¹ introductory speech at the conference The Sense of Landscape, Turin – 1998

I show my pupils fragments of a landscape
where it is impossible for them to find their way.
(L. Wittgenstein , 1946)²

The term ‘sense’, used in the title of these days of work, heralds, in its ambiguity, the attempt to confront that which is elusive, barely describable, and suppositional in the landscape. The ‘sense’ of this seminar manifests the intention to confront that strong link between our sensitivity and our reason that emerges like an iceberg in every occasion of ‘listening’ to the landscape. ³

I anticipate right away that we are interested in the product of these aspects on the technique, on the practice of the activities that constitute the landscape: from its fruition, more or less educated, to its project, more or less powerful.

For example, we are interested in understanding how to carry out an investigation of the landscape that accounts for the values and preferences that it generates in current behaviour: what motivates the gaze of the turian, what signs bear witness to the roots for the inhabitant, what alterations generate discomfort or offence to the ‘common sense of the landscape’.

For example, we are interested in understanding how we distinguish in the continuum of perception the elements that make up the image of the landscape that is consolidated in our memory, that we can talk about, that enters into our cultural and sentimental heritage: is it a structure of symbols? Is it an articulated sign system? Is it a holistic synthesis that we absorb with sensitive and uncoded capillaries?

Furthermore: when do we realise that we have moved from one landscape to another, where do the effects of a set of landscape factors cease, what ‘unity’, what ‘scale’ can we refer to in order to speak of the landscape in which we live or which we are passing through?

For example, we are interested in understanding whether we can govern the transformations of the landscape and how design approaches such as protection, enhancement, redevelopment can be applied to this or that ‘landscape unit’, or to this or that sedimented testimony of history, or to this or that specificity of the relationship between nature and human activities.

And this is just an elementary florilegium of the problems that confront us every time we deal with the landscape; or rather, of the questions that intrigue us every time we deal with the territory and now also every time we deal with architecture.

But questions of this kind also reveal the profound need for an epistemo-logical reconnaissance, for a discussion of principles, without which we will continue to apply imported methodologies that are clearly inadequate to provide satisfactory answers.

In short, even if we do not want to sink the subject into the theoretical and abstract, there is still a need for a re-examination of the paradigms with which aesthetic versus scientific judgement has recently been approached, a re-assessment of the ‘primitives’ with which we associate⁴ territory and landscape⁵ (and the other gender pairs substance/form, nature/culture, identity/difference), a qualification of the semiotic tools that can be used to decipher the text in the contextual continuum.⁶

² from L. Wittgenstein – Pensieri diversi – Frankfurt 1980 (tr.it.Milano 1984).
³ The term ‘listening’ refers to the splendid entry in the Einaudi Encyclopaedia edited by R.Barthes and R.Havas, in which we distinguish
⁴ between ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’, attributing to listening not only ‘the intentional act of hearing’, but ‘actually, the power, almost the function, of exploring unknown terrain’. It is interesting to note the difference between ‘listening’, which corresponds to hearing, and ‘observing’, which corresponds to seeing: both the former is synthetic and the bearer of new meanings, and the latter is analytical and the bearer of clarifications of meaning.
⁵ See R. Bodei – Le forme del bello – Il Mulino 1995 and C. Socco – Il paesaggio imperfetto – Tirrenia stampatori 1998 ‘the landscape as a “reflection of phenomenal reality”, … medium of the relationship between nature and culture, … primary referent, for man, of his territorial action’ in E.Turri – Il paesaggio come teatro -Marsilio 1998 (p.28)
⁶ It is indicative of the change in lexicon and structuralism manifested by semiologists (from Barthes to Caprettini,) when they move from a properly communicative object to ‘inquiries into nature and substance (Caprettini, in Segni, testi, communication – Utet 1997)’ and one realises that “anyone who wants to trace a semiotics of the city should be at the same time a semiologist (spe cialist of signs), a geographer, historian, urban planner, architect and probably a psychoanalyst” (Barthes, Semiology and Urbanism in L’avventura semiologica).

The array of contributions from the most diverse disciplines that have converged on the subject over the last few years can be grouped together on the basis of epistemology or on the intentions of those who propose them, but in each case there is a risk of accrediting only a different face of the landscape, the one discovered inductively by the very criterion that explores it. So, in order to avoid presenting the multiplicity of investigation and evaluation criteria as a tautological catalogue, in which each one justifies itself, let us try an inverse procedure here: let us try to highlight certain properties of the landscape and see if we can find the capacity to explore those properties in the most attentive investigation and design techniques.

What we are most interested in are the stimulating properties of the landscape, which disturb those who seek cer tainties with scientific categories or order with design techniques, those which oblige us to explore in complexity, to understand in polysemy, to engage in non-possessive design activity.

So here we do not seek to define the landscape as the object of our investigations and our actions, but rather we outline its potential as a provocative agent that induces re-flexion in those who observe it, or rather listen to it, enjoy its feeling.

If, today, we succeed in assessing the properties of the landscape that resist a reductive attitude, in which only those aspects pertaining to a sense already codified by analytical disciplines or predefined design styles are cut out, perhaps in those properties we will discover new directions for a more general research, which works on the edges of scientific knowledge and rational design, which begins to orient itself in an enormous, little-explored reservoir of potential: that which motivates the desire, the imagination, the memory of our inhabiting the world.

The landscape has always offered itself to be traversed by the most diverse criteria of interpretation, from the subjective gaze of the artist, more or less condescending or seducing power, to the objectivising lens of the scientist, more or less obsessed by ideological phantasms such as following a model of in dagine or faithfully reproducing ‘reality’. To each of these observers, the landscape, in its abysmal co-presence of form and content, of history and nature, of living events and their dead sediment, has offered specific aspects that are absolutely convincing for the validity of their own optics, their own interpretative framework. Not only that, but the landscape has allowed itself to be traversed far and wide by applying disparate paradigms and analytical criteria. Every ecologist, historian, anthropologist, geologist, painter, scholar, photographer can think he can describe ‘the’ landscape, and is stopped by a doubt not because reality in certain points seems opaque and unreadable to him by his instrument, but because he sees himself beside, looking at that same place, one or two hundred different interpreters with different instruments, all discovering and recounting their ‘essential structure’ of the ‘same’ (?) landscape. The driven hospitality that the landscape offers its investigators induces in them the

⁷ The Receptive is a term borrowed from the I King: it is a particular figure in the Book of Changes that is formed when the oracular Hexagram 7 is all made up of broken lines. ‘The broken line corresponds to the original, shadowy, tender, receptive force of yin. The quality of the sign is dedication, its image the Earth. It is the perfect counterpart of the Creative: the contrapositive, not the contra rio; a complement, not a struggle. It is nature in front of spirit, earth in front of sky, space in front of time, the feminine-maternal in front of the masculine-paternal’. (from the version edited by R.Wilhelm and introduced by C.Jung , in Italian published by Astrolabe 1950)
⁸ cf. R. Gambino – Ambiguità feconda del paesaggio – M.Quaini – Paesaggi tra fattualità e finzione – Cacucci 1994

infidelity syndrome, which in the sentimental system generates jealousy and in the system of knowledge generates Relativity, the rediscovered Complexity not only of the object of investigation, but of the very matrices of investigation, in its epistemology. In recent years the landscape has become⁹ one of the ideal places where the investigators of complexity gather; the subject attracts them precisely because of the characteristics that for a long time have made it impractical for research: the fascination of the e xploration of the borderlands of meaning between text and context, between subjective and objective, between reason and feeling. . This ‘sense’ of the landscape, which prompts one to take on its complexity as an object of investigation and a tool not only for knowledge but also for decision-making, is only rarely approached by those who proceed in their research with an analytical scientific method, which allows for extraordinary grounding but tends, by its very matrix, to overlook that which is not explained by the disciplinary assumptions of departure. Almost in every case, the investigator of the complexity of the country works transversally with respect to the disciplines, highlighting aspects that are widespread but little investigated due to their unwillingness to systematic analysis and their encroachment into the subjective field of sociology, anthropology and cultural analysis.

