Who takes on the task of caring for the landscape in a post-rural society, when the mountains are abandoned, and the centre of towns no longer has any identity value for its inhabitants but for others, with short-lived and continually replaced presences?
I hear the phrase ‘care of the landscape’ and I am reminded of the days in late spring, in the mountains, when as a child I used to ‘help’ the corvées that mobilised entire villages to restore paths and canals, arrange terracing, clear meadows and pastures. They were collective actions that reproduced the behaviour and customs of Easter cleaning on a grand scale: everyone tidied up their land as they did their rooms and stables after winter hibernation.
The house and the land were considered ‘naturally’ heritage: the former family, the latter communal. It was obvious to take care of the upkeep of both, it being clear that heritage was needed to function, not for it to constitute income, but for it to remain efficient as a productive tool. Essential. In the days of rural communities one cared for one’s land, just as in the village a carpenter kept his tools sharpened, or fifty years ago a traveller serviced his car and today a hacker updates his files. The difference, which is very important, is that the territory is a common good, and no one dreams of privatising it: try asking a seaman about the idea of selling beaches….
The attention of communities to the functionality of the land is complementary to a sense of the landscape that reassures and stabilises, that provides shared values, signals for the collective memory to be handed down to the children. The farmers’ own landscape has a syntax based on minute but firm, long-lasting signs that tell of events that are familiar to them. They are a memory of the difficult relationship with nature (the chapels on the edge of the alluvial areas, the ‘devil’s’ bridge, the untouchable wood because it protects from the avalanche); they emphasise the skilful ‘location’ of the settlement (the bell tower visible from all over the countryside, the road dividing the slope of arable land from the irrigated plain, the nucleus of fishermen’s houses coloured to indicate the landing creek); they highlight the fundamental infrastructures (the rows of vines on the edge of the irrigation or drainage network, the walls of the terracing into which the access roads are artfully inserted, the avenue – the only one with a symbolic role – leading to the noble estate, the shrine or the cemetery).
Other aspects of the sense of the traditional rural landscape are paradoxically entrusted precisely to the absence of signs: in particular, the sense of security provided by the common good is so implicit that it does not need to be visible. The traditional village has no fences, even the cadastre is oral and often the terms have been lost, the common functions (the ovens, fountains, warehouses, mills) are housed in buildings of little emergence, except for the church, which belongs to an ‘imported’ symbolic system and is therefore codified .
It is the landscape of the village and the city that needs signs: the scenography of gates, designed architecture, symbolic public spaces. It is a need that derives from exchange, from the necessary co-presence of ‘outsiders’ with inhabitants, from the intercultural basis that is implicit in the urban system, even the traditional one, based on trade. There is a need for signs because the city is at the opposite end of the self-referential rural world, far from the Tao’s maxim ‘blessed is the peasant who looks out from his own side at the inhabitants of the other village on the opposite side, greets them and is greeted in return, and has never been to see them’, where it is thought that all the world is a country, and that therefore there is no need to move or represent the landscape.
In Europe today, we are all citizens, starting with our gaze and behaviour: even in the remotest countryside we represent ourselves, we send plans of our country houses to web portals, we take possession of the rural landscape by photographing it in every direction. We are more explorers than inhabitants, we scout more than stay, we engage more in representation than substance.
But even of the forma mentis in which the rhetoric of the traditional city has developed, we have forgotten some fundamental aspects: we no longer think in terms of the common good (that sense of collective enterprise that still gives its name to the institution of government of the Italian city); we are not interested in public space, neither as planners nor as users; we do not take into account the duration of the objects that make up the urban landscape, but are only mobilised by novelties, transformations, events.
But above all, the fundamental link that held the inhabitant and the producer together was broken: the countryside and the city were the cultural property of the communities that inhabited them because they were felt to be the product of work that continued for many generations. The sense of territorial heritage was reinforced by the continuity of skills and the sharing of operational methods: caring for the fields and the city was an important segment of the fundamental production process in the pre-industrial world. It was a world endowed with a collective knowledge and ability to ‘take charge’ that was consolidated over the centuries and constituted the identity of the peasantry and of those ancient cities that we admire today.
