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GEOGRAPHY JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND DIDACTICS IN

Vol. 1, Year 5, June 2016

Editor in Chief: Gino De Vecchis (Italy)

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ITALIAN ASSOCIATION OF GEOGRAPHY TEACHERS (ASSOCIAZIONE ITALIANA INSEGNANTI DI GEOGRAFIA)

ISSN online 2281-5694 ISSN print 2281-4310

Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography (J-READING), Vol. 1, Year 5, June, 2016

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Contents Crisis of Landscapes, Landscapes of the Crisis. What are the Solutions?

Silvia Aru, Fabio Parascandolo, Marcello Tanca, Luca Vargiu

Foreword Fabio Parascandolo

Crisis of landscapes, landscapes of the crisis: notes for a socio-ecological approach Anna Maria Colavitti

The crisis of the landscape, the crisis of the norms for the landscape, the planning of the landscape between uncertainty and second thoughts. A few basic issues Benedetta Castiglioni

“Institutional” vs “everyday” landscape as conflicting concepts in opinions and practices. Reflections and perspectives from a case study in Northeastern Italy Paolo D’Angelo

Agriculture and landscape. From cultivated fields to the wilderness, and back Silvia Aru

The smart city: urban landscapes in the current crisis Federica Pau

Sardinian rebirth landscapes. An aesthetician’s outlook Marcello Tanca

Cagliari’s urban landscape: a commons? Serge Latouche

Degrowth as a territorial-landscape project

67 79

MAPPING SOCIETIES (Edited by Edoardo Boria) Edoardo Boria

A matter of ethics and cartography. The map of the ambassador and the map of the journalist

GEOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND (PRACTICAL) CONSIDERATIONS Gino De Vecchis

105

Geography in Italian Licei

TEACHINGS FROM THE PAST (Edited by Dino Gavinelli and Davide Papotti) Archibald Geikie

The Teaching of Geography with comments by Davide Papotti

Re-reading The Teaching of Geography by A. Geikie

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Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography (J-READING), 1, 5, June, 2016, pp. 5-8

Foreword Silvia Arua, Fabio Parascandolob, Marcello Tancab, Luca Vargiuc a

Dipartimento di Economia e Scienze Aziendali, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy Dipartimento di Storia, Beni Culturali e Territorio, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy c Dipartimento di Pedagogia, Psicologia, Filosofia, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy Email: silvia.aru@unica.it b

This issue on “Crisis of Landscapes, Landscapes of the Crisis. What are the Solutions?” is focused on the relationship between the vast phenomenon, and the vast phenomenology, of landscape, and the repercussions of the crisis that is affecting our society nowadays. As various authoritative scholars and intellectuals have pointed out, our contemporary times are facing up to an acrossthe-board crisis that runs the risk of transforming our life places in mere supports of economicfinancial functions, spreading across any aspect of social life (e.g. Bonora, 2009; Harvey, 2010, 2014; Tricarico, 2012; Moore, 2015). This implies that the crisis factors are not circumscribed to the economic concerns, as they are experienced – with anguish – by common citizens; rather, such factors are connected to the landscape as well. For the impact of the crisis manifests itself in the environmental and landscape dimensions of lands and territories, causing an alteration of their balances, shapes, and forms, or even their elimination. The concept of landscape has mutated over time. It has opened itself up to various disciplines and fields of knowledge so as to attempt to describe the indescribable, that is, the “structural obscurity of the world” (Farinelli,

1999, p. 43). For this reason, the landscape seems to be nowadays a sort of “seismograph” of the crisis. It appears as a sort of terminal device able to record locally the consequences – not always predictable and hoped for – of collective behaviours that depend on an inextricable chain of events. In this regard, it is sufficient to consider the common and collective sets in which our lives are immersed, or to think of the deep transformation arisen from the globalisation processes – a transformation that is alien to the qualities and the identities of places, as well as to their social-cultural and landscape features. Such change processes can be now investigated according to a multi-disciplinary approach and modelled with reference to large sets of highly complex phenomena, whose nature is, at the same time, geographic, urban, biophysical, economic, social, cultural, aesthetic, and political. However, it may often happen that the various specialist disciplines and discourses do not manage to communicate with each other. Thus, in order to avoid this kind of limit, we intend to embrace a synthetic point of view, in line with our previous contributions to the theme (Aru et al., 2012; Aru et al., 2013; Aru and Tanca, 2013;