The focus of the investigation and debate in recent years has not been on the landscape itself, as an object, but rather on its representations, its ideologies, the collective way in which the subjectivity of its users feels it, deposits it in their memory, recounts it.¹¹

On the other hand, the ‘contents’ of the landscape have been investigated by powerful developments of scientifically established disciplines: geomorphology, ecology, but also history, sociology and economics have increasingly been applied to the territory and have explained the evolution of the physical support of the landscape. It is precisely this flourishing of scientific studies, which confine their field of action to aspects of content, that is delineating by exclusion the specific nature of the theme ‘landscape’, that which is located in the materials and products of the activity of synthesis between the object ‘territory’ and those who read it. In this perspective, the crux of which is the interpreting activity of the user, there is no doubt that we are studying aspects of the culture (or if you like, the anthropology) of the territory. That is to say, studying, enhancing and transforming the landscape means examining and acting on both the cultural aspects deposited in places and those of the gaze that rests on places. And while we could discuss which places have a relevant depo site of cultural values (distinguishing them, for example, from other places that are more relevant from the point of view of the deposit of natural environmental values), it is indisputable that we are only dealing with culture when we examine the criterion by which we appreciate a natural place or by which we escape from a desertification caused by a disaster.

⁹ cf. E. Morin – The Ways of Complexity – The Challenge of Complexity – Feltrinelli 1985, where the characteristics of complexity are listed: the irreducibility of chance or disorder; the ineliminability of particularisms given by singularity, locality, temporality; the complication of interactions between the components; the complementarity of such notions of order, disorder and organisation; organisation as an entity made up of the parts but superior to them; the ‘hologramatic principle’, whereby a small part contains all the information that the whole has the recursive organisation, whereby each type of part produces other types of parts and is produced by those same types; the crisis of clear and closed explanatory concepts; the integration of the subjective observer in the observation system; the possibility of co-presence in an explanatory hypothesis of a theoretical model with another model that is contradictory to it.
¹⁰ F. Farinelli has long emphasised the constitutive ambiguity of the term ‘landscape’ in its various European linguistic meanings and the importance of this ambiguity in the founding structure of Humboldt’s approach, the basis of modern interest in the landscape. V. F.Farinelli – The witticism of landscape in Casabella 575/576 1991 and F.Farinelli – History of the geographical concept of landscape – in Landscape image and reality – Electa 1981
¹¹ from D. Cosgrove – Realtà sociale e paesaggio simbolico – Beckerham 1984 (tr.it. Unicopli 1990) to Ph.Joutard – L’invenzione del Monte Bianco – Paris 1986 (tr.it Einaudi, 1993), to A.Corbin – L’invenzione del mare – Paris 1988 (tr.it. Marsilio1990, to R.Dubbini – Geografie dello sguardo – Einaudi 1994, to S.Shama – Paesaggio e memoria – 1995 (tr.it. Mondadori 1997), just to mention some of the most recent studies on the subject, starting from specific periods or types of landscape.
¹² Cf. One of the starting points of this direction, now shared by many, was the Lausanne conference in 1991 ‘Landscape and the Crisis of Legibility’ (proceedings edited by L. Mondada, F. Panese, O. Sodestrom ed.Université de.Lausanne 1992), summarised in particular in the concluding speech by the editors: ‘L’effet paysager’.

The double track of the ‘cultural’ meaning, which fully invests the subject and to a large extent the object of landscape is no longer a subtle question of the philosophy of knowledge as much as a matter of political strategy, of administrative directive: it is, for example, to be found in the resolution of the Council of Europe (no. 53 of 1997), which defines landscape as ‘a determined portion of territory as perceived by man, the appearance of which results from the action of human and natural factors and their interrelationships’, and which applies to this landscape the commitment to ‘legally consecrate it as a common good, a foundation of the cultural and local identity of populations, an essential component of the quality of life and an expression of the richness and diversity of the cultural, ecological, social and economic heritage’.

The fruitfulness of the different approaches to landscape is not only appreciable according to the epi stemological debate that positively values complexity, but also because it is reflected in the practical necessities of the techniques and policies that work on landscape. Or rather, on the techniques and policies that work on the territory and that must now take the landscape as one of their paradigms of reference. We are in fact at the precise juncture in which, having verified that the protection and valorisation of the landscape as such are not yet consolidated, it is required to ‘systematically take into account13 the landscape in policies on land management, town planning and in cultural, environmental, agricultural, social and economic policies and in other sectoral policies that may have a direct and indirect effect on the landscape’.¹⁴

Since it is evident that a transversal theme to the whole of land management policies must necessarily interfere with many consolidated disciplinary systems, traditionally aimed at different objectives, which rely on different methodologies, criteria and languages, we must consider that the ambition of the Council of Europe is to use landscape to achieve a dialogue not only between countries and cultures of different European populations, but also (and above all) between segments of science and land management that have hitherto not been very communicative.

The landscape is therefore institutionally recognised as a place of interdisciplinary as well as international elaboration, and this not only in a cultural perspective but more concretely in a directive of management policies to be activated. In this direction, the role of the interdisciplinary synthesis becomes pre-eminent, both from a methodological and more directly operational point of view: the reference frameworks for decisions will depend on the ‘polytechnic’ capacity to maintain a hierarchy of values appropriate to the situation in the presence of various consolidated evaluation criteria: the naturalistic-environmental one, the strictly perceptive one, the one of cultural potential seen as economic resources, the one of the impacts induced by the functional transformations of the territory. It requires a classic model of intercultural work, which calls for respect for evaluative autonomy within a framework of technical compatibility of the various options: an attitude little practised by scientists (perhaps more so by politicians), but which the landscape urges us to adopt systematically, to make it a method, a technique for strategic decision-making. However, what methodologically seems to be a promising prospect for innovation, in practice still finds many obstacles and strong rigidities: landscape is certainly not the protagonist of territorial investigations nor of local or vast area planning, and above all only rarely does the study of landscape assume from the outset that cardinal role that the complexity method would impose. On the contrary, it occurs in¹⁵ It is becoming increasingly common that in the course of a general spatial survey (mostly for large area plans) a function of interaction between the disciplines emerges as necessary, work on languages and above all on evaluation criteria leading to comparability and the possibility of integrated decision-making. Only in those cases, sometimes, has the ‘sensitive’ landscape been recognised¹⁶ at least as a crucible in which different analytical tools could be made cohesive. In short, if landscape investigation, which brings complexity, does not find adequate scientific citizenship, it is complexity that brings landscape investigation to a fundamental role in the management and synthesis of the plurality of specialised aspects.

