in dedicated spaces and times, in ways of treating the territory, houses, meeting places that instruct on a pleasant, open, non-hierarchical use of public places, on a construction of the bellavista that on the one hand offers itself to the visitor but on the other generates the nostalgia that brings the traveller back home. It is the landscape, a concrete form that induces territorial behaviour.
In these concrete, landscape terms, the pleasure of living requires a quality standard of the same order as that functional standard we called ‘urban services’ 50 years ago, when the need for public functional endowments was evident in cities. Even for the ‘landscape standard’, which Italy produced spontaneously for centuries, today new investment strategies, cost and revenue allocations, service production methods and consequent economies must be invented. One responds to a demand that opens up a market of the same order as that generated by the city’s demand for functional services, which was the cornerstone of Europe’s post-war urban development, one of the pillars of an economic boom that lasted over 60 years. The financial capacity for investment, now as then, can be obtained by eroding at least part of the property rents that have so far grown on land and landscape resources, without contributing to their reproduction.
It is clear that the pleasures that make up this demand for landscape are not only those enjoyed with personal hedonism, but are also those linked to the satisfaction of reaping the results of one’s own project, of verifying day by day the outcomes of the realisations, and of seeing the appreciation of others who enjoy them.
Here the importance of work returns, but now as an agent for the pleasure of living. It is not just any work, but dedicated to a project, in a system of resources that feel trustworthy because of their own territory, inserted in a network of complex relations, not only economic and certainly not only monetary. In these terms, a series of territorial studies have long highlighted the importance of the synergic relationship between the individual entrepreneurial project and a welcoming milieu that acts as a habitat for its growth.[3]
Adding attractiveness to this type of useful work for the territory is the sense of common good: one does not work only to produce goods to be consumed individually, but to enhance something that can be enjoyed generally and openly, by oneself and those one cares about. Those who participate in the qualification of the landscape know that it is a product of all for all, and this statutorily assigns it an ethical value, which goes beyond any commercialisation. This overcomes the frustrating block of anonymity and subjugation, which forces the industrial worker when he does not know the users of his product, or verifies that he cannot afford it, or is even aware that it is harmful or evil.
In addition, and this is not insignificant, the product that can be enjoyed in its own territory has a fundamental communicative property: it can be seen, the change it produces can be physically perceived, it can be talked about. It is therefore a piece of the polis, to be discussed politically. In short, the work for the pleasure of living is itself one of the pleasures of living if it is not subterranean, if it participates in giving form to things and spaces, because it is from a shared form that one is able to communicate the common good, the res publica.
This form and its awareness is what we call landscape.
Landscape: political and economic instrument for the pleasure of living
The sense of landscape is a primary resource, particularly widespread in our communities that are heirs to a rural or free city history, but, like many primary resources (from water to fertile soil to oral or material culture), it has often been trampled upon and neglected for many decades. It is obvious: primary resources are neglected when there is no awareness of their function to produce well-being.
In general, the landscape is not considered a fruitful asset for the needs of our time.
On the contrary, we are inert in the face of epochal violence: just as in prison the first punishment is the loss of identity and reduction to a number, so our territory suffers a severe punishment in the system of globalisation, where the dictatorship of the homogeneous market neglects and thus causes the loss of the distinctive characteristics of places and reduces societies to purely anonymous machines of production and consumption. People are no longer inhabitants but workers, consumers, users of services. And this applies to rich and poor, residents in villas or council houses.
But let’s say it in ‘mercatese’: if the landscape is allowed to degrade, it is because there is no demand for it.
It is evident: where the pleasure of living is considered a strategic objective, there the landscape is brought to the attention of territorial practices. Its images acquire value, its specificities are respected, its material contents are maintained and reproduced.
There is no need to give examples: Europe is teeming with regions and cities that present themselves to the world, emerging, particularly in these times of globalisation, as the sites of a proclaimed and undisputed pleasure of living, locations for bittersweet literature and films, destinations for honeymoons, initiations into adult life or the serenity of old age.
