The making of landscape in modernity (original) (raw)
Conference Presentation - "The Value Of Landscape" - Turin, 2001
Calvino dedicates the American Lessons "..to some values or qualities or specificities (of literature) which are particularly close to my heart, trying to situate them in the perspective of the new millennium" and then speaks, as we know, of values such as Lightness , Rapidity, Accuracy, Visibility, Multiplicity. Today, here, we would like to work in the same spirit: to emphasize the specificity of the landscape, to examine its theoretical but also its operational implications, which affect daily behavior and our work. We would like to discuss the qualities, the opportunities and the alternative choices, instead of the absolute value of landscape. It is important to sustain a logic and ideological debate which daily practices related to territory force us to take into consideration. In those practices the value of the landscape (the sense of importance for its role) is outlined by itself, for its implicit comparison with other needs, with the choices, with the pleasures that are "competitive" in the use of the territory. In fact, now the theme of the landscape not only imposes itself on the attention of various disciplines of investigation as a "place" of the identity and driving force of the mobility of entire communities, but it has also become an axis of reference for most of the strategies related the territory: sustainability, safeguard of diversity, control of transformations are increasingly measured not only with the "structural" socio-economic aspects but also with the "cultural" and "political" aspects of the landscape. In the phase in which in the territorial and urban planning and in the intervention programs the watchword is "(re) qualification"; with a new perspective and a new understanding project, landscape allows to deal with themes of great urgency, such as those emerging from the critical places of abandonment (the "mountain", the "hinterland"), the anomie (the "peri-urban", the "infrastructural"), the degradation (the "exploited", the "abandoned"). All this involves the entry of the landscape theme into the world of practices, projects, guided transformations. It is also for this reason that suddenly the landscape became subject to an assessment of operational comparison among alternative analysis of advantages or penalties: it exits the indisputable system of immaterial and immeasurable assets and one enters into that of goods that are not indefinitely available but limited, perishable, to some extent considered as scarce resources. Let us therefore assume the value of the landscape as a center of reflection: it allows to see under a different light both the concept of “landscape” and “value”, each of the two terms leads the other to the margins of its own consolidated meaning, it is measured with unusual and practical theoretical elaborations, which we will discover in common use but which we have too little analyzed and discussed. We can perhaps define the landscape itself as a result of the process of putting the territory into cultural value, like that system of signs that can be read in the territory and appreciated by each of us individually or as a social or cultural group (the inhabitants, nature lovers, fans of the mountains, …). The territory pre-exists, in this sense, the landscape, which is produced by a selection, by a cultural enhancement of parts with respect to an undifferentiated whole. For the landscape, related to the territory (and the environment), it seems to take place what Wittgenstein said it usually takes place for art in relation to nature: "... art shows us the wonders of nature. Its foundation is the concept of the prodigies of nature. (The blossoming of a flower. What's so great about this?) It is said: "Look how it opens up!" If landscape, like art, is a medium and if this is the cultural value of the landscape, first of all we are interested in understanding if and how the cultural value is turned into economic value, which controlled passages bring to that selective and underlining process, all subjective and similar to the artistic one, to define a product that can be used as a resource, as an asset to be exchanged for other goods, shared with a community that some measure does not only use it but also trade. Secondly we are interested in getting into the merits, not only understanding the mechanisms of translation of the landscape from good to resource, but also understanding the criteria that made us prefer it, the Qualities, as Calvino said, of the landscape we care about.
2015
Landscape can be described in many ways, for example, its ecological diversity, botanical or cultural significance. But it is always more than its constituent parts. For future challenges we need to formulate a new philosophy of landscape that considers identity at its core.
In the last thirty years the idea of Landscape has changed a lot. Over many centuries, it was considered just as a "green remedy" 1 , a kind of escape from everyday life. The result was that designed landscapes recalled the Arcadian paintings of Lorrain and Poussin. With this perception, there was a good balance between nature and civilized, allowed by the creation of Landscape as a static image. Then morphology of the urban areas and the countryside mutated since the two at first separated realities started to be blended by human intervention. Obviously it is clear that there is no way back and it is not possible to stop technology, but can the concept of Arcadian scenes be considered still useful in "the design of our contemporary landscapes which have to address contemporary elements like infrastructural lines or derelict industrial sites" 2 ?
This article contributes to the debate and reflection centred on the state of contemporary landscape: a mosaic of presently and past constructed landscapes. It addresses the urgency of analysis and evaluation of the historic process of landscape (trans)formation through a cultural and ecologic interpretation taken together with the evaluation of the dynamics and tendencies of change, and taking into account the spatial model of landscape. In the context of the changeable dynamics typical of contemporary landscapes, this article contributes to the formulation of an intervention methodology, seeking both to respond to social needs and guaranty the sustainability of the inherited landscape.