Today, even the permanent inhabitants are only users, farmers in control of an entire production cycle are rare. Those few continue the tradition of maintaining the land they use, but obviously this is not enough. In the industrial and post-industrial world there is a lack of reasons for communities to feel involved in the care of the landscape for the abandoned rural territory (by now too distant from the widespread needs), for the city full of temporary city-users (by now with uninvolved guest cultures and behaviour), for the endless suburbs (by now the residence of almost everyone, but where people live unwillingly).
So the lack of care for the landscape is not the product of modern sloth or some other social subjectivity, to be remedied with a few good rules and reminders of the ethics of sustainability. Rather, it is one of the harmful outcomes of a profound structural process, which for at least a century has been irreversibly modifying Western society, uprooting it from the territories, which are no longer considered as means of production of communities and therefore no longer cared for.
Today, having lost the connection between territory and daily operations, we think of maintenance as a due act of the state towards local communities: for example, hydrogeological safety is increasingly compared to border defence. Defence is considered by even the most liberalist ideologies to be one of the central state’s own issues, but democracies insist on the people’s army as a guarantee against coup d’état temptations. The advancing hypothesis of mercenary armies to fulfil the task of defence seems dangerous when the memory of dictatorships is fresh. The same sense of ethical unease should be felt when we think of tackling the maintenance of the territory with state care, with the Civil Defence acting urgently, ex post, and with special powers.
But by now, the ideology of ‘I pay (taxes?) and I want to be served’ dominates, affecting issues that directly concern our house, and implicitly renouncing control over processes, insuring us against damage without preventing it. Thus we do not realise that we are abdicating cultural ownership of the basic resource constituted by the land, ownership that also implies responsibility, as summarised in the Gospel parable of the talents. This abdication is generated and generates a process of ethical and political degradation that directly affects the fundamental nexus of identity, the one that is the backbone of Ulysses’ voyage, which gives a relevant value to the sense of “proper” landscape, to the relationship (cultural before than economic and functional) between living and places.
Therefore, today we must reinvent not only the operational methods of landscape sustainability, but above all identify the new reference values so that landscape care is recognised as a process of widespread interest, worthy of systematic investment in energy and time.
But both in terms of the collective assumption of responsibility and the systematic nature of investments, the crisis has revealed a profound weakness, perhaps more Italian than European, that is paralysing today: individualism and short-sightedness with respect to the future limit the forces that can be counted on, reduce the degree of ‘virality’ of initiatives, especially when it comes to long-term commitments. For 40 centuries, the landscape has relied on the dedication of entire populations that handed down the good practices of care and cultivation from father to son; today the capacity for commitment is, if anything, individual, it struggles to find partners and (therefore) lasts a few years, if it goes well.
Therefore, the problem moves upstream, and to tackle it we need to find socio-cultural conditions and topics of interest that can be proposed as breeding grounds, where it is easier to host and grow micro-enterprises that invest in the landscape, where the virtuous contagion of these initiatives is more likely to propagate, where there are widespread expectations of change that provoke the relaunching of work started by others and the development over time of enterprises.
This is not utopia: it happened, for example, for historic centres, in Italy, during the last generation, when on the basis of a very few isolated experiments and calls by intellectuals and scholars, a virtuous process of valorisation was progressively triggered, which in 30 years led thousands of municipalities to rediscover their landscape and cultural identity in the historic core, recovered and often revitalised. This has happened, in this generation, to the Slow food project, which Petrini has been running for a quarter of a century and which is showing an exceptional capacity for territorial expansion and entrepreneurial involvement. In the Italian panorama, reluctant to any radical innovation, the Slow food manifesto has not only found supporters and practitioners, but has broadened the terms of the theme of food, has drawn the necessary consequences from virtuous behaviour in productive practices on the territory, and is beginning to affect the landscape, for now rural, precisely from the maintenance and sustainability of the resource, the Terra Madre.