In most cases, a physically and immediately persuasive material component acts as a support: there is no doubt that the centre of Rome or Provence also convince to the pleasure of living through the perception of the morphologies of places and settlements, their climate and lights. In other cases, it is the collective behaviour in public space, even more than the shape of things, that induces the pleasurable sense of landscape identity (we notice this in Barcelona or along the Via Emilia, for example).
A review of landscape actions
In any case, where the pleasure of living is consolidated, there is a priority attention and capacity to invest in maintaining or enriching the spaces, places, and behaviours that are deemed useful for continuing to satisfy it. But even there one can read the signs of a difficulty, of the economic unsustainability of such a service in times of general crisis.
So where the socio-cultural model is already addressed, the theme of the landscape project is the qualification, in terms of sustainability and legibility, of the resources recognised and used as well.
In those cases, the strategic objective is to make the economic value clear, to make users aware of the landscape’s contribution to the balance of costs and benefits of the quality of life, its public utility.
Therefore it is important to have (in itinere and not only ex-post) a correct economic balance, which measures the landscape footprint of each significant change, discovering how much a landscape is worth, in terms of assets and induced incomes, and how much the transformations weigh in increasing or reducing that value.
In this way we discover in detail the perverse mechanisms that produce what we already know in brief: that in the landscape value is produced by places, relations and behaviours that for the most part are free or poorly remunerated, and that this value is drained by other relations and other behaviours, which not only exploit but worsen the situation of the landscape.
The sustainable project for the qualification of landscape resources necessarily passes through the recognition of the circuit of wealth that is triggered by them but does not remain with them.
A balance sheet highlighting these value flows is useful to realise the players involved, the overall costs and revenues and their unequal distribution over the territory. And thus to reinforce the defences against the private uses of rents induced by the landscape, which do not invest in its reproduction or even single-handedly ruin an entire public resource, like polluting an aquifer from a single well.
If it is not easy with value, it is even more difficult to make people aware beforehand of the risk of damage: if the assaults of advertisements on the Bridge of Sighs cannot be repelled, it will be impossible to avoid the sheds in the Trulli Valley. It is only afterwards that we realise: the urban and environmental sacking of the Ligurian Rivieras shows how much economic damage can be caused by wasting landscape resources, as local tourism entrepreneurs themselves realised too late, who were the protagonists of that sacking, now condemned to second-class rents compared to other territories, less favoured by nature but better able to manage their landscape.
Starting from clarifying the ‘accounts’ of the landscape, it is possible to assess what produces value and what consumes it, looking for suitable measures to equalise the system, inducing people to invest part of the value produced for the qualification of places and behaviours that are already recognised as a positive resource.
There is nothing new here: in Renaissance Tuscany, the rule of Bellosguardo required those who built to enjoy a panorama to make their building beautiful, as it was part of the panorama enjoyed by the person opposite. And it was a discipline gladly respected.
A pact for new identity landscapes
The problem is different, and if possible more difficult, when the natural role of the pleasure of living is degraded. This is the most frequent case in our territories, and it happens due to a weakening of the sense of landscape caused by the irruption of (mostly ideological) needs, which lead to the squandering and squandering of resources in a reckless and improper manner. The lack of collective awareness, of cultural and economic sensitivity with respect to the value of the landscape, derives from the loss of a sense of cultural ownership of places and resources, which was instead very much present where and when the landscape was physically made by the inhabitants: in the rural world and the pre-industrial city.
But we cannot be torn apart by nostalgia for an irretrievable equilibrium, we cannot devote all our energies to keeping up, at an unfeasible cost, a landscape made and maintained by an inhabitant/producer society that has disappeared. Today, those who use these territories are no longer producers of the landscape and in many cases are no longer even inhabitants: they come from afar, they are mobile, their overall multiculturalism brings together different proxemics with things, places and people. And therefore he will not spontaneously take care of the maintenance of the place that hosts him.
To cope with this structural lack, which is now irretrievable (those who make the landscape are no longer the community of inhabitants), a new subject must be identified who considers a medium- to long-term investment to qualify a landscape from scratch and, above all, to build a new sense of virtuous landscape in users. This is no mean feat, but it is nonetheless achievable: this is what has happened in the cities launching themselves on the international tourism and urban marketing scene in the last 30 years: from Bilbao to Lille, from Valencia to Montreal.