Italian Association of Geography Teachers

Silvia Aru, Fabio Parascandolo, Marcello Tanca, Luca Vargiu

Tanca, 2014; Castiglioni, Parascandolo and Tanca, 2015; Vargiu, 2015; Aru and Tanca, forthcoming). After all – even within the compass of these short notes – it is not superfluous to recall that, like the word “landscape”, the term “crisis” is polysemic as well. Among the numerous meanings of the Greek verb krinein (the etymon of “crisis”) there is not only “to come to a crisis”, but also “to judge, to give judgment”, and also “to accuse”. It is precisely these two latter meanings that are the basis of our modern words “critique”, “criticism”, and “to critique”. In light of this, we may therefore point out that every reflection on crisis is inevitably a critical one, that is, a reflection that thinks critically of the crisis, or a reflection that criticizes the crisis. Thus, “Landscapes of Crisis” must be intended considering landscape as a tool in view of a critical inquiry both into the crisis and the landscape. On the other hand, “Crisis of Landscapes” must be intended both as “criticism of landscapes” and as “criticism of crisis (via landscape)”. Conceived this way, such investigation will not provide all the necessary tools to “escape from the crisis”, just because “to escape from the crisis” would also imply “to escape from critical thinking”. On the contrary, we need more critical thinking in order to understand the crisis and to deal with it. From this point of view, a critical inquiry into landscape will allow us to shape a more articulate framework and to provide indications, if not about the destination, at least about the directions to take. Moreover, such a critical perspective could have a very deep impact on the educational field, broadly considered, especially in environmental and socio-economical terms. It is well known that the environment is used and transformed by human being, and that this relationship is the main object of the Human Geography as a territorial science. The understanding of the pros and cons of certain human actions and of specific socio-economic developments, as well as the recognition of the complex phenomena which are here at stake, may have the strength to activate and promote different visions of the world. A “new world” that will be more sustainable in economic, social and environmental senses and, in this way, more Copyright© Nuova Cultura

just and equitable at the same time. For this reason, educational processes and practices pointed towards all the “protagonists of a same territory” become more and more crucial (Giorda and Puttilli, 2011, p. 17). Stimulating a critical approach in order to change attitude toward landscape in a time of crisis has a high educational value at different stages of schooling (but also outside the scholar system, for example in the perspective of lifelong learning). It aims to improve the awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of the globalization processes, as well as of the challenges posed by an increasingly globalised world. The issue here presented is an outcome of the fourth day of international studies on landscape (“Crisi dei paesaggi, paesaggi della crisi. Quali vie d’uscita?”) organized by the University of Cagliari on December 2nd, 2014. Although not embracing a specific educational point of view, we nonetheless hope that “Crisis of Landscapes, Landscapes of the Crisis. What are the Solutions?” will be a useful tool for teachers, educators, students, researchers, and all those people who are interested in deepening their knowledge on the current crisis and its impact on landscapes. The eight papers here collected develop a critical approach to landscape from different disciplinary perspectives (geography, city planning, and aesthetics). Through this variety of conceptual and disciplinary lenses, the landscape appears in all its complexity, as a heuristic device not only for asking questions about the present crisis, but also for searching for answers to the contradictions of the present. In “Crisis of landscapes, landscapes of the crisis: notes for a socio-ecological approach” Fabio Parascandolo, aiming to shed light on the process of change from “traditional” to “modern” territorialities, introduces a relational and genetic approach to the landscape crisis. This way, the paper embraces the idea that landscape cannot be “saved alone” and that it is necessary, first of all, to preserve our territories, our living planet and the natural commons essential to life. In her paper entitled “The crisis of the landscape, the crisis of the norms for the landscape, the planning of the landscape Italian Association of Geography Teachers