But what underlies an interdisciplinary mindset for landscape is far more radical, it is not pro duced by an enlightened directive but on the contrary generates the very concept of interculturality: it is driven by the concrete practice of living that is evolving. In fact, exponentially increased mobility, accessibility broadened by the circulation of images and wealth, the transformation of work and productive sectors are distorting the classical terms of the concept of living, and with them the age-old question of the landscape of the insider and that of the outsider.¹⁷ The very ‘identity of the peoples’ referred to in the Council of Europe resolution is no longer that of the rural, rooted and isolationist world of past generations, just as the eye of the visitor, whether tourist or scholar, is no longer completely foreign, totally lacking in the lexical rules of local things, incapable of pathetic (or practical) connections such as those of those who read their own history in the landscape. A progressive detachment is taking place between the identity of places and that of their inhabitants. The local identity, i.e. of places, is certainly one of the basic values for any criterion of landscape protection: it guarantees its diversity, recognisability, and signalling in the spatial reference system of its inhabitants. But on the other hand, at least in Europe, it is being¹⁸ outlining as a true cultural revolution a process of delocalisation of personal identity, which shifts the references of identity (and among these the landscape in the first place) from a restricted sphere to a much vaster and indefinite network, with considerable potential for complexification and enrichment, in addition to all the inconveniences and incidents of novelty. In this situation, which is the one in which we live, for each one of us the landscape of local identity no longer coincides with our own personal identity, which is also constructed from many other landscapes frequented, discovered, loved also because they bear witness to our presence in other local identities: I ‘feel’ myself to be a contemporary Turinese, Genoese, Provençal and Parisian, insofar as I feel myself to be the cultural owner of those places (that is, I appreciate the sense of inhabiting those landscapes ‘as’ an inhabitant). If the sense of dwelling shifts from a place (a landscape that produces with the local identity also the cultural identity of its inhabitants) to a network of landscapes, which are enjoyed as producers of multiple local identities, then the cultural identity of each of its ‘mobile inhabitants’ will be an intercultural identity, i.e. a sense of self supported by the signs of different codes, of multiple histories, which are all gathered in a positive value, identity, while remaining structurally different. The effort of the relationship¹⁹ intercultural, which in inhabiting European landscapes as Europeans seems to be boldly accomplished, is

¹⁵ Some (few) planners have been complaining about this situation for years, with little audience…. v. Gambino – Landscape plans, an overview – in Urbanistica n.90 1988 and Paesaggio, ambiente territorio – Utet 1996
¹⁶ The tautology ‘sensitive landscape’ adopted in many studies to distinguish landscape from other topics of landscape ‘content’ (from ecology to geomorphology, from history to economics) is already an indication of the difficulty encountered in placing landscape studies in the joint position between studies on materials and those on representation and the cultural role that those same materials, perceived and memorised, play.
¹⁷ see D. Cosgrove – Social Reality and Symbolic Landscape.
¹⁸ On attention to the signs of the space in which one lives see F.La Cecla – Spazio e mente locale – in Pensare altrimenti – Laterza 1987
¹⁹ Many important considerations on these themes are made by psychoanalysts of the Jungian school. Among them, the theme of dwelling, borrowed from Heidegger, and the landscape as a physical/ideological place of its manifestation appears continuously, especially in its discomforts and transformations. See e.g. U.Galimberti – Parole nomadi – Feltrinelli 1997

reveals itself to be difficult whenever the basic cultural diversity is more marked and therefore respect for differences weighs significantly on the maintenance of one’s identity: this is seen, for example, in non-EU migration.²⁰

But, while other cultural aspects are hardened and rendered incommunicative in order to resist the syncretic process that history is spontaneously favouring, to the point of becoming the grounds for conflict in the name of identity, landscapes on the contrary make available an initial mediation, a sort of invitation to make the permanent signs of local identity co-operate (or at least be compatible) with the individual needs to have the cultural ownership of a networked, open territory: an inter-cultural identity.

The landscape is a field of exploration of two opposing desires, identity and otherness: in order to understand its complexity, semiotic analysis must cooperate with holistic feeling From the landscape emerge not only the differences between cultures, but also (and above all) those between the part ordered by reason and the rest, which cannot be explained by a rational attitude. In assessing our relationship to the landscape, we can make the²¹ subjective, in which we exalt not only our role as users but also that of producers of a part, which we magnify even if it is minimal, through the trick of paying attention only to the signs we recognise, i.e. our own. Or we can accept to listen to the ‘other’ component, which in fact always prevails in the landscape, due to the direction of chance, due to the human inability to manage the sedimentation of times, the accidentality of points of view, the situation of the actors (from meteorological to human).

Depending on what we choose to read, we can equally passionately support the thesis of the landscape as a place of identity or the landscape as a place of otherness, of finding oneself or losing oneself. In practice, this is almost never an explicit choice, but rather a matter of behaviours that focus our attention in a more or less dedicated way on the landscape, leaving us more or less free to ‘listen’. They range from the route taken every morning to go to work (in Italy often made by absent-mindedly passing through places that are the destination and image of millions of tourists) to the festive day dedicated to hiking in the mountains, to ‘enjoy’ the landscape.22

However, underlying the practice of dedicating a few hours to the ‘enjoyment’ of the landscape, there remains the complexity of this desire: the landscape is a place of projection of our deepest senses, and is home to many of the antinomies that we use to orient ourselves in the world: certainly the orderly and the chaotic, but also the beautiful and the ugly, the sign-like and the confused.^{23 24}

The activity of orientation in a complex system finds its archetype in man who ‘explores’ the world around him, and (the relationship with) the landscape is the most direct manifestation of this process: the metaphors of paradise and Adamic nomination, those of the one and the ten thousand things of ancient Chinese philosophy, and those of the animistic foundations of the world all rest on the sense of the

²⁰Foreignness and the uncanny (Freud’s unheimlich) see J.Kristeva – Stranieri a se stessi – Paris 1988 (tr.it. Feltrinelli 1990)
²¹ The ‘we’ can indifferently refer to us as men, or to us as Europeans, or to us as Italians, or to us as Torinese from the S. Salvario district: in any case, it illustrates a belonging for which a personal sentiment is considered to belong to the whole group, without the need for technical or political verification.
²² On the modalities of everyday behaviour in relation to the surrounding space and landscape, on the interference between behaviour functional to practical objectives and that ‘apetto all’ascolto’ and on the use of elementary semiotics to move the mind economically in the functional system see P.Castelnovi – La città, istruzioni per l’uso – Einaudi 1980
²³ Aesthetic theories appear to be largely based on judgements on artistic production, but in fact their categories have always been applied to natural phenomena or, as is more often the case, to ‘mixed’ anthropic and non-anthropic phenomena, in which in any case the producer is indifferent, and which are judged by their form; see for an approach: R. Bodei, cit. and for an application to landscape: C. Socco – cit.
²⁴ The hypothesis of a sign-confused antinomy different from ordered-chaotic is conducted here, but is indirectly confirmed by the distinctions induced by Luis Prieto in Essays in Semiotics – Practices, 1991

landscape, almost a substitute, a golem of the creative act: in religions, it is as if God, who has his own identity as a creator, grants one to man as an ordinator (signifier).²⁵ Today, buffeted by the returning wave of disorientation, after the intoxication of global control over the world, the sense of landscape as a support of identity is contrasted with that of landscape²⁶ as otherness: in every landscape a repository of both what we know and what we do not know is revealed.
On the one hand, landscape as a support of identity is a fundamental component of the sense of ‘inhabiting’, responding to a (defensive?) drive that is the appropriation of a place, the reliance on the environment to feel, the attempt to per-manage beyond one’s own time in a context that lasts longer.
But on the other hand, one of the fundamental life drives of man (perhaps only western man? ) is²⁷ that of conquest which, in its simplest and most sensitive version (together with that of the body) is that of the extension in space of its power to ‘inhabit’: conquest which in its elementary form is the exploitation of resources and in its sublimated form is the consciousness of an ability, the knowledge that one can go and return, the acquisition of memory of oneself in a context other than oneself.
Landscape as Identity and as Otherness thus offers two faces of a single structural dynami c of human drives: to consolidate and expand the sense of power of Dwelling. Starting from this antinomian matrix, the more or less complicated itineraries (depending on ideologies) that the landscape imposes between the other antinomian categories of our aesthetic-gnoseological rapport with the world are comprehensible: the beautiful and the ugly, the orderly and the chaotic, the sign-like and the confused. In fact, one can explain the beautiful, the orderly, the sign-like as the fruits of ‘dwelling work’, of ‘making a home’ in the world; the ugly, the chaotic and the confused as the ‘other than oneself’, the ‘uninhabitable’, the ‘inuma no’. In the perspective of the classical world, these latter aspects of the landscape were mostly the place of the ‘sacred’, precisely because of their ‘inhumanity’; in the perspective of today’s world, they are rather an ‘undeciphered text’, the place of the conquest no longer of new physical spaces but of new frontiers of beauty, order, sign.
But these two opposing tensions are not enough to explain the multipolarities of meaning that agitate us when we look at a landscape: there is also their contradiction, the insane desire to ‘dwell in the sacred’, to live a relationship with the environment without the mediation of domesticating apparatuses such as the sense of beauty, of order, and above all without the sense of meaning, trying to overcome the obsessive tension to semicity that reassures us and that is probably the radical intimate of dwelling: naming things, giving a reason for them.
The panic sense, the romantic losing oneself, the belonging rather than possessing is a third drive, removed and repudiated by all gnoseology and almost all aesthetics, but which has certainly always agitated our culture and which persists, in the outcomes of the artistic movements of the last three hundred years, on widespread taste.
Thus, when looking at a landscape, interpretative keys are interwoven that respond to different figures of living: 1, the confirmation of identity through known signs, 2, the search for new trophies of signs in hitherto unexplored territories of otherness, and, the overcoming of the boundary between identity and otherness, the anxiety of the sub-limen, of the loss of classical dwelling powers for a recomposition within a pre-sign nature.