Socio-cultural experiences of this calibre show that far-reaching processes can be triggered, but it is necessary to focus on the cardinal themes of the entire process of collective and lasting ‘taking charge’ of the territory. Attention must be focused on the primary, basic aspects of our country’s landscape resources, and the widespread sensitivity that is still present must be brought to the fore. It is only in these conditions of cultural context and ‘social demand’ that the reasons for convenience and interest mature, so that many public and many private subjects will commit themselves with continuity to enhancing the territory and seeking positive feedback for these actions in the common sense of the landscape.
On the other hand, there seems to be a change in the general attitude towards the landscape, in its psychological and cultural components: the prevailing aesthetic enjoyment of past generations (starting from the ‘purevisibilism’ of Croce’s memory) is being overlaid by a different way of ‘doing’, more interactive and lively, which claims to have more complete sensory experiences, to act in places. This activism takes on a dangerous edge when it becomes heavy pressure in delicate sectors (the queue to climb an Alpine peak, the congestion of pedestrians in the alleyways of the ancient city, the extinction of ‘niche’ fish products due to the demand resulting from their slow-food launch). But the same cultural impulse also becomes the source of a fundamental volunteerism for widespread programmes of territorial care, satisfying the pleasure of living with forms and modalities that appear new, but are in fact the most essential ones: going back to farming, plants, animals, children and the conditions that make a long-term project possible. The oldest modality, but one that seems newest in a generation born under the sign of individualism, is that of collaboration around projects, forming groups with a shared sense of common goods that is not abstract but tangible, equipped with know-how and specific skills.
This is a complex process, which fortunately moves from a situation of the country in motion, full of cues and territorial initiatives, albeit micro and not very coordinated, of which it is necessary to find the appropriate cultural and institutional opportunities and spaces to trigger agglutination, as were identity monuments for the enhancement of historic centres and good eating for qualified agriculture.
Looking at the deep-seated reasons for the discomfort that moved those initiatives, some ideas can be drawn to unite and systemise the widespread activities of awareness-raising and enhancement on landscape issues.
The areas of interest of many recent initiatives that move from the crises of the two operational pillars of territorial government: that of town planning and that of local development, are good areas for experimentation.
Traditional town planning, after having hosted the innovations first of urban recovery and then of redevelopment, for which it was in no way prepared, now measures its own failure with the theme of the suburbs, which were produced precisely in the perversions of classic regulatory plans, and which do not seem to be able to find a remedy except with a drastic change of approach. The containment of soil consumption and the consolidation of a network of protected peri-urban areas seem to be going in the right direction, but we all know that the calming of the building fury in our cities is due not so much to a new and effective generation of rules as to the deflation of the real estate bubble, which in the western world has effectively blocked all building sites for five years. In this unnatural calm (which we fear is similar to that of the eye of the storm), initiatives of a completely different kind are moving spontaneously: from movements for urban gardens to the valorisation of agriculture close to the built environment, from the recovery of disused or reclaimed areas to the formation of centres for cultural events and events in hitherto marginal and unknown areas, to the search for bicycle and pedestrian accessibility for green areas and cultural heritage.
These are local groups, often united around initiatives whose common denominator is the search for services and open spaces for leisure time, mostly in peripheral and peri-urban areas. It is a demand that forms in the larger conurbations, where citizens suffer from a lack of relations with open landscapes.
The pressure on peri-urban areas increases when the crisis reduces mobility and thus the forced weekend behaviour on the motorways: thus more citizens return to appreciate green areas, cultural or food and wine destinations outside the city, and itineraries within reach by bicycle. If this trend consolidates, the collective revaluation of open areas on the urban edge is perhaps the best antagonist to the blind urbanisation pressure that has dominated the allocation of land values over the last 60 years.
The whole system of rents is rebalanced if a sense of the quality of urban life takes shape in the widespread culture that includes open spaces, which become an important component of the city, like services and infrastructure networks. Open windows onto green spaces become a factor in the appreciation of housing and offices; ‘soft’ and safe accessibility becomes a qualitative element for elderly or minor inhabitants and reduces the costs of daily life in the city, as does the spread of low-equipment loisirs; wooded patches, flooded areas and permeable belts reduce, especially for the nearest buildings, the harmful effects of climate change and the unsustainable urban footprint.