Silvia Aru, Fabio Parascandolo, Marcello Tanca, Luca Vargiu

between uncertainty and second thoughts. A few basic issues”, Anna Maria Colavitti highlights the problems faced by the different Italian regional landscape planning systems in applying basic rules and regulations at a local level. The problems can concern norms which are perceived as too “strict”, as shown by the case of the Sardinian Landscape Plan (SRLP). In a complementary line of reasoning, Benedetta Castiglioni distinguishes between the idea of an “institutional landscape” and the idea of an “everyday landscape”. Whereas the former is intended with a limited spatial extension and as ruled by an elite, the latter is intended as larger than the former and managed by the community. The paper “‘Institutional’ vs ‘everyday’ landscape as conflicting concepts in opinions and practices. Reflections and perspectives from a case study in Northeastern Italy” tries to combine and integrate different disciplinary approaches in order to consider both kinds of landscape. After reviewing the historical evolution of the perceptions of the landscapes, Paolo D’Angelo stresses the role played by agriculture with regard to landscape in Italy. Starting from these premises, in his paper “Agriculture and landscape. From cultivated fields to the wilderness, and back”, the Author points out that all kinds of landscapes (not only the “exceptional” ones) are to be considered worthy of protection. The focus of the issue shifts from the countryside (and agriculture) to the city. In fact, the main aim of the article “The smart city: urban landscapes in the current crisis”, written by Silvia Aru, is to present the new urban paradigm of the smart city, emerged in recent years as a planning answer to the ongoing socioeconomic crisis. Federica Pau, in her paper “Sardinian rebirth landscapes. An aesthetician’s outlook”, focuses on the complex changes that took place in Sardinia during the second post-war reconstruction. The Author analyses the impact of these changes through the photos of the Sardinian photographer Fabio Petretto. Marcello Tanca’s article, “Cagliari’s urban landscape: a commons?”, opens the discussion

to a very topical issue in geographical field, the commons, that is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society (reservoirs, fishing and grazing areas, forests, etc.). Urban landscape appears similar to a public good, and its “health” is determined by the simultaneity and coexistence of different spaces, as demonstrated by the “fight” against the commercialisation of public spaces taken up by the inhabitants of the Marina neighbourhood in Cagliari. This issue closes with the special contribution of Serge Latouche. In “Degrowth as a territorial-landscape project”, Latouche sees the present crisis of landscape as the result of the crisis of civilisation. Politics, culture, and the whole way of life must regain their territorial anchoring. To achieve this aim, the French scholar traces a new path, the policy of degrowth, that is different from that indicated by the leading development model. This new policy will imply the protection of the landscape as well as the search for the common good.

Acknowledgements We would like to express our gratitude to Editor in Chief, Associate Editors and Editorial Board of JReading and to the reviewers for their time and valuable remarks. We would also thank all the colleagues who have accepted to take part in this issue on “Crisis of Landscapes, Landscapes of the Crisis. What are the Solutions?”.

References 1. Aru S., Parascandolo F., Tanca M. and Vargiu L. (Eds.), Sguardi sul paesaggio, sguardi sul mondo. Mediterranei a confronto, Milan, Franco Angeli, 2012. 2. Aru S., Parascandolo F., Tanca M. and Vargiu L. (Eds.), Rivista Geografica Italiana, Special issue “Paesaggio e democrazia”, 120, 4, 2013. 3. Aru S. and Tanca M., “Discorso, testo e narrazione nella rappresentazione del paesaggio. Il Piano paesaggistico sardo”, Rivista Geografica Italiana, 120, 4, 2013, pp. 241-256. 4. Aru S. and Tanca M. (Eds.), Convocare esperienze, immagini, narrazioni. Dare Italian Association of Geography Teachers

Silvia Aru, Fabio Parascandolo, Marcello Tanca, Luca Vargiu

senso al paesaggio, vol. II, Milan and Udine, Mimesis, forthcoming. 5. Bonora P., “È il mercato bellezza! Deregolazione, ‘sprawl’, abuso di suolo, immobiliarismo di ventura: una crisi annunciata di postmoderna immoralità”, in VV.AA., Le frontiere della geografia, Turin, UTET, 2011, pp. 69-85. 6. Castiglioni B., Parascandolo F. and Tanca M. (Eds.), Landscape as Mediator, Landscape as Commons: International Perspectives on Landscape Research, Padua, Cleup, 2015. 7. Farinelli F., “The Witz of Landscape and the Astuteness of Representation”, in Buttimer A., Brunn S.D. and Wardenga U. (Eds.), Text and Image: Social Construction of Regional Knowledges, Leipzig, Institut für Landerkunde, 1999, pp. 38-53. 8. Giorda C. and Puttilli M. (Eds.), Educare al territorio, educare il territorio, Rome, Carocci, 2011. 9. Harvey D., The Enigma of Capital: And the

