UNIVERSITY OF CAMERINO – SEMINAR TRANSITION ISSUES 

1.A transition phase?

The news and images of the terrible tragedy in Japan 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 and largely inadequate. No less difficult are the attempts to bring back to a unitary interpretation, even in the light of the Thomian theory of catastrophes, 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 tries to associate interpretation with prediction: ‘in the dark discern the future’.

But are we really going through ‘the phase of great risks’ (Scalfari 2011)? Is 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’ really not coincidental? This is certainly not the place to answer questions like these. But even if we focus our attention 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 of public interest.

During 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. Luigi Mazza, in a lucid analysis in Urbanistica (n.98, 1990), taking up a note by Bernardo Secchi (Casabella n.530, 1986), observed how “the social question to which urban planners traditionally gave an answer would have changed, no longer a ‘general question’, but a problem of minorities; urban planners would not have noticed this, and by pursuing a now non-existent ‘general question’ they would have aggravated the system of inequalities instead of attenuating it”. General problems such as those related to the relationship between the state and the market in the construction of land, 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 dealing with 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 such as 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.

More than twenty years later, one can ask oneself whether these observations are still valid, whether the urban question still constitutes or once again constitutes the problematic framework with which planning must confront itself. And if the way out of 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 deficiencies 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 the 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.

In attempting to offer some answers to these questions, one cannot ignore an almost banal observation, which concerns the intersection of the urban question with the ‘environmental question’ in the strict sense of the term. This latter expression evokes an inextricable tangle of problems, risks and fears, but also hopes, questions and expectations that have become increasingly important for contemporary society in the second half of the last century. On the one hand, in fact, the processes of urbanisation and territorial transformation have accelerated and amplified the shattering of the ecosphere, multiplying the inequalities and imbalances that require specific attention and therefore specific ‘projects’. The emphasis on diversity (which, at the international level, has progressively shifted from the biological sphere -the subject of the Rio agreements in 1992- to the bio-cultural sphere to which Unesco and the World Conservation Union have still recently drawn attention), the search for identity values (on which the European Landscape Convention itself focuses its recommendations: CoE, 2000), the claiming of new citizenship rights (which include the defence of one’s own peculiarities), the political and socio-cultural prominence given to local development (which pervades the declarations and policy acts of public administrations at all levels), are some of the fundamental traits of the changes that took place in those decades, which push much more than before, to “make space inhomogeneous and to define differences within it” (Secchi, ibid.). But on the other hand, the explosion of environmental risks and the ‘leap in scale’ of most environmental, economic and social problems (which are less and less treatable on a local scale, and increasingly require actions and control apparatuses on a regional, national and above all international level), re-propose the great themes of trans-scalar integration of public regulatory actions, of the great narratives and ‘big pictures’ on which overall strategies are based (just think of infrastructure systems). Emblematic, in this sense, is the theme of ‘global change’ and the boundless set of activities and policies that should counteract or mitigate its undesirable effects.

2. Places, networks and landscapes in the ongoing transition

The great transition in which we are engaged is not only about the real changes in the contemporary world, but also about 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 the one recently proposed by the newly founded ‘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 and 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.

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.

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 the agrarian landscapes inherited from centuries of history, bent natural dynamics to the often indecipherable logic of urban expansion and settlement dispersion, “, dismantled the ecological networks (ditches, canals, hedges and trees, etc.), precious guardians of the diversity of the countryside.), precious guardians 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.

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 of contemporary scientific thought that seems to be changing the sense of human presence in the world. 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 an unceasing 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). Their ability to preserve their identity characteristics depends, no less than on the ‘operational closures’ of local systems, on their openness to change and thus on their ability to look out effectively on the networks of relations operating in the territorial context, at the various scales.

It is here that the relationship between local and universal values becomes concrete. In international scenarios, the overriding reference to supra-local value systems is also under discussion today. Indeed, on the one hand, the retreat of universal values, which are threatened or attacked by current development models, leads to 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’. Although identity claims are certainly not exempt from autistic closures and bitter conflicts (the ‘armed identities’), it is in local cultural systems that universal values take root, as demonstrated 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). Thought of as an embankment against the loss or regression of universal values, the defence of the thousands of World Heritage sites scattered across all 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).

The tension between natural and cultural values, between local and universal values, inevitably evokes the relationship between places and networks. Places and networks 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 promoted by the Council of Europe in 2000. 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’ (Cattaneo 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 social centrality pushes us to interpret them in 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 no less than to tourists and visitors.

3. The rearticulation of urban centrality.

In particular, it is the historic urban landscape, which composes properly urban forms with peri-urban fringes of ‘urban countryside’ (Donadieu 2006), that increasingly attracts (as the Vienna Memorandum already noted in 2005) visitors, residents and capital. In the transition towards the society of culture and knowledge, and in the face of the homologising pressures brought about by globalisation processes, the role of centrality is less and less entrusted to strictly economic and functional relations (the ‘central’ functions of the tertiary and quaternary sectors) and increasingly 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 Unesco documents (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 all attention to the distinctive features, rules of coherence and specific qualities of contemporary urbanity.

This is what is at stake: the urban centrality and its meaning for contemporary society, as a specific level of urbanity, the ultimate essence of that ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1970) 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. From 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 what emerged in the criticism of urban sprawl in recent decades, which must be rethought 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.

4. The new role of free spaces

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.

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 assume a denser and more complex meaning, integrating nature and culture by connecting different resources and values. There is a growing need to build new ‘environmental infrastructures’ capable of innervating the entire territory, playing a supporting role no less important than that traditionally assigned to transport, communications or energy networks. But this need 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. Parks and landscapes, new alliances

Far from being able to close in on sectorial horizons and 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 ‘things’ 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 appearing 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. Different causes converge in the crisis we are going through, which relate to the weakening and inadequacy of the institutional and governmental apparatuses, but also to the lack of confidence 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.

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 relentless 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 more than a quarter of it is covered and thus more than 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 art.12 L.394, which entrusts to the Park Plans a “substitutive” role with respect to any other plan, and art…. of the Code … which instead attributes to the Landscape Plans a sort of primacy with respect to the Park Plans as well.

In the light of the above considerations, there seems to be a double need for integration, of nature and landscape policies with land policies. An ambitious research programme in this sense, with the whole of Europe as its field of attention, was presented in Barcelona as part of the IUCN Congress (Gambino…). The alliance between parks and landscapes can only find common ground in the spatial context and in an authentically project-oriented perspective. The “territory project” (Magnaghi 1998) has long been indicated 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 (ANCSA1960) assigned the Regulatory Plan the task of outlining the ‘overall actions’ necessary for the redevelopment of historic centres. Many other problems concerning 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.

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The text partly takes up the author’s presentation at the ANCSA International Conference on ‘Actuality of the Historic Territory’ in Bergamo in 2011. 

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