In our territories we have an advantage: almost everywhere the resource is there, even if mistreated, and it is often not necessary to have it invented by archistars or urban make-up geniuses. The works done for the centre of Turin, Genoa or Marseilles, in the Cinque Terre or along the rivers around Lyon show that it is possible to trigger the valorisation of the landscape resources already present, with significant investments but, all in all, proportionate to the expected returns. But even in these cases, investments to outline a new image of places only have socio-economic effects if they become a shared part of the sense of landscape.
Hence, a political and economic pact must be established between producers and users, which ensures a correct and sustainable sharing of burdens and honours, not so much for the initial investments as for their subsequent effects.
Initial investments for the landscape, generally public or in any case exogenous and one-off, must be considered the start of an engine that must then continue to run with local autonomy of expenditure, and must allow for the redistribution of socio-economic and cultural benefits across the territory. And on the other hand, in a system that functions autonomously, management expenses must be limited to a maximum, because as a whole they must not exceed the inhabitants’ spending capacity for the “landscape” chapter added to the share that can be derived from visitors, remunerated with the costs of accommodation.
Faced with a framework of references of this kind, a system of economies should be devised that requires those who enjoy the benefits of a landscape to take responsibility for its maintenance, in a way to be invented, which in practice borrows the modalities of the tourist tax, those of stall fees and those of urbanisation charges (here to be translated into landscape charges), reducing or eliminating the costs for those who contribute directly, with their works, to the quality of the landscape and its maintenance.
A different role for public authorities
This is the scenario in a society that has included the landscape among the resources, including economic ones, for the quality of life.
But we often move in a much more slippery situation, in which the landscape is presented not as a real resource, cultural but also economic, to be taken care of in a collective and responsible manner, but as a rhetorical figure, abstractly cultural, almost independent of our care, like language or folklore.
Too often, interventions for the landscape are invoked in a contradictory manner, where a mixture of schizophrenia and false consciousness dominates. On the one hand, the mayors of rich and frightened cities spend billions on new designer urban signs, without checking their effect on the sense of place and the reaction of citizens, neither before (and this is understandable), nor after (and this is unforgivable). On the other hand, those same cities invest little in qualifying the appearance of their suburbs, and that little goes mostly in streets with many roundabouts (so they can get out of there as soon as possible?) and certainly not in spaces to give a sense of collective habitat, a space of social recognition to the majority of citizens, who sleep there for years and generations.
The mayors of districts famous in the imagination of the tourist landscape compete for inscriptions on the Unesco heritage list, while at the same time their urban plans allow their valleys to be filled with warehouses and their coastlines with condominiums.
Thus, the same political subjects spend money and dictate rules for conflicting objectives, without verifying their social sharing, in a context of land management that is opaque and difficult to understand. Above all, neither producers (of works that are not checked on their actual usefulness, effects or management costs) nor users (free to scorn or enjoy landscape transformations that they do not feel are their own, because they have not decided on them and believe they have not paid for them) are made responsible.
In these terms obviously waste and neglect prevail, management costs grow.
Thus the landscape is not considered useful: this is not the role that should be demanded of public actors.
It is an incurable contradiction, as long as landscape is only thought of as a patrimonial good, which the public hand or charitable bodies must support with resources from elsewhere or with generically binding rules. Instead, as in the parable of the talents, we must make ourselves responsible for putting the landscape resource to good use for the pleasure of living, and to do this we must involve the subjects who want to enjoy that pleasure: making them responsible, making them operationally and economically autonomous, using the public hand only for structural interventions and to initiate processes, not to support them in management.
In order to achieve a fundamental assumption of responsibility in those who seek the pleasure of living, we must get out of the false binomial into which the practice of landscape by public bodies has been thrown: either sterile conservation of a past world or production of decontextualised signs with no relationship with the inhabiting society.
Both sides of this binomial derive from institutional strategies that have little to do with the construction of a system of responsibility, such as the one implicit in the paradigms of the European Convention, and this derives from the lack of a tradition in this sense in the relationship between body and citizen, which in Italy tends more towards regulation than participation, and therefore more towards defining duties than responsibilities.