Crises of Capitalism, London, Profile, 2010. 10. Harvey D., Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014. 11. Moore J.W., Ecologia mondo e crisi del capitalismo, Verona, Ombre Corte, 2015. 12. Tanca M., “Il paesaggio come bene comune. Alla ricerca di ‘buone pratiche’ per l’organizzazione del territorio”, Rivista CNSEcologia Politica, 2 (new series), 2014, pp. 1-13. 13. Tricarico A., “The Intensifiying Financial Enclosure of the Commons”, in Bollier D. and Helfrich S. (Eds.), The Wealth of the Commons. A World beyond Market and State, Amherst MA, The Commons Strategies Group – Leveller Press, 2012, pp. 147156. 14. Vargiu L. (Ed.), Esplorare nel passato indagare sul contemporaneo. Dare senso al paesaggio, vol. I, Milan and Udine, Mimesis, 2015.

Italian Association of Geography Teachers

Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography (J-READING), 1, 5, June, 2016, pp. 9-23 DOI: 10.4458/6964-01

Crisis of landscapes, landscapes of the crisis: notes for a socio-ecological approach Fabio Parascandoloa a

Dipartimento di Storia, Beni Culturali e Territorio, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy Email: parascan@unica.it Received: November 2015 – Accepted: March 2016

Abstract The paper focuses on the relationships between landscape and the multi-faceted crisis of our times. We live in a time of crises for Western citizens (cultural, ecological, political, institutional and social crises). The landscape crisis is actually entangled in a bundle of planetary crises, and this paper represents an attempt to outline a relational and genetic approach to this subject. Landscape crisis is rooted in an underlying territorial crisis, and the case of the crumbling of the Italian code of space is taken as an example. The premodern Italian landscape has been dismantled by the irruption of a growth-first paradigm and a commodification of the social system. In a globalising process, surrounding territories have lost importance for localised communities. Contextually, mechanized monocultures and industrialized metropolitan areas have reshaped the geographical features of territories, in Italy and on the world scale. The landscape issue cannot therefore be detached from an overall process of change from traditional to modern territorialities. This approach to landscapes and landscaping aims to provide some basic tools to deconstruct the reasons for the present crisis from their foundations, in the conviction that the landscape cannot be “saved” alone. In fact, it is not possible to attain liveable landscapes without preserving at the same time our territories, our living planet and the natural commons essential to life. Keywords: Collective Interests, Crisis, Global Social Order, Landscapes, Modernization of Subsistence, Natural Commons, Territoriality

1. Introduction: which crisis? We are living in times of crisis, on which a superficial agreement is always possible, but what kind of crisis? Currently, we are entangled in continuous accumulations and overlaps of sectorial crises whose roots plunge into systemic rules and whose genesis often goes back to the first half of the last century, at least. Each specific crisis tends to be continuously exacerCopyright© Nuova Cultura

bated, above all if it has neither been addressed, nor resolved by tackling its structural causes. Crises can be periodic or temporary (for example crises of food supplies), others are of indeterminable duration (political and institutional crises, unemployment crises), whereas others appear long-term and deeply rooted in the life of the populations concerned (Italian demographic crisis).

