Landscapes in danger

1.1. Landscape, the face of society.

In one of his most intriguing parables (quoted by C.Magris, 1997), J.L. Borges speaks of a painter who sets himself the task of drawing the world, portrays the most diverse landscapes and realises, in the end, ‘that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face’. The landscape is the face of a man as well as of society, of its physical constraints, its vicissitudes and its hopes for life. The landscape’s wounds, its scars, flaws and asymmetries are those of society itself projected onto the ground. Its disintegration reflects the disintegration of society. The landscape draws the relationship between ‘vu’ and ‘vecu’, between what is seen and what is experienced (Raffestin,1977).The thousand European landscapes are the thousand faces of Europe. Concerns about European landscapes express the social, political and cultural tensions of a Europe still in search of itself. Of a Europe that seeks its identity not against other identities, but against “its own temptations, its own demons, its own monsters” (A. Finkielkraut, 2003), in dialogue, inclusion and diversity. The defence of European landscapes cannot in any way be separated from this search, it cannot in any way be reduced to a ‘cosmetic’ or ‘gardening’ operation, or to a bureaucratic rationalisation of the variegated national systems of defending the surviving signs of the past.

1.2. Landscape, between emerging and ordinary risks.

It is in this complex sense that the landscape is in danger. But the news and images of immense tragedies in the most diverse parts of the globe seem to overwhelm any possibility of a rational, scientifically oriented approach to the great questions of contemporary human settlement. Despite the media clamour and the ‘demand for truth’ that usually accompany environmental emergencies, it is often too difficult or perhaps impossible to distinguish emergency issues from those that manifest themselves in the sign of the everyday and ordinary. Attempts to grasp the links linking ‘natural’ catastrophes to the more or less conscious and intentional work of man are difficult, largely inadequate. No less difficult are attempts to bring back to a unitary interpretation the outcomes that manifest themselves in the various sectors of anthropic activity, from those that concern the physical transformations of the territory to those that concern the use and consumption of natural resources, or social and cultural dynamics, or economic and financial processes. And the difficulties are all the greater the more one attempts to associate interpretation with forecasting, to anticipate the future. One wonders whether we are entering ‘the age of great risks’ (Scalfari 2011). The concomitance of earth tremors of unprecedented violence, the disastrous effects of global climate change (Kushner, 2011), dramatic geopolitical aftershocks on an international scale, the global economic crisis and the bursting of the ‘speculative bubble’ is no coincidence. This is certainly not the place to answer questions like these. But, even if we focus on urbanism and planning, we cannot help but wonder about the great changes that are sweeping through contemporary territories and the responses that technical and scientific culture has elaborated or is elaborating at the dawn of the third millennium. The ‘crisis of modernity’ (Harvey 1990) consummated over the last few decades had marked the decadence of the great narratives, of ideas of progress and social justice, of general issues such as those related to the control of land uses and primary resources. Ecosystem fragmentation, a perverse product of the total urbanisation of the territory, seemed to be reflected in the shattering of the social fabric and systems of relations, in the extreme diversification of interests and social demands. And. consequently, denying space to unifying interpretations, to the very idea that there could be a ‘public interest’ to refer to.

1.3. Landscape and the urban crisis.

In the course of the 1980s, the debates on the crisis of town planning, characterised by the almost caricatured opposition between the culture of the plan and the culture of the project, seemed destined to definitively disprove the social efficacy of planning in interpreting the public interest. It was observed that “the social question to which town planners traditionally gave answers [had] changed, no longer a ‘general question’, but a problem of minorities” (Mazza, 1990; Secchi 1990). General problems such as those related to the relationship between the state and the market in the construction of the territory, and thus to the control of land values, seemed “removed from the passions and interests of most urban planners. The attention of many is rather focused on the question of the form and design of the city’. Fascinated by the problems of the overall identity of the urbs, planning would be incapable of tackling those of the “fragmentation and articulation of the civitas and thus the multiplicity of forms according to which our society tends to represent itself”. The contribution of urban and territorial planning to the resolution of the “urban question” on which the reflections of scholars like Castells had concentrated in the preceding decades, not without powerful feedback from the grassroots movements of society, seemed to be weakening; and indeed the question itself – as a general question – seemed to be losing relevance and relevance in the questions and perceptions of contemporary society.

1.4. The new urban question .

More than twenty years later, one can ask oneself whether these observations are still valid, or whether instead the “new urban question” (Secchi 2011) – more and more closely intertwined with the multiform “environmental question” – still constitutes, or once again constitutes, the problematic framework with which planning must deal. And whether the exit from the crisis that seems to pervade our cities and territories requires the construction of a broad and comprehensive interpretative framework: a framework in which we can attempt to coherently situate the great problems of contemporary society, from those that concern the physical transformations of the planet to those that reflect the radicalisation of economic and social inequalities, the shortages and degradation of housing conditions, and the growing mobility of populations, activities and ideas. In other words, we must ask ourselves if and how the culture of planning (in terms of scientific statutes and disciplinary skills, professional technical capabilities, administrative apparatuses, legal instruments and institutional frameworks, but also cultural attitudes and sensibilities) can today translate “individual concerns into public issues” (Bauman, 2008). A change of perspective is required, to move from a static and inventory-based patrimonial vision – such as the one that has oriented and still largely orientates action to protect cultural and natural heritage (Choay 1993) – to a dynamic and structural vision, capable of grasping the dramatic criticality and topicality of the territory. It is a vision that discounts the impossibility of archiving the historical legacy in the memories and relics of the past and instead urges the recognition of the topicality of the historical territory in its incessant contemporaneity with the culture of the society that inhabits and produces it. A vision that, by crossing broader reflections on the dynamics of contemporary society, has helped to understand the (re)discovery of the territory as a resource at risk of loss and degradation, but also as an irreplaceable foundation for political and cultural action.