Thus we are used to thinking that the sense of responsible landscape was a virtue of archaic or rural societies, in which producers/inhabitants did not need written rules to live well. Instead, this attitude, mediated by local authorities, has also played a fundamental role in modern society, as a cultural mediator between territorial identity and social design.
Responsible management of urban developments, conceived as a new territory to be inhabited, allowed the generations between the 19th and 20th centuries to metabolise an evolutionary synthesis between rural cultural habitats and extraordinary innovations (such as the industrial city, non-adventurous transport, widespread availability of culture and leisure). For better or worse, the hundreds of millions of migrants who travelled the western world were made to feel like inhabitants in new places, and for them a new concrete form was given to the desired idea of home, of ‘proper home’.
In those decades the basic requirement was met, the first exogenous response was given to that desire to live which we are discussing, fulfilled in difficult situations and with modest resources, within a framework of rules and investments not too demanding of the public entity. Today, in an affluent society, with theoretically much greater resources, we are faced with a potential demand of the same order as that of 3 or 4 generations ago, which instead of asking for a ‘city effect’, poses other requirements: a ‘landscape effect’ for the pleasure of living. We can adopt the same strategy and ask the public entity to play its part, giving rules and coordinating resources appropriately, but of course we must direct it because, as we have seen, on the subject of landscape the public hand is uncertain and contradictory.
The country for the public res
On the other hand, working on the landscape not only serves to provide services for living well, but also seems to constitute a good strategic axis to remedy the structural crisis of the sense of the common good, of res publica.
Certainly, the needs of the common good to which the 20th century sense of landscape responded are different from those of today. Back then, landscapes, for example those illustrated and recounted by the Touring Club, helped to consolidate a precise sense of the common good, outlining widespread and shared images and representations for the young Italian nation, which needed to demonstrate an identity that until then had never been systematically described.
Today, the sense of living comes out of the autistic niche in which it had enclosed itself in the rural world, and acquires an open relationship with the world: it broadens its horizon in a perspective of global citizenship. The new sense of landscape helps in this different breath, offering itself as a way of communication, a tale of one’s habitat that the inhabitants tell themselves and others: landscape becomes a service to the common good as the identity card of a community in the world.
And vice versa, where the indigenous people tramp about, a new type of inhabitant is emerging, the one of choice: one who fights for the ‘landscapes of the heart’, who devotes energy and work to the defence and enhancement of beloved places, to which they have extended their desire for global living.
It is the other face of globalisation, the good one, which drives people to seek to belong to and be responsible for an open, dialoguing world, made up of relationships that may be distant but are animated by a commitment to the common good. The desired dwelling goes out of the city, extends to the territory and the world.
But for this ‘civil’ service of communication and integration to be performed systematically and widely, the role of the landscape must be brought up to date, responding as best as possible to ‘new’ requirements of the pleasure of living. In reality, answers should not be sought to new themes but to permanent requirements in the modern living system:
– a relationship with open spaces that is not casual and occasional, to be refounded in consideration of the gaze of the prevailing user: the citizen, who mostly seeks in open spaces stable forms of domesticated nature, in which the signs of nature and those of traditional agriculture coexist without alteration,
– a sense of history widely aroused and related to living memory, not isolated in symbolic monuments but found as a thread present in places frequented daily (what happens in historic centres is to be transferred to the whole territory)
– a sense of the local community (i.e. of the living characters of the place where one lives) restored by the spaces of social encounters, fostered by pleasantly walkable spaces, pervasive in the city from the centre to its edges, connected, to be designed together with public and private service centres, to make up for a now chronic lack especially in the car-dominated suburbs.
In order to meet these seemingly obvious requirements, which are in any case of great importance to initiate a responsible landscape policy, the culture of ‘landscape designers’ is completely lacking:
– the relationship with the operators who make and maintain the landscape (starting with farmers) is missing,
– there is a lack of management culture (starting with public institutions and the lack of volunteers),
– there is a lack of the ability of the territorial government to rethink town planning as a landscape enhancement technique,
– there is a lack of compliance with the general requirement of economic sustainability, both in terms of investment and sustainable management: the designer is rewarded the more the project costs and not the other way around.