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As far as the roots and articulations of crises are concerned, I share the views expressed by Latouche (2010, pp. 51-56); I also think a longterm overview of socio-economic development is necessary (Esteva, 2004, and its references). As Western citizens we have gone – to give just some idea, but many more categories could be mentioned – through a cultural crisis since May 1968 and an ecological crisis since the 70s. Social crises were diffused as soon as neoliberal politics (“Reaganomics” and Thatcherism) emerged. Even if for the European masses the positive outcomes of Social Democracy and its welfare schemes are by now only a vague recollection and a cause for regret, it must be underlined that the two fundamental pillars of the Keynesian-Fordist paradigm – Economy of Growth and Consumption Society – are still functioning potently, and not only in the West but on a global scale, with effects also on landscape issues. As stated by Latouche (ibid.) the multi-dimensional crisis that is underway can be understood as a global and a longue durée result of the Keynesian-Fordist economic rules implemented in developed countries, as well as its subsequent metamorphosis in the present “turbo-capitalistic” economic order. Following the explosion of The U.S. subprime mortgage crisis in 2007, and after its overall and domestic effects and byproducts, a realistic way to define what is happening to our global system is to call it a structural crisis, or, better, a civilization crisis: that is, a unique but multi-faceted crisis.

2. Why landscapes crisis? My starting thesis is that the crisis of landscapes is deeply rooted in the crisis of territories and territoriality. Consequently, it is important to first focus on the latter. As I will further outline in part 3 of this paper, the crisis of landscapes does not bring about, but reflects the swirling and unbalanced change of human territoriality and territorial relations1. Analyzing the landscape features of the Piedmont region, Italy, Magnaghi (2009, p. 277, 1

On the crisis of landscape see Quaini, 2006 (pp. 43 and following). On territories and territorialities I refer to Raffestin’s remarks (2005, especially pp. 55-59). See also Turco, 1988, 2012. Copyright© Nuova Cultura

translation by Author), claimed that contemporary civilization “has produced, as an effect on the territorial structure of its economistic paradigms of development, above all detractor elements of the landscape and environment, the destruction of places, and attacks on the elements that form the long-term identity of the region” (italics by Magnaghi). Similar observations have been made by other urban planners at national level (Palermo, 2009; Bianchetti, 2011). Considering the Italian case before the beginning of the last century, the forms of the landscapes in this country were able, on the contrary, to create admirable balances between natural and cultural components. In fact, since the Middle Ages and until the 19th century, a code of space had been collectively developed in Italy. A universally recognizable code worked regardless of the urban or rural location of those implementing it, and it was respected beyond all social stratifications. This cultural production of space (Lefebvre, 1974) was rich in meaning, and concerned at the same time architectural features, rural-urban planning and policy contexts. For centuries it had given everyone “not only the physical coordinates of his/her own life, but a living image of his/her membership, a collective identity in which to reflect, and from which to draw strength and nourishment” (Settis, 2010, p. 52, translation by Author). The disruption of this remarkable spatial and anthropological intertwinement was carried forward by a growing industrialization of the real estate sector. Since the period between the two World Wars, industrial construction – a macroeconomic sector with high profit margins – has become the main agent of spatial code crumbling in Italy. This modern style of urbanisation became dominant in the second half of the 20th century, deeply altering and often entirely shattering the old balances (for further reading on the ancient Italian spatial code and its disruption see ibid.). Since the 60s, “land development” in Italy has been based on the indisputable primacy of modernism, casting out artificial materials (like concrete), the implementation of heavy infrastructures and great works (Grandi Opere), overbuilding and so on. All these phenomena were and still are accompanied by a barely concealed – and sometimes clearly expressed – devaluation of Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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aesthetic and artistic values coming from the past. A good interpreter of this mentality was the Italian minister for economy, who, speaking of heritage issues in 2010, declared: “Con la cultura non si mangia (culture does not put food on the table)”. A truly exemplar sentence, which “sums up in one single joke the prejudice and backwardness of so many Italian people about anything smacking of thought, reflection, cultural development, long-term considerations of our lives” (Arpaia and Greco, 2013b, translation by Author). To refute such an unfounded claim one can simply point out some serious calculations of the potential profitabilities of manifold forms of cultural heritage. Ideological abuses of anticulture and pro-market-&-pro-technology discourses could be easily wiped out this way (see Arpaia and Greco, 2013a). But even though shareable, these patterns of reaction remain merely defensive and cannot stop the ongoing process of unlimited commodification of “anything under the sun”. In my opinion it is also useful to wonder why cynical attitudes like that mentioned above seem to be so advantageous to common sense. Digging just a little deeper, you find that within the conventional settings of Italian social and territorial action, a major problem is always lurking. It lies in significant institutional pressures and considerable business interests in promoting technical innovations, aiming to enhance the speed and competitiveness of goods production systems. Nothing strange, fundamentally: we all know that after all “it’s the market, baby” (cf. Bonora, 2009). This is to be expected exactly because a commodified social system is incorporated in a hegemonic growth paradigm. Nevertheless, all this creates a clear contrast. An ultimatum: on the one side lie the economic benefits for the minorities of powerful private industrial and/or financial companies, and on the other public, collective or community interests for landscape conservation, in terms of ecological and social wealth. Which should prevail: unbridled speculation or proper planning? I only give a small example illustrating my thesis (clearly many could be suggested, taken from a wide array of socio-spatial domains). The Landscape Plan approved in 2014 by the Regione Toscana was soon boycotted by important members of the local business community because of Copyright© Nuova Cultura