²⁵ In the Latin usage (or of the corresponding Greek or Sanskrit etymata) of ‘explore’, ‘order’ and ‘nominate’ the same intriguing 25 meanings recur: ‘explore’ means to investigate, to establish certainty and to consult the gods; ‘ordino’ is used in the beginning for the threads of the weaving, ‘nomino’ means to distinguish, to distribute according to rules (nomos is the Greek law) and, proberbially, the ‘nomen omen’ (indicating a correspondence between name and symbolic meaning, prognostication)
²⁶ cf. F. La Cecla – Losing oneself. Man without an environment – Laterza, 1988
²⁷ Among the many who have examined the specificity of the model of the West, cf. E. Severino- il Destino della necessità -Adelphi, 1980, in which he investigates, among other things, the etymological roots of key word classes on action and ordering in the classical and prehistoric world

The continuous co-presence of these three drives in our judgement can be read in any artistic or literary attempt to describe the sense of the landscape (i.e. the sense that the landscape provokes). On the contrary, the habit of all of us to feel within ourselves the interaction of a wide range of the ‘senses’ of living makes the case of those who orient their judgement only towards the confirmation of identity, or only towards the search for new signs, or only towards the emotion of the sublime, extremist, ideological, not very comparable with our direct experience.
The isolation of one of these drives is more suited to persuasive communication, to a trend manifesto, than to the ‘comprehensive’ interpretation of the modalities and motivations of current fruition, that which animates widespread action, which provokes at the same time and in a physically delimited con text (such as a large city, for example) apparently incompatible behaviours such as tourist flows, the rootedness of inhabitants in certain sites, the autistic discomfort deriving from the metropolitan ‘anti-sprawl’.
In this complex and dynamic framework, any rigid interpretation is partisan and obtuse: even the all-out defence of local identity as the identity of the inhabitants runs the risk of forcing and overestimating the role of the landscape and the image of the settlements with respect to the cultural well-being of the inhabitants. But both identity and otherness have their own cultural status and emotions, which must be specifically studied in order to understand each of the behaviours they generate with respect to the landscape, especially in a planning perspective, in which these behaviours become the living matter with which one is confronted, which will react in some way to the directions that are expressed.²⁸

How much and how much of our identity is projected into our sense of territory? Or, put another way, what territory do we refer to when we think of ‘our’ place of residence?

To make the strategic incidence of this first question comprehensible, a foreword is necessary.

The theme of identity, like every sign theme, is given by a relational structure, it arises as a difference from…., so much so that in itself identity does not arise: the ‘solitary’ subject has no identity and there²⁹ We only realise our identity when it is in confrontation with something else, when we want to emerge from a context. , to be read as a ‘text’.³⁰

For the landscape, the same process occurs: the community that inhabits it does not ‘feel’ it except when it confronts it with something else, when it has to bring it out to present it to others, when it leaves it; the landscape of Ithaca acquires sign value and becomes a part of the identity only for Ulysses who returns: for Penelope and the Proci, who have stayed behind, the landscape has no meaning.

²⁸ It is important to emphasise the generality of the social body with which one measures oneself, when planning landscape: since one is dealing with a general cultural universe, one has as interlocutor the ‘people’, the entire population, which cannot even be subdivided into inhabitants and tourists. See for example the aforementioned resolution of the Council of Europe, which mentions the procedures of public participation (art.4,c), of mobilisation of public opinion (art.5), of local and regional authorities (art.17)
²⁹ For example, Narcissus falls in love with himself ‘as if he were another’ because his self-consciousness does not entail a representation of the self as a ‘person’ (in the etymological sense), i.e. he has no sign problem, no signifier, no physical and perceptual sense (which does not prevent him from having many other senses).
³⁰ On identity, the essay by G.Paba – Identity and Urban Identity – in Materiali 1/95, periodical of the University of Florence, is very stimulating

So, simplifying, we think of the process of identity as a sign process, which by de finition is a process of ‘desolation’, of ‘substitution’, i.e. signs are made when they serve in ‘as without’ one thing: the sign is one thing ‘instead’ of another.³¹

The sense of identity can thus be traced back to principles very similar to those of the more general sense of sign-competence: it is a set of relational and relative values, based on the recognition of belonging and differences: belonging to a system shared with others and differences with respect to other elements of that system.

Thus the ‘landscape’ is objectively and in any case the aspect of the territory, but it only becomes the reference of a personal or common feeling when it enters into competition, in dialectic with some other environment, in the memory or practice of individuals.

In this role, the ‘landscape’ is the place of signs of living, whose signifiers are supported by the perceivable aspects of the territory, whose meanings are personal and collective aspects of ‘feelings pri mari’, such as identity or the power to build.

We all take on, each in our own way, elements of the landscape to bear witness to our identity, at least when we tell ourselves to others, when we take on the traits of the collective identity of the reference group. The less the city represents us, the less we recognise ourselves in the neighbourhood, in the village, and the more this reference becomes vast and generally landscape-based, the more its distinctive features will be subjective, different among different witnesses. By widening our sense of identity to the territory, leaving the districts and the shadow of the bell towers, we support a new process of cultural colonisation: we venture to attribute meaning and significance not to ‘texts’ that we know through that process of unconscious ‘cultural osmosis’ that is given by the closed group, the confined place, but we open ourselves up to being inhabitants of a place that we somehow choose, of which we at least choose the points of reference, the signifiers.

In some way, more or less consciously and more or less spoilt by ideologies, we retrace a native process of belonging.

But in addition to belonging, we want to rediscover a certain sense of ‘power’, of being able to dispose of those places, since the process of projecting identity onto the territory is not a pure sign process but is substantiated by some functional component, productive of performances that ‘really’ (and not only symbolically) appease our desires for possession, even if no longer linked only to physical resources but at least to cultural ones.

looking for the traces of one’s fellow man (skiing on the glacier, pizza and Coca-Cola in China…). What is happening for the landscape, in terms of a widespread cultural process, is a passage analogous to that genealogical recognition that in the 1960s and 1970s led to a widespread consideration of constructed historical testimonies; the discovery of historic centres, of the ancient, with all the love and hate one has for the inheritance of little-known relatives: a rediscovery of fragments of an unhoped-for past and a placing of these pieces in the context of our living rooms, of our squares, as trophies of an appropriation made by descendants who are now strangers, a little bit colonial and a little bit barbaric.

The demand for identity that extends to the territory leads us to a sense of dwelling that is somehow inclusive of the attitude that is proper to the tourist, with all its contradictions.

³¹ The reference to the fundamental principles of semiotics can be explored with countless texts. To introduce the subject with reference to design and territorial aspects see P. Castelnovi – La citta: istruzioni per l’uso – Einaudi (1980); U. Eco – La struttura assente – Bompiani (1968).