2. Identity, values and rights.

2.1. Landscape, the foundation of identity.

In the new rhetoric that permeates the public discourse on the contemporary territory, the theme of identity has assumed great prominence, not by chance introduced by the European Landscape Convention in the very definition of landscape, conceived not only as the dynamic outcome of the interaction between anthropic and natural factors, but also as the “foundation of identity” (art. 5). A definition that has been widely reflected in the discursive and planning practices of recent decades, in which the landscape has often been the banner of the defence and strengthening of local cultures and economies, also as a function of resistance to the homologising thrusts of globalisation. As a system of identity values, the landscape interprets not only the peculiarities, characters and differences of the territory, but also its evolutionary potential. Hence the growing importance attributed to the landscape for the protection of biodiversity and even more so of “bio-cultural diversity”, to which Unesco and the World Conservation Union have again recently drawn attention. Hence also the attempt to contribute, with landscape policies, to the rediscovery and enhancement of local cultures, agriculture and economies (just think of the success of ‘slow food’ and ‘zero km’ production), placing it at the centre of urban and territorial marketing. However, in spite of the emphasis on the landscape and its identity function, the very concept of identity has come under increasing criticism. On the one hand, identity claims have not failed to show regressive tendencies, ‘autistic’ closures and nostalgic drifts into the cages of traditions. At all scales, from local to planetary, the shadow of ‘armed’ or ‘warlike’ identities has advanced menacingly (Amartya Sen., 2006.). On the other hand, the “leap in scale” of an increasing number of environmental, economic and social problems (less and less treatable on a local scale, increasingly requiring actions and control apparatuses on a regional, national and above all international level), re-proposes the great themes of trans-scalar integration of public regulatory actions, of the great narratives and “big pictures” on which overall strategies are based.

2.2. Towards a new territoriality of the landscape.

The changes in the scale of the problems to be faced challenge identity distortions because they affect not only the real changes in the contemporary world, but also the ways in which we observe them, the conceptions, myths and utopias that guide our analyses and choices. We cannot avoid measuring ourselves against emerging processes, but ‘to do so we must be able to recognise them. And to recognise them understand what is happening” (Hillman, 2011). To this end, the ‘territorialist’ approach – such as that proposed by the ‘Society of Territorialists’: Magnaghi 2010 – has played and can play a significant role. “This approach has placed at the centre of disciplinary attention the territory as a common good, in its historical, cultural, social, environmental, productive identity, and the landscape as its sensitive manifestation […]. The return to the territory as the cradle and result of human action expresses and symbolises the need to reintegrate into the social and therefore also economic analysis, the effects of human actions on the human mind and the natural environment, always historically and geographically determined’. The territory, therefore, not as an inert support for human activities, but as a constitutive system of the relations they have with natural dynamics. It is in this complex and problematic context that the search for   a new territoriality, pregnant with memories and environmental awareness, must be concentrated, against the backdrop of an evolution in contemporary scientific thought that seems to be changing the meaning of human presence in the world.

2. 3. Cohesion and competitiveness.

In this research, reference to the local dimension is fundamental. A dimension that highlights the identities and characters on which the diversification of the territory rests, without constraints of scale. Which creates landscapes, with a dynamic and trans-scalar vision, with incessant connection to the perceptions, expectations and projects of the inhabitants. but places are not autonomous and independent fragments, they are not separate worlds, they are “splinters of the world” (Magris, 1997). Their capacity to conserve their own identity characters depends, no less than on the ‘operational closures’ of local systems, on their ‘openness’ towards change and thus on their capacity to effectively look out over the networks of relations that act in the territorial context, at the various scales. In both directions, the landscape plays a fundamental role. On the one hand it links tangible and intangible facts, places and activities, variously located in the territorial space, in contexts that tend to be cohesive, in which local communities can recognise themselves and interact more or less effectively. The landscape device is a reflection and instrument of ecological, economic, social and cultural cohesion, capable of strengthening the resistance and resilience capacities of local systems in the face of pressures and disturbances from outside. But at the same time, the landscape is also a reflection and instrument of competitiveness, insofar as it gives local systems a characterised and recognisable image, enabling them to participate with hope of success in the confrontations that are looming at all levels, mobilising structured sets of diversified resources, giving voice to the ‘territory of the inhabitants’ or investing in urban and territorial marketing.