the restrictions it placed on new agricultural models. Entrepreneurs and their representatives complained that the limitations would prevent the implementation of “winning innovations” in farming techniques. Market competitiveness dictates, in fact, unceasing changes in yield types, namely the increasing extension of vineyards in rittochino (along steep slopes), managed with intensive mechanization (straddling machines) and extensive use of chemicals to reduce the periods of cultivation (Figure 1). It is moreover clear that this arrangement in intensive monocultures does more than further simplifying landscapes by reducing their ecosystem services. It also compromises multifunctionality and tourist attractiveness in the areas concerned, increasing soil erosion, hydrogeological risks and negative impacts on public health because of the polluting effects of this farming model (Pandolfi, 2013; about rural territories’ development in Italy see Parascandolo, 2006).

Figure 1. Changing rural landscape in Tuscany: on the left side, the most recently-settled vineyards, in tall steps and straight cyclopean walls. Source: Pandolfi, 2013, p. 84.

3. Landscape relations with

“traditional” and “modern” territorialities To grasp the relationships between the landscape crisis and the underlying crisis of territoriality, it will be useful to start from a fundamental insight into political ecology, which could be stated as follows: “The well-being of human beings largely depends, in the last inItalian Association of Geography Teachers

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stance, upon the quality of the relationships which they maintain with the natural world” (Villalba, 2010, p. 96, translation by Author) – “natural world”, i.e. extra-human nature (Moore, 2015), I would add. From this assumption, an important corollary arises: if the modes of representing and transforming the world employed by the members of a social system involve increasing environmental imbalances and deteriorations, negative impacts on human conditions and on the overall resilience of the social system itself may possibly be delayed with various devices, but sooner or later they will inevitably emerge. Chiefly during the last two centuries, modern civilization (which for a long time has been a solely Western European and North American enterprise) has triggered radical social and ecological changes on regional and global scales, whose huge impacts historically affected the nature of the world system both in the past and in contemporaneity (Crosby, 1986; Jaffe, 1994; McNeill 2001; Moore 2007). In order to produce the healing procedures required for the multidimensional crisis of our times, it is essential “to take the bull by the horns” and identify the imperialistic genesis of most organisational models devised in the West. It is widely accepted that instrumental rationality represents one of the fundamental features (I would suggest the most remarkable) of Western modernity. Thus, it is important to recognize firstly the genetic role of utilitarianism in producing the complicated and inconvenient situation of our times. From my perspective, I will focus on a typical utilitarian socio-economic and socio-ecological scheme devised and disseminated worldwide by Western modernity: the full technologisation and commercialisation of subsistence (that is of life economy). The expression “subsistence” refers to a set of fundamental, reproductive and vital daily activities, related to natural assets: water, food, wood, textiles or building raw materials, metals used for simple tools, etc., all satisfying basic needs and actions (eating, drinking, clothing, sheltering from weather, farming, etc.). In a subsistence economy all the fluxes of “stuff” tend to come from a territory, large or small, but as much as possible situated close to a given settlement, to be directly consumed or otherwise processed and transformed (generally using Copyright© Nuova Cultura