An intriguing contradiction rebounds directly on the very crux of identity research. In fact, the traditional sentiment that results from identity research is more based on the defence of the remnants of an irreversible, structural relationship between inhabitant and territory, felt as a productive and cultural space ‘made’ by him (or by his peers) and as such recognised without the need for signs; it is a defence that immediately presents itself as a loser, on the side of the vanquished, and achieves that pro gectural gloom that plans made of constraints are.

Conversely, the feeling that animates the search for identity in the ‘tourism’ mode is more based on pleasure (both in the identity-seeker and in the secondary researcher, who studies the identity-seeker). Pleasure in being aroused by new senses, in paying attention to signs that trigger freer paradigmatic chains, in perceiving in signifiers a new connection with archetypal feelings, with nature or culture that arouse ancient but pleasantly innovative belongings: the project that can be glimpsed is dangerously to be ventured on choices of cheerfulness (which brings ‘allos’ in the etymon), of provocative intuition, of first aid to the constipation of repetitive city signs with the valorisation of landscape signs and ‘discourses’ in the most open and astonishing contexts for their diversity.32

In short, that ‘serendipity’ that many consider to be specific to the city must now be pursued³³ in the open landscape, in a way of perceiving even the city as a landscape of surprises, capable of arousing amazement. By now the signs for the qualification of identity are signs for an inhabitant, yes, but no longer a producer, the historical master of his own space: what emerges is an inhabitant who becomes capable of being a tourist in his own home, who is curious among new recognisable meanings in the territory, starting from the re-comprehension of the landscapes of ‘his’ land to return to ‘his’ city but with a different interpreting power.

For this different inhabitant, whose identity no longer rests on an implicit recognition of his or her territory, the landscape necessarily becomes a text to be interpreted, a sign system that has rules (albeit unwritten but nonetheless known): in short, it requires competence.³⁴ Hence the social and cultural need for an investigation into the sign system of the landscape, the manner of its communication and the specification of ‘landscape competence’, which becomes a subject of learning and knowledge similar to linguistic competence.³⁵

The methodological attempts and exercises in the recognition of the sign structures of the landscape and their functioning, which have been attempted in recent years, respond to the practical need to investigate the landscape competence that seems to be an original attribute of the function of dwelling.

From a methodological point of view, the hypothesis that landscape can be interpreted with the paradigms of semiotics is interesting for two reasons in particular:

³² For example, when speaking of Marseilles, ‘a port lives as much in the memory and observation – always much sharper, always brought to greater attention and sensitivity for the concreteness of things, for the grain of stone and wood, for the warmth of the wall crossed in a flash by a darting lizard, for the aromatic plants growing in the interstices of old stones – of passing strangers, of those who take to the sea or who disembark, as much as in the more passive, more habitual, lazier, less intense memory of its permanent population, those with their feet on dry land. But each memory has within it the image of an absolutely peculiar city, of an urban geography completely unknown to the other…… The result of all this is that what little literature exists on Marseille is the work of outsiders and travellers heading for one side or the other, of people who are in the city only because they had to leave it, and therefore could only know it as a stopover place, as the place of a preferably short but always uncertain and always unwelcome wait’ in R. Cobb – Tour de France – Adelphi 1995
³³ On the ‘serendipity’ of the city see A. Bagnasco – Fatti sociali formati nello spazio. Cinque lezioni di sociologia urbana e regionale – F.Angeli (1993); or, in a different discourse, P.Castelnovi and L.Dal Pozzolo – Progettare etc.. – Turin, Celid (1990)
³⁴ The ‘competence’, identified in linguistics by prominent semiologists from Pierce to Chomski, is the practical consequence of the com pllexity of the interpretative mechanism of meanings when one moves from a simple sign system to its articulated structure (which in natural language is discourse or narrative).
³⁵ On the subject P.Castelnovi – La città: istruzioni per l’uso – Einaudi 1980

– the maintenance, within a codified field of enquiry, of the uncertain and complex relationship between subject and object, which overcomes the positivist criticism of the non-scientific nature of ‘subjective’ enquiries

– the high ductility and ‘productivity’ of semiotic models to become interpreters of the most diverse criteria for ordering the world, even very lateral to codified languages. Work has been done in many directions, borrowing from classical semiotic methodologies or simply studying apparently elementary themes such as relevance (what do we distinguish³⁶ in the mare magnum of the context to be a sign, to be a text), or the functional relations of semiosis (what meaning has that particular object – or relation between objects – other than self-reference, emergence with respect to context) or the primary syntactic structures (what relations³⁷ between the different objects that I consider relevant and that together should constitute a ‘landscape narrative’).³⁸

In all cases, the great difficulty of explaining the internal mechanisms of signification is matched by the great difficulty of defining a semantics proper to the landscape. In the studies, there gradually emerges an abandonment of the attempts at direct translation of linguistic semiotics in favour of a more derivative use of principles and specific topics, inserted into a research logic closer to the circumstantial paradigm of the more recent historians and anthropologists than to the functionalist one of the ‘classics’. On the other hand, research derived from linguistic semiotics also moves in this direction, when it shifts the focus of attention towards complex levels of signification (the tale, the discourse) and renounces the structuralist anxiety, the tendency to make every cultural procedure mechanical (and therefore dominable and reassuring).³⁹

The stopping point of this tentative navigation in which many of those interested in landscape are engaged seems to be a sort of ‘quantum’ definition of the attribution of meaning: complex units of signification are sought that can be read in the landscape, that would be used en bloc in cultural and identity relations, and that assume importance in a design and planning perspective as units of recognition, of reference, endowed with meaningful connections within themselves shared by the users (and that can be studied in their internal relational mechanics even in a separate location).

This is the ‘semiotic way’ to ‘landscape units’: geographical partitions of the overall landscape that are required by planning practice and are defined according to different criteria.40

Probably the attribution of meaning that is the foundation of the quanta of landscape, the one that would generate all the values attributed to single pertinent elements, is still linked to elementary relations: between the factors of identity (the pertinences that allow one to recognise one’s own presence, one’s own history, one’s own heritage of testimonies) and those of otherness (the pertinences that, by difference, denounce the natural, but also the product of other culture, the accidental): it is a question, for example, of the different relations between the signs of nature, signs of rural civilisation, signs of urban civilisation.⁴¹

³⁶ cf. L.Prieto – Relevance and Practice – Feltrinelli 1976
³⁷ An amusing illustration of the tentative procedure one is obliged to undertake in order to apply semiotic analysis to the universe of objects (and landscape) can be found in R. Barthes- L’avventura semiologica – Ed. du Suil 1985 (tr.it. Einaudi 1991)
³⁸ One of the most articulate attempts is contained in C. Socco – Il paesaggio imperfetto – Tirrenia Stampatori 1998
³⁹ Central in this direction is the work of A.Greimas, J.Lotman and R.Barthes, see, for an introduction G.Caprettini – Signs, texts, communication – Utet 1997
⁴⁰ For landscape units see R.Gambino
⁴¹ For example, the landscape of the Valle d’Aosta has been read in this light in the context of the Territorial Landscape Plan (see the Quaderno di Urbanistica 1998, a monograph on the Valle d’Aosta PTP)

This primal semantics seems to be articulated in the various situations according to more or less differentiated local (and personal) cultures and pertinences, which accentuate the role of identity or otherness or connote their relations by highlighting coherences, cooperations, dialectics and conflicts.

It would thus be possible to interpret the ‘primordial sense’ of a landscape unit by highlighting a specific relationship between elements of identity and elements of otherness, and vice versa it would be possible to distinguish different landscape units by noting that a portion of territory is recognised as having a certain relationship between elements of identity and elements of otherness, different from its neighbour.