2.4.. New value systems potentially in conflict

The protection of the landscape, like that of nature, has to do with the affirmation of value systems; but the value systems are not the same. What counts, in the second case, are values that are recognised and presided over by the ‘hard sciences’ (such as geology or biology), in such terms as to almost nullify any possibility of choice regarding the protection measures to be adopted. Between the objective and scientifically incontrovertible recognition of the value and the choice of the ways in which it is to be protected, a stringent, even deterministic, relationship emerges. In the first case, landscape protection, values of much more uncertain determination come into play, leaving ample room for subjective interpretation and evaluation, despite the powerful aid of the social sciences, primarily history. The resulting lability and subjectivity with regard to protection and management measures have been explicitly recognised by the European Landscape Convention itself, which commits the parties to take into account, when assessing landscapes, “the specific values attributed to them by the subjects and populations concerned” (Art. 5). However, this distinction is not rigid. Even in the field of nature conservation, a more socially sensitive conception of the values at stake has made inroads; while the very scientific objectivity of evaluations is increasingly called into question (it is enough to recall the bitter dispute that swept through the scientific world when it came to choosing the best intervention strategy, in the face of the dreadful fire that devastated Yellowstone Park a few years ago): McHarg 1966) has deeply imbued landscape culture, behind the banners of Landscape Ecology.. Rather than suggesting a bifurcation between different value systems, experience seems to indicate the inherent problematic nature of value identification, both in the field of nature conservation and landscape conservation.

2.5. Principles and rights

The recognition of natural and cultural values, in particular those values that the market ignores or opposes, is at the basis of the long struggles for the ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1970) and for the construction of the ‘welfare state’, made more bitter today by the emergence of immigration phenomena and new social inequalities. But the recognition of those values also leads to the affirmation of new rights and duties, such as those that in Italy refer to Article 9 of our Constitution. International agreements and treaties have sanctioned a progressive expansion of ‘environmental rights’, including those that – as typically the ‘rights to existence’ of inalienable environmental goods, primarily water – reflect trans-generational collective interests. At the same time, the range of ‘citizenship rights’ has expanded, which now also peacefully cover ‘intangible’ values such as aesthetic or literary ones. It may seem ironic in our country, which has left much of its coastline, agrarian landscapes, mountains and historic centres at the mercy of real estate speculation (and indeed still seems to indulge in it in the name of economic development) to demand respect for the ‘rights to beauty’: a luxury that many feel we cannot afford. But it cannot be ignored that under that banner, substantial and aggressive movements of opinion and coalitions of interests are aggregating… If one accepts the idea that nature and landscape policies cannot disregard the new rights of citizenship, one cannot avoid asking oneself how to ensure their concrete implementation, taking into account the plurality, variability and intrinsic conflictuality of the interests and values at stake. A conflictuality that is certainly not limited to the clash between generic public interests and private interests, but increasingly pits different antagonistic public interests against each other, as the chronicles report. Why and under what conditions should the recognition of an outstanding historic urban landscape or an unparalleled agricultural landscape prevent the construction of a skyscraper for public offices or a logistics platform or a large hospital complex? In order to escape the pitfalls of relativism and react to the ‘retreat of universal values’ (Touraine 2008.), the acceptance of hierarchies of values is invoked. But the battle over absolute values seems hard to relate to the logic of open and inclusive democratic confrontation. If each of the conflicting parties entrenches itself behind its own system of values, the outcome of the confrontation can only be that of a more or less violent overpowering and, it may be added in the light of experience, tendentially to the detriment of weaker public interests, such as landscape and environmental interests. Hence the opportunity, in the spirit of the Constitution, to ‘reason by principles’, replacing the logic of imposition with the logic of persuasion (Zagrebelsky 2009). It is on this ground that the search for the most appropriate forms of public regulation of the processes that shape the landscape can be based.

2.6. Regulation versus perception?

The relativism of values and stakes places great emphasis on the role of perception, an indispensable reference (according to the Convention) for policy-making and for value recognition itself. Apparently, perception and regulation represent two antithetical perspectives. On the one hand, perceptions appear to be dominated by the mutability and instability of the conditions of sensory observation (as the observer’s position varies, as the seasons, the hours of the day and the weather change), by the subjectivity of the cultural filters that condition their fruition, of the sensitivities and prior knowledge that mediate the perceptual process. At stake is the very semiosis of the landscape, its openness to processes of signification, which can never be reduced to a ‘given’ and immutable system of objectively recognisable and shareable signs. (Castelnovi 2000).

On the side of regulation, the perspective seems to change radically. The reasons, interests and stakes at stake, the modalities of human intervention in transformation processes change. Underlying this is the recognition of landscape as a common good, now extended from exceptional landscapes to landscape as an asset of intrinsic and ubiquitous value. The broad definition of the European Convention tends to subsume the set of widely shared collective interests: from the ecological to the economic and social ones directly connected to the wellbeing and ‘good living’ of local populations and to development prospects, to the anthropological and cultural ones in which local, national and global identity values are expressed.