It is a new type of urbanisation services that are needed, that the mass of citizens are willing to pay for (in money or in labour and entrepreneurship) but that are not generated by themselves: they require a careful design of the Plan, new alliances between producers and users and between public and private to achieve adequate management efficiencies. It is not enough to set aside a few undeveloped plots: they must be integrated on the one hand with the built-up edge and on the other with the agri-natural system of the surrounding open countryside, ensure a minimum of infrastructure and above all design maintenance and care in a sustainable and lasting way.
The lack of attention to post-intervention management aspects is an all-Italian evil, where a tradition of good maintenance practices and public-private collaboration is lacking. We must learn from the many northern European or American experiences, which have shown for decades that peri-urban land care can be implemented to a large extent by the users themselves organised in cooperation with local farmers, at minimal cost to the public body but under its monitoring and control.
Local development programmes in disadvantaged rural areas suffer more dramatically from the crisis than plans in more densely urbanised areas. In marginal contexts, the lack of care and maintenance of the landscape is only one of the harmful effects of the processes of abandonment that have been demolishing mountain settlement in the country for several decades. Added to these has been the freezing of local finance, which has meant the drying up of public resources that assisted weak territories and even the destructuring of the institutions of the vast area, from the mountain communities to the provinces. Even in the very few cases where a new offer of products (almost everywhere tourism) has matured, the crisis, also affecting the spending capacity of the citizens who make up the potential demand, almost always prevents the new facilities from reaching the minimum survival threshold.
Rare are the places where the crisis brings out the possibility of utilising neglected resources, not because these are lacking (on the contrary), but because of the territory’s lack of a minimum capacity to sustain valorisation programmes without robust help in a long start-up phase, help that can only come from the towing capacity of public investments. On the other hand, it is evident that the hypothesis of beautiful souls, that the abandonment of the mountains will favour a salvific return of nature, is only realistic over very long periods of time. In the decades in between, where rural care of the land is lacking, the hydrogeological disaster is added to the loss of housing and productive resources and the increasing inaccessibility of places.
In this structurally critical situation, signs and affections seem to resist on the territory, more than the physical structure. The landscape remains beloved (especially by the families of former inhabitants, now as tourists) and the role of the emergence of signs, for the urban and non-urban gaze, becomes important once again: one notices buildings that are out of place or out of scale, one appreciates views in which the traditional landscape is intact or those with calibrated inserts of modernity. Small wars break out over the risk of adulteration of the landscape and No committees arise; mayors often find themselves having to mediate or take part in ideological battles over aesthetic issues that take on the level of passionate ethical clashes.
In this difficult season for the development strategies of marginal territories, a few virtuous examples emerge in communities that have been able to make a flag with spot interventions, indicating with signs of liveliness the possibility of alternative routes, of cultural and sometimes ethical offers, attractive to citizens disillusioned with the urban environment.
These are often small municipalities or peripheral districts that have been able to enhance their resources with good architectural projects, while in a few cases we are beginning to see the positive results of more structural and strategic works, which move from the revitalisation of the landscape led by new-generation producer groups and integrated management programmes, the result of collaboration between several public and private entities.
The common denominator of these experiences is the prevalence of managerial and operational aspects over formal ones, which are in any case not neglected, but are a support and not an objective of the intervention. At the basis of the positive assessment is therefore not only the architectural qualities and the enhancement of the landscape, but above all the economic sustainability of the experiments and their effectiveness in generating local development that is not ephemeral, in terms of employment, tourist attractiveness and typical products.
An interesting observatory of this type of initiative is the European Landscape Award, whose selections in Italy have highlighted the powerful growth of experiments that start from the peripheries of the territory but are outlining a model of behaviour of great interest, both for local authorities and for the subjects of the third sector, now irreplaceable protagonists of programmes of territorial care. The production model of the companies confiscated from the mafia by Libera, the urban redevelopment of Carbonia, and the management autonomy of the Val di Cornia Parks, winners in the Italian selection in the last editions of the Landscape Award, have been recognised as exemplary interventions by the Council of Europe, for the experimentation activated and the ethical power of the proposal.