It is clear that in this direction, investigations become substantial to verify which and how much of the materials constituting the objective heritage of a territory (in historical testimony, natural importance, morphological specificity) are assumed by users to distinguish elements of identity, of otherness, and their relationships. In a word, how much of the substance of the landscape is assumed in the ‘landscape’ sign system.

The research front that develops on the substance of the landscape on the one hand benefits from the analysis (of objects and, more recently, of the networks and spatial effects of systems of objects) of the identity-historical and natural heritage, but on the other hand has to come to terms with the subjectivity of the user, with local cultural specificities, with the hyperboles (or, conversely, the aphasias, the censorship) of the represented landscape.The research front that develops on the substance of the landscape on the one hand benefits from the analysis (of objects and, more recently, of the networks and spatial effects of systems of objects) of the identity-historical and natural heritage, but on the other hand has to come to terms with the subjectivity of the user, with local cultural specificities, with the hyperboles (or, conversely, the aphasias, the censorship) of the represented landscapeThe research front that develops on the substance of the landscape on the one hand benefits from the analysis (of objects and, more recently, of the networks and spatial effects of systems of objects) of the identity-historical and natural heritage, but on the other hand has to come to terms with the subjectivity of the user, with local cultural specificities, with the hyperboles (or, conversely, the aphasias, the censorship) of the represented landscape..The research front that develops on the substance of the landscape on the one hand benefits from the analysis (of objects and, more recently, of the networks and spatial effects of systems of objects) of the identity-historical and natural heritage, but on the other hand has to come to terms with the subjectivity of the user, with local cultural specificities, with the hyperboles (or, conversely, the aphasias, the censorship) of the represented landscape.⁴²

In fact, the territory is not offered as a text previously thought of in communicative terms, but ‘communicates in spite of itself’, so that the landscape as it is interpreted is the result of a work of ‘reduction to text’ of an undefined information support, enjoyed inattentively and for the most part meaningless until a voluntary act intervenes that makes use of a specific competence belonging to the user’s cultural properties. From this follows a structural value of the ‘subjective interpretative strategies’ (of the user), which end up prevailing, in generating hierarchies of importance of the various factors, over the quantitative aspects of the ‘objective’ information (i.e. lying as availability in the objects themselves).

Hence, the incompressible role of the holistic description, of the sentimental, unashamedly subjective and evaluative tale also emerges in the survey: that importance which dominated the field of landscape when its meaning was connoted by adjectives such as ‘artistic’ and which was then removed and to some extent sterilised as a consequence of the ‘scientific’ approach.⁴³

On the contrary, a structural function is being recognised for the investigation of subjective specificities: from those of the ‘sense obtained with the senses’, and therefore of the plurality and complexity of sensory experience, to that which associates situation and sensation in perception (specificity of time and space), to that of the cultural particularity of the ‘local mind’. In short, a deeper recognition of the epistemological role of landscape work is coming forward: that of a trace for listening to the deep, archetypal impulses of irreproducible mystery.⁴⁴

⁴² The recent E. Turri – Il paesaggio come teatro (The landscape as theatre) – Marsilio 1998 Still today, many studies are affected by this abrupt variation of significant meanings of the term ‘landscape’.
⁴³ See e.g. the entry ‘Landscape’ (edited by C.Blanc-Pamard and J.Raison) in the Enciclopedia Einaudi 1980
⁴⁴ cf. E.Zolla – The Mountain – in Lo stupore infantile – Adelphi 1994 – and – Verità segrete esposta in evidenza – Marsilio 1990

Once again, this is not a verbal ellipsis without a practical response, but a basis for research and design on which we are, all of us, already working: this is demonstrated by terms such as ‘contemplation’ placed among the ‘proper uses’ of the areas of greatest landscape interest, or the whole debate on the possibilities of using the wilderness.

In these respects, the landscape takes on a role as a repository of ‘semic non-sense’, of the place where it is possible to have only sentimental relations with the world, ‘inexpressible’ with articulated language. Perhaps all artists are intent on reproducing an unspeakable specificity of what they are able to ‘hear’. and this constitutes the reason why a landscape (like a portrait) can be called such in painting .⁴⁵

Perhaps we too, who rely on the sign system as a buoy, a buoy that orients us, in order to swim in the landscape must abandon signicity and accept a flow of meaning without precise references, a ‘drift’ that helps us give space to the usually deaf and mute parts.^{46 47}

It is the space that in psychology Jung conquered for the soul and its nutrients (the need for affectivity, the need for shade, perhaps even the need for loss of self in non-describable space); it is the place of the ‘secret’, of the landscape experienced alone as an experience of the self unlike any other, which motivates the search for wilderness and exploration. These are feelings of identity equal and opposite to those that drive one to crowd the celebrated places and send well-known postcards, which have a strategic value in the sentimental quality of life, the same that leads Bachelard to place the attic and the cellar of dreams, nightmares and desires in first place in the evaluation of domestic spaces.

Philosophers and psychologists such as Zolla or Galimberti stimulate us to think that the landscape is such insofar as each of its representations is in any case a metaphor of deep and archetypal senses, and that therefore the feeling of the landscape (first and foremost a connoted space) is only subjective and not communicable except by impoverished representations (at least in size, in the senses (what one feels), in the senses (the deep meanings one gives). Landscape is either experienced or represented but generates other effects: it is still one of the senses of life that cannot be reproduced. The absolute indifference of these experiences with respect to the physical support should be emphasised: an urban landscape can be just as valid as a desert one, and many masters of painting or poetry have represented the sense of mystery at the doors of their houses (just think not only of Magritte, or Leopardi’s l’Infinito, but of Morandi or Rembrandt).

The key to accessing the ‘deep senses’ seems to be an ability to listen to the possible, the unexpected: the landscape is one of the places of attention in which the experience of sense is possible as a combustion between an outside of us and a capacity for ‘waiting for the unexpected’, an inner readiness to be caught up in an unexpected glimmer of the sense of things, a moment of unveiling.⁴⁸

In all these cases the landscape is understood as signifying material beyond the normal correspondence with codified denotation, so much so that it appears as a text that can be more easily deciphered by those who, with a foreign eye, travel (with little stability and much readiness for the event) through the places of their own mind and territory.

⁴⁵ It is not only about the romantic ideology, which can be read for instance in Turner’s correspondence, but one can also apply this reading to contemporaries, even to cinema (see e.g. W.Wenders) or photography (see e.g. A.Adams).
⁴⁶ see R.Barthes, entry ‘listening’ cit.
⁴⁷ Fundamental to these aspects is the lesson of G.Bachelard: see e.g. La poetica delo spazio – P.U.F. 1957 (tr.it. Dedalo 1975) La terra e le forze – Corti 1948 (tr.it.Red 1989)
⁴⁸ see M.Zambrano – Chiari del bosco – Madrid 1977 (tr.it. Feltrinelli 1991)

Hence an overcoming of the privilege assigned to the insider, a connoisseur of the collective meanings of the landscape, but also deviated by fruitive automatisms and by too brief drifts of meaning, linked to the prevailing functionalism of his gaze, part of an operative, active domesticity. More attention should be paid to the outsider, the foreigner, not so much for the diversity of culture as for the underlying attitude, of those who are willing to be surprised, to perceive the ‘light of the woods’.

Perhaps there is an optimal target for the experience of landscape as an unveiling moment, outside the functional scheme or rational knowledge, but also lacking the total naivety of those who know nothing: the returner. Perhaps the best perceptor of the landscape is Ulysses (not only in Ithaca, but throughout the extraordinary and foreign mare nostrum that hosts him, like a bowl with the wanderings of a flea), it is Don Quixote, it is Dante, it is Neruda with respect to the postman, it is Maria Zambrano.

It is a sensibility that grasps the difference between what it feels and what it is accustomed to feeling, and that is not afraid of the difference but is anxious about it, is in search of something that makes it reconnect with a deeper feeling, a lost already known.