Recognition of these interests implies an affirmation of values that is at least in part opposed to current trends, market dynamics, and the triumph of special interests that could undermine their integrity or usability. This affirmation therefore requires an action of support and defence on the part of the public administration, capable of configuring a ‘regulation’ of transformative processes aimed at preventing undesirable effects and stimulating synergetic and positive ones.At the same time, the public regulation of risky processes is all the more ‘democratically’ legitimised the more the recognitions of value are translated into rights and duties proclaimed at the national or international level; this is the case with many environmental rights, such as typically the ‘rights to existence’ of certain inalienable resources (such as water) that respond to trans-generational collective interests. The ‘rights-based’ approach is gaining ground in the landscape conservation debate, closely related to the nature conservation debate, supported particularly by the IUCN. There is no hiding the fact that these national and supranational designations may collide with local visions that are more concerned with the interests (of a few) rather than the rights (of all).

3. Conservation and innovation.

3.1.. Conservation and innovation, an inseparable relationship

In recent decades, the principle of conservation has undergone a disconcerting expansion of its scope and meaning, not without ambiguities and contradictions. In relation to both nature and cultural heritage, conservation has progressively detached itself from concepts such as those of ‘preservation’, safeguarding, passive protection, implying the recognition of a condition of unchangeability that cannot be perfected, to make way for more or less complex forms of transformability, dynamic management, careful stewardship (Passmore 1986), care and innovation. Although the new conception recovers important lessons from the past, such as Marsh’s (1864) or Leopold’s (1933) conservationism, it is nourished by current reflections. On the one hand, the realisation that, more than in the past, there can be no authentic and lasting conservation that does not involve innovative transformation (“you cannot separate things from their becoming”: Tiezzi 1999; “change is an inseparable part of the biosphere”: Botkin 1990). Any intervention in cultural heritage implies innovative tension, at least in making sense of things; and, on the other hand, risks and threats arising from global changes cannot be effectively addressed without innovative ‘adaptations’ (Adams, 1996). But on the other hand, and symmetrically, the realisation that any genuine innovation in the contemporary world implies confrontation with a cumbersome natural and cultural heritage, with complex systems of ‘provenance’ (Petz, 2004) and memories (Schama, 1997), that there is no oblivion without memories, and that the innovative management of today’s ecosystems cannot ignore their previous history (Botkin, 1990). In short, conservation is increasingly configured as a ‘privileged place of innovation’, (ANCSA, ‘Gubbio Charter’, 1990). Innovative conservation, far from being interpreted as a weakening of conservation options, implies a strengthened commitment to the care of the territorial heritage and its transmission to future generations (Gambino, 1997).

3.2. The expansion of the conservative option

But the change in the meaning of the principle of conservation is all the more remarkable in that it has been accompanied by a veritable explosion in its scope of application, both with regard to nature and landscape and cultural heritage. For the conservation of nature, perhaps the most emblematic change concerns ‘protected natural areas’ and their relationship with surrounding territories. The search for forms of protection and enhancement extended to these territories (according to the slogan of the IUCN Congress in Durban, 2003: “Benefits beyond Boundaries”), of conservation policies “on a landscape scale”, of ecosystem planning for eco-regions, of “networking” of large systems of protected areas with various characteristics, finds a common inspiration in the new way of understanding the principle of conservation. A similar expansion has taken place in relation to cultural heritage, with the shift of attention (which finds emblematic testimony in the evolution of ANCSA thought: Gabrielli, 1997) from ‘monuments’ to historical centres and settlements, to the historical territory in its entirety. Indeed, this shift in meaning, from monument to heritage, is closely connected – in the discourses that scholars such as Francoise Choay (2008) have been developing for years – to the “globalisation of the preservation of historical heritage”, i.e. the international recognition that “we can no longer afford the luxury of letting it go to ruin”. Even more explicit, it is hardly worth mentioning, is the shift concerning the landscape, expressed in the European Landscape Convention, which sanctions the obligation to recognise landscape value for the entire territory, applying diversified measures of protection, management and planning. Under all these profiles – and in contrast, of course, with most of the traditional control and protection apparatuses and practices – the irreducibility of the principle of conservation to individual ‘pieces’ of the natural-cultural heritage detached from the context is affirmed; or in other words, the impossibility of dividing the territorial heritage into parts to be conserved and parts to be left at the mercy of transforming pressures.

3.3. The nature-culture relationship. 

In this perspective, the relationship between nature and culture plays a crucial role that is far from obvious.   Rejecting less sustainable schematisations (such as the dichotomous division of the territory into natural spaces   and man-made spaces: a division that nevertheless still recurs not only in the policies  parks and ‘insularised’ protected areas, but also in many territorial policies aimed at countering the senseless consumption of land with exclusionary measures)   it is necessary to recognise that the debate is open, on a theoretical level no less than on a political and operational one. On the one hand, it is necessary to de-naturalise anthropic transformation choices, which are too often concealed by generic   references to natural events (the false natural emergencies   that cover authentic ‘planned disasters’ and     devastating logics of ’emergency’ land management, but also those structural interpretations of urban and territorial plans that confuse the ‘given’ with the project). On the other hand, it is necessary, after the ecological turn of the middle of the last century and its deterministic repercussions (McHarg 1966), to reconstruct the relations between naturalness, rurality and urbanity, recognising their pervasive co-presence in every corner of the planet. A radical overcoming of that opposition between nature and culture that has played a central role in western civilisation in the modern age, starting from the great Renaissance utopias, takes shape. If still at the end of the 19th century Ebenezer Howard (1898) could propose with the theory of the three magnets and the idea of the “Garden City” a creative synthesis, the great changes of the last century (such as the industrialisation of agriculture or the “total” urbanisation of living space and the reciprocal contamination of the respective dedicated spaces) have put traditional interpretative models out of play and urged the elaboration of new relationships.