So, in a nutshell, the landscape can only be a political and economic instrument for the pleasure of living if in the awareness and sense of responsibility of investors, local administrators, technical planners and assessors, measures can be found to obviate the uncertainties, shortcomings, and neglect described above. Faced with these difficulties more than the will, there seems to be a lack of technical equipment, institutional approaches, and a culture of decision-making at the local level.
Useful Landscape Services
In the light of this thesis, for a useful and responsible sense of landscape it is a matter of constructing, by trial and error, an operational and decision-aiding knowledge that links economic, technical, cultural and political evaluation tools into a coherent system.
In this perspective, a number of working traces are outlined, which in other countries or in urban contexts have constituted the main route to positive results:
a. The formation of responsible legal entities dedicated to specific projects
In the face of shared landscape projects at a local level, set up purpose companies with different forms (mixed companies such as STUs, foundations, associations, ….), in the public interest but based on private participation. Subjects should be accredited (by territorial bodies, such as the Region or the State) with credit institutions on the basis of specific projects, positively evaluated with respect to operators, local resources and within a controllable time horizon.
The credit and administrative facilities (plan variants, use of dedicated sector funds, etc.) should make it possible to start the initial part of the process against a positively assessed balance of the relationship between intervention and management costs (immediate and induced) and the territory’s capacity to absorb these costs, highlighting the knots that require exogenous investment and the timeframe for its sustainability.
In this framework, fund-raising actions are to be transformed from a desperate search for sponsors and non-reimbursable public funding to the construction of economic sustainability frameworks with private operators over the medium-long term, to be adjusted and corrected as we go along.
b. The training of territorial agents for landscape design
To train young technicians dedicated to making accredited landscape projects (e.g. Corona Verde) operational, following the model of local development agents (e.g. French).
The service should be of interest to individual or associated municipalities that wish to have technical subjects dedicated to process governance for territorial and landscape issues, which require, on the one hand, widespread awareness and participation building and, on the other, inter-sectoral coordination between private operators (e.g. farmers, tourism operators, sector technicians – for environmental, historical-cultural, tourism aspects, etc.) and public subjects.
Local development agents should be asked, in addition to the organisation of participation and coordination between operators, the ability to return useful evaluation frameworks for operational budgets, both economic-financial and landscape-environmental.
c. The formation of networks for the circulation of good practices and the integration of excellence
Forming accredited systems for circulating the best experiences in the various ‘hot’ areas of governance (participatory aspects, involvement of private individuals, associations and companies, participatory survey techniques, communication, management and intervention, sober and sustainable design…) .
A powerful website appears to be a fundamental tool, but it only ensures results if it is associated with opportunities for direct knowledge of the experiences of others, and the possibility of dialogue with the protagonists of projects of excellence.
In this sense, the importance of investments, however small compared to the cost of activating the projects, for the circulation of knowledge and people focused on operability and practice.
There is something for everyone to do, but in our opinion it is worth it given the possible, lasting positive outcome.
[1] Social capital refers to those intangible assets that have value more than any other in people’s daily lives: namely, goodwill, membership of organisations, solidarity and the social relationships between individuals and families that make up a social unit. This is the first definition of the subject, by Lydia Hanifan, from 1916.
[2] On the right to pleasure, Wim Wenders is enlightening, about the rock’n’roll spread from the USA to Europe: ‘… it was very important because it created a kind of feeling of identity, not to say class. Maybe I should explain myself better. It is a concept of identity that is completely opposed to capitalism and imperialism. In a way it is the only necessary step towards revolt. I believe that rock’n’roll gave many people for the first time a sense of identity. This is because more than anything else it comes close to joy. So, thanks to rock’n’roll, I began to think of the imaginary, of creativity, as united with joy: the idea of having the right to enjoy something….’ (from Le storie esistono solo nelle storie, in W.Wenders – L’idea di partenza, Liberoscambio 1983)
[3] See for example F.Governa and G.Dematteis – Il milieu urbano.L’identità territoriale nei processi di sviluppo. Franco Angeli 1999