Our generations of uprooted people, of those lost to the land, of strangers in their own cities and their own knowledge, of those humiliated by the bad products our ambitions have generated, of Milarepa and Job living in their own excrement, have for the landscape a return motion, a tension towards a quiet, non-imperialist, non-aggressive search, willing to listen to ancient resonances, which are perhaps the basis of unveiling; willing, like Wittgenstein’s student, to enjoy fragments of a boundless landscape, where it ‘seems’ (but is) impossible to orient oneself. For this type of ‘need’, so latent but so profound, I would like to be able to make the perception of the world, at least the European, Mediterranean and Alpine worlds, interwoven with urban, rural and natural, practicable: the landscape is either for this or for very little.

At this point, the initial question, as architects or planners, ‘if and how can we govern the transformations of the landscape’, turns into a more tendentious, more directed question: ‘what design strategy is envisaged to enhance the properties recognised in the landscape: its complexity, its function as a repository for a plurality of different cultural actions and sediments, as a place of identity but at the same time as a place of otherness?’

We are in an area almost unknown to planners, sometimes practised by the best architects, who are silent in planning, as in alchemy. Around the application of these themes to design there has never been any debate, on the contrary, there is a sort of suspicious evasion of the theme, which sees more or less unconscious participation by researchers in fields for which there is no teleology to the project, ever. It is in fact only designers by trade (and sometimes politicians) who instinctively put a phrase like ‘what is the point of all this in my design to transform the world?’ at the end of their considerations. It is evident that, with the premises of this introductory report, the temptation arises to postpone the discussion on the project to a later, practical, low-tech phase, given that the landscape is above all culture and that it is not easy to conceive of a project for culture, that one cannot conceive of a project that affects the most intimate and subjective behaviour of the users, that the plurality of studies on the natural or historical materials of the landscape incites tout court to their conservation.

On the other hand, hypothesising to regulate the landscape is like hypothesising to regulate language: it is not practicable (nor even desirable), beyond the rules it already implicitly has and which must be enforced, on pain of its public failure. It is impossible to hyperstatise with new rules a living historical and collective product, but one must take into account the functional aspects, the territorial support of the landscape, which today has regulations that are little complementary and never synergic with the implicit rules of the lived landscape. From this impasse perhaps derives the inability to think of transformational rules of the pure landscape, and the project is often entrusted only to conservative rules of certain physical supports, in the blatant contradiction of wanting to conserve the landscape, which is a dynamic system with three components (the system of legible signs on the territory, the user and the user’s culture), statically regulating only the former.

Instead, it seems to us, precisely in the light of the previous considerations, that there is an ever-increasing need for widespread planning wisdom, for knowing how to design transformations while taking the landscape into account. It seems to us that first of all the challenge contained in the modest words of the Council of Europe directive should be taken up, which simply postpones consideration of the ‘landscape’ theme to the specific sectorial design forums, those in any case active in the management of territorial transformations, from infrastructures to the valorisation of territorial resources for development, from training to mobility policies. It is a question of succeeding in inserting the ‘seed’ of landscape into consolidated design practices, specialised engineering that is by now codified and tends to be impermeable to fundamental methodological innovations.

We therefore propose to turn our attention to the project from the ‘happy islands’, already directly related to the landscape (the garden project, the Park’s environmental plan), to the widespread practice of transforming the territory: that which produces the material of the new landscape and destroys the deposit of evidence of the old. It is certainly a matter of designing for strong goals, to be achieved with weak plans, poor in new rules, new signs and projections of the author,⁴⁹

but capable of keeping many reading possibilities open, of giving continuity with the pre-existing and unknown layout: they will mostly be projects that go unnoticed: therein lies their merit.

For this anonymous, service-oriented landscape design, we can only follow a few traces for now, all to be developed:

a. The project as re-cognition of resources.

Often in the plans of vast areas there is the case of strategies imposed by other reference frameworks, territorial or economic, which impose pure protection guidelines for the landscape, while recognising their impracticability and uselessness. On those occasions, the most important work is carried out not on the regulatory project side but on the knowledge side: these are, however, occasions to attempt an initial representation of the properties of the landscape, an index that can be recognised in its systematic aspect.

It is clear that the very catalogue of the relations between specific sectorial aspects and the landscape (i.e. their object relations as text, their assumption as pertinent in fruition, their systematicity in the memorised image of places) is an act of design, a provocation to be brought to the table, an exploration in the deposits of signs and senses that can become resources, bases for the development of the quality of life.

In this case it is important to link at least

– the ‘permanence’ system of evidence recognised as a ‘concrete’ deposit of memory, signs of local identity and values of collective identity (mostly hyper-statised in ‘ideological’ images)

⁴⁹ see R.Gambino – The dimension of the vast area in spatial planning practices – in Urbanistica informazione Dossier 6/1996

– the system of relational ‘invariances’ of the ‘primitives’ constituting the landscape, understood as relations in time and space between the great natural signifiers (sky, sea, forest, grass, desert, rock, orographic containers, river) and the fundamental subjective relations (the ‘moving in’, entering, leaving, travelling, orienting oneself getting lost, remaining, enjoying the same place in different conditions) – the constellation of natural or anthropic co-presences susceptible of being enjoyed as otherness (which could more easily provoke archetypal senses or arouse the values of the repressed, the forgotten, or vice versa of conquest, curiosity, interaction.

In this way, a sort of structural skeleton of each landscape is outlined, which allows us to compare broad categories of European landscapes to which we can devote types of verse design attitudes: we will differentiate a ‘Mediterranean landscape’ from an ‘Alpine’ and a ‘Nordic’ landscape, a ‘city and plain landscape’ from a ‘river and forest landscape’.⁵⁰

In those landscapes (and in their pure or syncretic situations) we will be able to highlight a more or less decisive role of permanences, or of invariants, or even of suggestions of otherness; we will be able to read the typical cases of deep structure of identity assigned to this or that category of designs and ‘quanta’ of landscape. And with reference to these typified landscape frameworks, we will be able to direct and compare projects aimed in the same way: at valorising typical resources, knowing that they are the most vital, that they have the greatest potential for development; at keeping alive those rarer ones, case by case; at choosing, among transformation alternatives that are difficult to control, those that are less incisive on structural parts.

b. a project, even an incisive one on a small scale (such as an architecture) is always a project of transformation of a pre-existing text, a place often already of great importance for the identity or cultural power of a community. To transform in order to improve that condition means to study the effects that the transformation has on the overall structure of the landscape (both as a form of expression, i.e. of the perceptible part of the territory, and above all as a form of content, i.e. as a factor reordering or altering conceptual orders of the users’ worldview). On the other hand, there is no immediate recognition by public opinion of the land transformation project (especially on a large scale), due to the inertia of subjective evaluations and the difficulty of users in imagining changes. This facilitates negative attitudes: a great velleitarism on the part of ambitious planners, convinced that they will always act on the territory in a significant way even if not followed by a change in behaviour, or vice versa a loss of responsibility on the part of other planners, who a priori never consider the transformation they carry out to be incisive on the overall structure. In reality, the planner eclipses himself at the moment of delivery of the work; instead, the landscape takes note of the project long afterwards: the holistic judgement on the overall landscape unity is changed with great inertia, the consolidated idea of a known place is altered in the memory only rarely and ‘in jerks’.

In short, the project ‘makes’ the landscape with times and modes that are not considered at all by the designer. Awareness of the role that every planned action has in the flow of landscape transformations instead demands an evaluation of the cultural dynamics with which the transformative event will be undertaken: it is a tentative evaluation that constitutes the most difficult design commitment due to its ethical rather than technical bearing. But even according to a correctly functionalist logic it is necessary for the landscape project to be shared, on pain of the contradictory nature of its outcomes with respect to the guidelines. This depends on the important role of collective evaluation and the opinion of the inhabitants, which in the landscape system is nourished by the communicative role of the landscape itself, unlike what happens in other value systems (such as environmental ones).