3.4. Anthropogenic responsibilities in natural dynamics.

A growing awareness of anthropogenic responsibilities in the determination or aggravation of hazards, disasters and environmental degradation is being painstakingly asserted, while the ‘new paradigms’ emerging at the international level (IUCN 2003) now link any prospect of nature conservation to the promotion and regulation of sustainable cultural, economic and social development. On the one hand, the emphasis on international efforts to defend bio-diversity grants increasing space to the importance of bio-cultural diversity, hostage to total urbanisation processes but never independent of natural dynamics (Unesco 2009). It is this diversity that constitutes the wealth (the ‘capital’) on which to base sustainable territorial development. And on the other hand, one certainly cannot ignore the cultural significance connected to the anthropic use of natural resources, to the individual and collective enjoyment, perception and appreciation of landscapes and ‘natural beauty’. Already the Humboldtian discovery of the ‘new world’ (von Humboldt, 1860), like the eighteenth-nineteenth-century ‘invention’ of the Alps, oriented the gaze and irreversibly humanised the natural world, even in the absence of significant physical transformations. Particularly in European territories where cultural sedimentation has been denser and more pervasive, the naturalness we have to deal with is that historically determined by the prior events of the anthropic appropriation of space: not only from that which has left us an admirable heritage of cultural landscapes, but also from the homologating drives that have invested the countryside, oversimplified and trivialised agrarian landscapes inherited from centuries of history, bent natural dynamics to the often indecipherable logic of urban expansion and settlement dispersion, dismantled ecological networks (ditches, canals, hedges and trees, etc.), the precious guardian of landscape diversity.), a precious guardian of landscape diversity and ecosystem stability. (Gambino 2000). In the scenarios that are emerging at a global level, naturalness thus ‘historicised’ cannot in any way be confined to ‘natural areas’ removed (illusorily) from anthropic influence, but encounters the work of man everywhere, whether it allies itself with natural dynamics, or contrasts them in more or less calamitous forms.

3.5. Local values and universal values.

In international scenarios, the overriding reference to supra-local value systems is also under discussion today. On the one hand, in fact, the retreat of universal values, threatened or attacked by current development models, pushes for exemplary protection measures, such as those granted to World Heritage sites. But on the other hand, the revaluation of local systems and the reasons for local development, especially in situations of marginalisation or decline, is reflected in the reaffirmation of local identity values, often seen by losing communities as the ‘roots of their future’. It is in local cultural systems that universal values take root, as shown by the research and debates that have accompanied various experiences of recognition of Unesco Sites, including the recent one concerning the Dolomites: included as a ‘natural site’ but for reasons that explicitly refer to the relevance of local cultural heritages. A relationship of complementarity, or more precisely of strong interaction, thus seems to emerge between local values and universal values, which does not eliminate the possibility of conflicts and contradictions. (Gambino 2010). Conceived as an embankment against the loss or regression of universal values, the defence of the thousands of World Heritage sites scattered across the continents often seems rather to bear the banner of ‘peculiar’ local values, capable of competing advantageously in the global arena. It is no coincidence that the cultural-political battles for the ‘nominations’ of sites to be included in the Unesco lists are increasingly being waged in the name of the revival and consolidation of local cultures and landscapes (as is typically the case with French or Italian wine-growing landscapes).

4. The rearticulation of urban centrality.

4.1. Places and networks, complementary metaphors.

The tension between natural and cultural values, between local and universal values, inevitably evokes the relationship between places and networks, which have long been thought of as complementary metaphors for the interpretation and design of contemporary territories (Gambino1994?). They can help to recognise the ‘territoriality of the landscape’ in the broad meaning attributed to it by the European Convention. It is in the landscape, as a result of the incessant interaction of anthropic and natural dynamics, that the historical settlement takes on its full meaning of historicity and actuality. It is in the landscape that historic centres converse not only with the countryside ‘built up’ (to use Cattaneo’s words, 1845) over centuries and millennia by agrarian networks, water systems and road and infrastructure systems, but also with the mobile presence of nature, which, reluctant to any confinement, pervades and diversifies the spaces surrounding the variously constructed areas. Despite the fact that the processes of widespread urbanisation, the proliferation of infrastructural grids and the very ‘modernisation’ of cultivation practices – especially in the last half-century – have profoundly and extensively eroded the landscapes inherited from the past, shattering their connective grids and identity features, it is still in those landscapes and in their coherent evolution that we can attempt to recover the quality, beauty and recognisability of contemporary territories. The reconstruction of better ecological balances and more acceptable safety conditions in the framework of people’s lives, no less than the search for new founding relationships with places, finds a fundamental expression in the diversity of landscapes. But also, conversely, the full consideration of the new meanings of contemporary urbanity pushes us to interpret them within the framework of the reinvention of the landscapes of modernity. The landscape key offers a powerful aid to orient the territory project towards the recognition of the new forms of the relationship between culture and nature: an obligatory step to improve the overall quality offered to inhabitants as well as tourists and visitors.

4.2. The historic urban landscape.

In the international and especially European panorama, it is the urban landscape, where properly urban forms are composed with peri-urban fringes of ‘urban countryside’ (Donadieu 2006), that increasingly attracts (as the Vienna Memorandum of 2005 already noted) visitors, residents and capital. In the transition towards the society of culture and knowledge, and in the face of the homologising thrusts determined by globalisation processes, the role of the city is less and less entrusted to strictly economic and functional relations (the ‘central’ functions of the tertiary and quaternary sectors) and more and more to symbolic relations, identity images and ‘intangible’ dynamics. It is above all on these that the marketing policies with which cities and territories try to face the competitive challenges looming at the international level with hopes of success leverage. It is on these that recent documents (Unesco 2009) draw attention, emphasising the complex role that landscape ‘staging’ plays by combining the enduring images of the historic city with the suggestions of the new architectures that redesign its relations with the extra-urban context. The resulting tensions are certainly not without misunderstandings and contradictions. As demonstrated by the bitter disputes that have accompanied the ‘verticalisation’ of many European cities (the skyscrapers of London or Paris or Milan), there is a clear risk that the very new images of ‘urban modernisation’, by distancing themselves from the historical heritage of individual urban landscapes and placing themselves at the service of the same speculative mechanisms that dominate the real estate market, paradoxically configure their substantial homologation. From an international perspective, there is a risk that the dreams of the ‘European city’, proudly set against the ‘American city’ due to the complexity of its historical stratification, will erase any attention to the distinctive features, rules of coherence and specific qualities of contemporary urbanity.

4.3. New centrality and the right to the city

This is what is at stake: urban centrality and its meaning for contemporary society, as a specific level of urbanity, the ultimate essence of that ‘right to the city’ on which the urban struggles of the 1970s were based; but once again at the centre of the social demand for the city and memory. This is the paradigmatic case of L’Aquila, where the urgency of new replacement interventions for the ‘earthquake victims’ has thrown into the shade the need to recover the historic city and its socio-cultural values, passionately advocated by its inhabitants. In an international perspective, the crisis of ‘centrist’ policies (emblematised by the new towns and villes nouvelles) contributes to questioning the idea that only the space of convergence and physical aggregation – the square – can accommodate the values of centrality and that, on the contrary, open spaces, the countryside and the spaces of ‘urban dissolution’ are dialectically opposed to it. This discussion has particular relevance for historic centres. It concerns first of all their ‘central’ role from an economic-functional, social and cultural point of view, in the context of relations between the compact city and the diffuse city. Relationships that are much more problematic than in the criticism of urban sprawl of past decades, which must be reconsidered in the face of the emergence of the ‘reticular’ city (Dematteis 1995, Gambino 2009), perhaps the prelude to new, more complex forms of metropolisation (Indovina 2010). But the discussion also invests the other term of the concept of the historic centre, its historicity, denying at root the possibility of anchoring it to precise and stable spatial delimitations. The rearticulation of the urban centrality does not concern pieces of the city or detachable pieces of territory, but the historical territory in its complexity.

5. The new role of free spaces

5.1. Bringing nature back to the city. 

In the city and in the contemporary historical territory, inside or on the edges of the ‘built’ space, free spaces are less and less interpretable with the ambiguous metaphor of the ‘urban green’, increasingly the theatre of the new urban phenomenology. A theatre that is not enclosed within the stable boundaries of the urban, since it dynamically branches out into territorial networks, which enter and leave the compact city (typically with river belts and water systems), cross it and bind it to the territorial context. In this framework, the ‘renaturalisation’ of the city, the subject of recurrent urban and territorial policies at an international level, can take on a new and different meaning. It should be thought of not so much as granting the green a few extra metres, but rather as bringing nature back into the city, restoring to it the fullness of that ecological, historical and cultural significance, which transpires vividly from historical iconography. The efforts that are being made in many European cities, starting with London, to rethink and update the idea of ‘green belts’, in the new prospects of the networked city spread over the territory, testify to the difficulty of identifying new organisational logics, capable of integrating open and closed spaces, urban and rural landscapes, settlement dynamics and environmental dynamics. In this direction, nature and landscape conservation policies seem destined to challenge the culture of town planning, forcing it to break out of its traditional enclosures (more or less rigidly linked to the built environment) in order to take on new, heavier responsibilities for the realisation of public space and the welfare state.