⁵⁰ Traces for a reflection on the Mediterranean and Alpine landscapes, understood as in this report, can be found in P.Castelnovi – Effects of the evolution of peri-urban space in Italy: weakening of the sense of territory and loss of urban collective identity – in Mediterranée 77 1993; and P. Castelnovi – The mountain teaches how to design architecture together with the landscape. in Seminar Projecter la montagne – Grenoble 1995 (internal publication) and – In search of the structures of heritage and environnement in ‘Re composition des territoires des Alpes occidentales, St.Oyen, 1996

What for environmental values is the subject of a culturally complex civil and political awareness, for landscape values can be entrusted more directly to a system of implicit knowledge that naturally forms a part of common opinion and identity, which just has to be allowed to emerge. It therefore seems easier to ‘make policy’ by discussing landscape than environment: for example, the statutory participatory procedure for impact assessment could well be applied as a landscape impact procedure, generating debate and mobilising public opinion much more than the one centred on environmental impact. But these experiences remain so far isolated, due to the high cost⁵¹ energy and commitment that they entail, because of their extraneousness to any established procedure and the isolation in which they are confined in relation to the ‘scientific community’ present in schools and journals. What is needed, therefore, is a targeted promotion to foster, in our schools and in our research, a widespread practice of this sense of project and confrontation: this could be one of the major objectives of the ‘landscape-oriented’ education advocated by the Council of Europe.

c. Landscape/economic project.

The landscape is also a strategic resource for the economy and the quality of life of the inhabitants if it succeeds in maintaining and enhancing its level of communicability: if its signs are widely shared, if the clarity of their expression is not diminished by elements of noise or contradictory messages. This importance of communication derives from a social process that affects economic flows: the landscape can be counted on as a resource for development if it is considered a resource for identity (heritage) or for otherness (sacred place) by a broad community, broader than that which physically inhabits the places. Only in this way does the landscape become an economically valuable resource.

Obviously this inequality (which is the one underlying the relations of any market) generates confrontation, competition, flows of people and investments: this is tourism.⁵² By contrast, defence plans are triggered, which seek to avoid centrifugal flows and to valorise local resources for local people: a significant part of the projects concerning the use of the landscape included in development plans refers to that category of tourists at home, which increasingly emerges as a target for sustainable territorial transformation initiatives. But, as mentioned above, even if he is a local inhabitant the tourist must be considered as the referent of a specific communication, which corresponds to his ‘listening’ attitude. Therefore, the development project that identifies the landscape as a resource must first and foremost take on the task of enhancing the ‘public relations’ of that landscape, making manifest the culture deposited in it. Precisely because the project is aimed at enhancing the representative aspects of the ‘landscape as theatre’ it will have to work in particular on the things already present, it will have to rely on physical transformation above all to obtain effects of cleaning, completion, and univocity of the landscape text already available today.⁵³

⁵¹ A number of ideas for discussion on the theme of participation in landscape planning are contained in the speeches by Balducci, Bellaviti, Bobbio, Castelnovi at a seminar in Aosta 1995 published in U.Janin Rivolin Yoccoz (ed.) – Progettualità partecipata – Franco Angeli 1996
⁵² The turbulence that a dynamic of confrontation between landscapes generates in the entire social system is feared by the traditional system founded on the rural world, so much so that in the Tao it is said blessed is the village ‘where, although there is a neighbouring village within sight, so that from one to the other one can hear the cocks crowing and the dogs barking, the inhabitants until their death in old age have never met!

The territories in which this strategy may be most valid are those in direct contact with concentrations of potential tourists, not only because they are consolidated destinations, but also because they are accessible from the most concentrated settlement points: thus not only areas already frequented by tourists, but also urban and peri-urban areas. It is in the latter that a project based on the landscape resource can achieve greater added value, given the under-utilisation recorded to date.⁵⁴ The urban development project that assumes the landscape as a resource (and thus goes beyond the criterion of pure protection that encloses the landscape within the enclosures of parks and monuments) can be a topic of great interest for urban planning, especially in these years in which the priority of redevelopment, the recovery of fringe areas, and the transformation of the compromised is emerging. In that no-man’s-land to which the large peri-urban strips and periphery-regions have been reduced, new landscapes have been formed from the remnants of rural ones coexisting with large penetrations of urban objects, almost always of little significance for inhabitants and tourists. These new landscapes can be looked at as a development resource, extracting from them the permanences and traces of previous landscape structures, the new figures of the relationship between urban and rural, the new criterion of behaviour of the metropolitan inhabitants who frequent them. Re-appropriating urban regions is probably one of the strategic planning goals of the coming years, and landscape, recognised in these new representations, can be a strong cultural attractor on the whole topic.⁵⁵

d. the most elementary and most radical degree of the project is the pure resistance to the death of the landscape, understood as the loss of the ‘common sense of the sensitive territory’, as the increasingly low incidence, in the general behavioural model, of the topological aspects linked to the physical form of the environment. There are worrying symptoms in the recent evolution of models:

– we move too quickly and with reticular references, so that the destinations count and not the courses, and we lose the enjoyment of the landscape as a system of slowly correlating meanings because they are made up of permanences in the variations of light, seasons, of sequences of actions repeated always in the same place;56

– loss of importance of the structural aspect of the image system (the culture of video clips and zapping tends to deconstruct the image with which we store the world, even the world experienced directly);

– a territorialisation without landscape is developing, for example of the night, a place par excellence devoid of complex landscape, made up only of non-subjective fruitive episodes of the user (cultural property is lost, one is a slave to neon lights and locations predetermined by leisure planners), with increasing reference to the cultural identity assigned to personal (i.e. group) behaviour and clothing and less and less to the relationship with physical places. It is a trend that is for the moment interstitial, in the great typologies of the European, urban Mediterranean, forest or mountain landscape, but such as to pervade a generation that tends to escape from localist and historical references, derived from territories that boast no identity heritage in their landscapes, but only provocations to otherness.

⁵³ Particularly due to the heterogeneity of the writing compared to industry texts, see the history of New York (and projects for its image) in J.Charyn – Metropolis – N.Y. 1986 (tr.it Est 1996)
⁵⁴ see P.Castelnovi – Effects of the evolution of peri-urban space in Italy, cit.
⁵⁵ The attractiveness of specific points on the urban periphery now redesigns the geography of recreational movements of the entire European youth generation, which tends no longer to occupy urban centres but specific areas of the suburbs.
⁵⁶ Amusing and instructive medicine, against the haste in the enjoyment of the landscape, is the promenadology lecture that L. Burckardt gives at various venues (in Turin in 1997).

In the culture in which the place is only such if it is made up of people, the death of the landscape as we understand it (text and archive par excellence of the possible memories of the ‘mute’ past and hope for communicating in the future: ‘leaving signs for posterity’) is taking place for those who, like us, presume to be founded on history, with the end of the relevance of historical signs in widespread culture, with the death of history as an element of cultural property, of difference, of identity. The homo novus of the year 2000 dispenses with landscape and history; landscape and history risk remaining the prerogative of homines veteri, the minority and the negligible.

An ideological sense of landscape is reborn, made up of stereotypical behaviour and postcards, in which the symbolic and the nominalistic merge (Nature, the Historical Centre, the Museum or their reproduction in Disneyland): the landscape becomes archaeology as it is done on a dead object, that is, detached from the living body of cultural properties that still stir in current behaviour, an object that can be used as a catalogue.

The wager of those who want to fight this battle of degree zero of the project lies in the resistance of the archetypes on which the landscape rests, of those ‘primitives’, which must overcome the flood wave of aspatiality and abstoricity, constituting the basic catalogue of cultural resources and signs that will in any case allow the theme of the overall sense of the landscape to be reopened, in any case permanently at the foundation of the culture of living.

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