5.2. From ecological networks to environmental infrastructure.

On the other hand, in the European experience, the construction of ecological networks – to contrast or reduce the ecological and landscape fragmentation of the territory, restoring a minimum of connectivity and permeability, especially in large urbanised areas – has already taken on different and more complex purposes than the original, strictly biological ones (CED-Ppn, 2008). In the reticular city that looms on the new urban horizons, connection networks cannot only have biological functions, linking habitats and natural resources that risk insularity, but inevitably take on a denser and more complex meaning, integrating nature and culture by connecting different resources and values. There is a growing need to build new ‘environmental infrastructures’ capable of innervating the entire territory, playing a supporting role no less important than that traditionally assigned to transport, communications or energy networks. But this need does not only manifest itself ‘outwards’ from the city, i.e. towards the territories of settlement dispersion and urban sprawl, but also ‘inwards’, i.e. into the meshes of the compact city. The growing interest in regeneration programmes aimed at bringing nature back into the city (‘greening the city’), in projects for the recovery and redevelopment of riverbanks and historically consolidated water systems, in the reuse of ‘urban voids’ and large disused areas that are not merely real estate, signals the maturing of a new awareness of the tangles of deficit that need to be removed.

5.3.Linking protection and enhancement.

Far from being able to close in on sectorial horizons, ‘cosmetic’ practices or dangerous emergency policies, innovative conservation of the quality of the territory requires far-sighted strategies of structural and preventive intervention, which look not only at ‘excellence’ but at the territory as a whole; it is this that must be saved and enhanced, not the individual ‘objects’ it houses. The new visions that characterise the international scenarios, the new paradigms that should guide the conservation of nature, the reticular perspectives that are emerging in contemporary cities and territories, call for branched and complex, trans-scalar and multi-sectoral strategies. Falsely natural disasters and daily environmental tragedies reaffirm the need and urgency to link the protection and enhancement of cities and historic centres, landscapes and cultural heritage to respect for nature and the environmental context, today the subject of policies that are largely, dramatically separated. In the crisis we are going through, different causes converge, relating to the weakening and inadequacy of institutional and governmental apparatuses, but also to the lack of trust in cooperative attitudes, in the possibilities of partnership and inter-institutional collaboration: even when, as in our country, ‘loyal collaboration’ between government institutions is explicitly required by the Constitution itself. This leads to an insuperable difficulty in the construction of that ‘collective intelligence’ of business, politics and the project (SIU, 2011) that constitutes an indispensable condition to face the challenges of the territory with hope of success.

5.4. Integrating nature and landscape policies.

In an attempt to change course, new alliances are emerging between policies for nature and policies for the landscape (Gambino 2009, 2010). The reasons for this are manifold and are rooted in the common need to have a positive impact on land governance. On the one hand, it is noted that nature conservation policies, despite the shortcomings and contradictions of public action, are assuming an unexpected prominence in local and regional policies. In particular, in 2010, the Year of Biodiversity, the central role of parks and ‘protected natural areas’, both those established by individual states with reference to the definitions of the World Conservation Union (IUCN 1994), and those established at supra-national level, such as the Natura 2000 network for EU countries, was largely reaffirmed. A spectacular and unceasing growth of the set of protected areas has led to their extension to a very large share of the total territory in recent decades: in Europe, it is estimated that a quarter of it is covered and that about a quarter of the population is directly affected by their management (CED-PPN 2008). This share can be further increased if one considers that the ‘new paradigms’ sanctioned by the IUCN are pushing to extend the benefits of protected areas to their territorial contexts (IUCN 2003). On the other hand, landscape policies, according to the guidelines set by the European Convention, concern the entire territory and are explicitly called upon to affect every policy, from town planning to transport to agriculture, that may involve landscape conservation and transformation. However, despite the concordance of goals and the broad overlap between protected natural areas and the landscapes that are protected in various ways, the respective policies are, in general, substantially separate: park policies are governed by institutions, instruments and forms of regulation and strategies that are generally different, except in the case of real overlap (as in the case of the “protected areas” falling within the “protected landscapes” classified by the IUCN, which cover more than half of the protected territory). In the case of Italy, the difficulty of the connection between the two orders of policies is well represented by the contradiction between Article 12 of Law 394, which entrusts the Park Plans with a “substitutive” role with respect to any other plan, and Article 145 of the Cultural Heritage and Landscape Code, which instead gives the Landscape Plans a sort of primacy with respect to the Park Plans as well.

5.5. New alliances for the territory project.

In the light of the above considerations, a double need for integration of nature and landscape policies with land policies seems to be emerging. An ambitious research programme along these lines, with the whole of Europe as its focus, was presented in Barcelona as part of the IUCN Congress (CED-PPN, 2008). The alliance between parks and landscapes can only find common ground in the spatial context and in a genuinely project-oriented perspective. The ‘spatial project’ (Magnaghi 1998) has long been referred to as the place for the integration of different public interests, the evaluation and composition of values and the strategic orientation of policies to regulate transformation processes. And already 50 years ago documents such as the Gubbio Charter (ANCSA, 1960) attributed to the Regulatory Plan the task of outlining the ‘overall actions’ necessary for the redevelopment of historic centres.Many other problems relating to human settlement have subsequently contributed to complexify and aggravate the urban question, urging converging multi-thematic policies capable of contrasting the sectorial nature of public action and its overwhelming dependence on the logic of emergency It is difficult to think that they can do without the ‘territorial project’ in the strict sense of the term, as a broad and shared social process, capable of reflecting, as Sereni puts it, the ‘territorial designs’ of the local populations. A process that cannot avoid moving within a cooperative horizon, in which the fundamental action of local subjects and powers finds the necessary feedback at a regional, national and supra-national level.

Bibliographic references

– ANCSA, 1990: The New Gubbio Charter. Un contributo italiano alla riqualificazione della città esistente, XI Convegno-congresso nazionale, Gubbio.

— 1997: Heritage 2000. Un progetto per il territorio storico nei prossimi decenni, XII Congresso naz., Modena.

– Bauman Z., 2008: The Loneliness of the Global Citizen, UE Feltrinelli, Milan.

– Castelnovi P., 1998: Introductory speech at the seminar Il senso del paesaggio, ISSU, Turin.

– Cattaneo C., 1845: Industria e morale, in Atti della Società d’Incoraggiamento d’arti e mestieri, Milano.

– CoE, Council of Europe, 2000: European Landscape Convention, Florence.

– CED-PPN (Centro Europeo Documentazione Pianificazione dei Parchi Naturali), 2008: Parchi d’Europa, ETS, Pisa.

– Choay F., 1993: The Allegory of Heritage, Officina, Rome.

– Dematteis G., 1995: Progetto implicito, F.Angeli, Milan.

– Donadieu P.,2006 La campagna urbana (edited by M.Mininni), Donzelli, Rome.

-Finkielkraut A., 2003: Il fantasma antisemita che attraversa l’Europa, La Repubblica, December 2003

– Kushner J.A., 2008: Global Climate Change and the Road to Extinction,Caroline Academic Press, Durham.

-Gabrielli B.,(a c.), 1997: Patrimonio 2000: un progetto per il territorio storico, Rel. -Congresso ANCSA, Modena.

– Gambino R., 1983: Centrality and territory, CELID, Turin.

– Gambino R.,1994, ‘Places and networks: new metaphors for the plan’, in Archivio di studi urbani e regionali, 1994, Milan

– Gambino R., 1997: Conservare Innovare, Utet Libreria , Turin

– Gambino R., 2000: Reti ecologiche e governo del territorio, in Parchi, n.29/2000.

– Gambino R., 2002: Parks Policies: a European Perspective, in Environments Studies, vol. 30, no.2. Toronto.

– Gambino R., 2009: Parks and Landscapes of Europe, Lectio Magistralis, Politecnico di Torino, Turin.

– Gambino R., 2010, Landscape Analysis and Planning, Unesco Master on World Heritage at Work, Turin.

– Howard E., 1898: Garden Cities of Tomorrow, London.

– Harvey D., 1990: The Crisis of Modernity, Il Saggiatore, Milan.

– Hillman J., 2011: “American Psyche” interview in La Repubblica, 13/3/2011.

– IUCN (the World Conservation Union) 1994: Guidelines for Protected Area Management Categories, Gland:.

—2003, Vth World Parks Congress: Benefits beyond Boundaries, Durban.

– Lefebvre H., 1970: The Right to the City, Marsilio, Padua.

-Magris C., 1997: Microcosms, Garzanti ed., Cernusco s.n..

– McHarg J, 1966 : ‘Ecological Determinism’. , in FF.Darling, J.P.Milton, ed., Future Environments of North America, The National History Press, Garden City, New York

– Magnaghi A., 1998: Il territorio degli abitanti, Dunod, Milan;

—2010: Manifesto of the Society of Territorialists (draft in progress).

– Marsh G.P. 1864: Man and Nature, Ch. Scribner, New York

– Mazza L. 1990: “Il suolo ineguale”, Urbanistica n.98, 1990.

–Raffestin C., 1977: Paysage et territorialité, Cahiers de Géographie de Québec, vol.21, septembre-décembre.

-Schama S.,1997: Landscape and Memory, Mondadori, Milan

– Secchi B., 1990: ‘Tre Piani’, in Urbanistica n.98, 1990;

—-, 2011: ‘The new urban question’, in CRIOS no.1/2011.

-Sen A., 2006: Identity and violence, Laterza, Bari.

-Tiezzi E., 1998: ‘Natural capital between evolution and conservation’, Oikos No 4/98.

– Touraine A. 2008: ‘This is how our universal values die’, LaRepubblica, 22/2/2008.

– UNESCO, 1972: Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, Paris.

– UNESCO, 2009: Investing in Cultural Diversity and Inter-culture Dialogue, Gland.

– von Humboldt A., 1860: Cosmos. Saggio di una descrizione fisica del mondo, Venice.

-von Petz U., 2004: “On provenance”, Criticism of Urban Rationality, no. 16/2004 Alinea, Naples.

– Zagrebelsky G., 2008: ‘Values and Rights’, La Repubblica, 22/2/2008.