artisanal techniques). This organisational model is specific for village communities, but also micro-regional societies composed of aggregates of towns and campaigns followed this pattern, each town autonomously counting upon its respective terroir, Umland or contado in order to put in place the great part of the systems that supply it. Observing the history of village customs but also ancient town rules and statutes in Italy and in Europe, it is in fact possible to detect their strong roots in local environments (Decandia, 2000, pp. 51-124; Agostini, 2015). The model of reference is the auto-sustainability and self-regeneration of local life, as far as possible (for a general introduction see Mies and Benholdt-Thomsen, 1999). In a subsistence system, each local collectivity bases its material reproduction on diversified withdrawals of environmental assets available in the territory of community relevance. Every territory is divided into water bodies and limited (and changeable) agricultural, grazing/forest areas, etc., all generally known and used by small scale peasants or shepherds, according to cultural traditions and grassroots (or possibly class-specific) knowhow. In these vernacular societies and economies (on the meaning of “vernacular” see Illich, 1980) respect for environmental constraints in the activation of resources is essential, in order to avoid the scarcity of basic items essential to the local reproduction of human life. In each local community, tendencies to competitive and individualistic behaviours have to be reconciled with the irreducible need to cooperate, simultaneously for survival and for self-centred forms of buen vivir (Spanish expression; Italian: ben vivere, buona vita; for an actual example: Gesualdi, 2009). As a general rule, models of collective responsibility in proximity of resource management took on the function of regulating the impulse toward private gain2.

Far from being “idyllic”, as clearly expressed in McC. Netting’s (1981) account, village community systems achieve forms of local subsistence via selfmanaged life strategies, based on reciprocal collaboration and set around local agro-ecosystems. For case studies on (micro-) regional levels see: Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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Compared to the “traditional” schemes of subsistence and neighbourhood economics, the ambitions and operation modes of the urbanindustrial civilization that emerged in Northwest and Central Europe, and subsequently consolidated in the “Neo-Europes” (Crosby, 1986) and particularly in the North American subcontinent, were, and still are, completely different. These social and political ensembles of nation-state contexts reached full maturity during the 19 th century. Their peculiarity, compared to historical social formations of the ancien régime, is that state powers actively supported new commercial, industrial and professional interests, and therefore pointed to the establishment of wide ranging market systems and institutionalized technical expertise. Throughout history, the latter have led to huge technical and economic rescaling processes (first at domestic level but also, increasingly, at international and transnational levels). All organisational patterns of production, distribution, consumption and disposal of material goods and all collective knowledge needed to perform human life on the planet, have been re-moulded and restructured in function of these overall processes 3. New approaches to production and the exchange of goods and the associated forms of social organization gave rise to legal reforms opposed to the economic self-sufficiency of rural communities and to multiple, polycentric and independent forms of town-country relationships. Especially in agriculture, various sequences of commodification waves and related changes in cash-crop regimes were made possible by, among other causes, dramatic increases in productivity, achieved by farming systems subjected to corporate profit maximization. Completely new production models replaced traditional agricultural systems (characterized by high intensity of ecologically sustainable − but not very productive − human labor). These new models have altogether disrupted local relations of interdependence between men, soil, plants and Jelen, 1996; Parascandolo, 1995. For a community level example: Parascandolo, 2004. 3 For in-depth discussions about these issues see Sachs, 2004; each item of this work is provided with a comprehensive bibliography.

animals, and established capital intensive and external input intensive patterns of production, based on the significant use of chemicals and machines. Cycles of so-called “Green Revolutions” imposed ecologically unsustainable farming techniques, characterized by minimal human labor but high production of goods, profits and waste. The territorial disempowerment of local societies goes along with their integration into conditions of dependence and subordination in economic production mechanisms. The latter are embedded in strategic domestic or transnational trade exchange systems, guided by market economy forces and supported by central governments and multilateral organizations4. In the long run, the result of these disruptions was the uprooting of self-regulated systems of subsistence. The term “uprooting” points to the disintegration of social vitality aimed at the communitarian self-management of daily life activities. In Europe, especially during the second half of the XX century, a true war on localized subsistence was carried out (Illich, 1980; Mies and Benholdt-Thomsen, 1999), and the residual “organic” relations between settlements and their surrounding countryside faded more and more, until a typical condition of our times was achieved: in each settled community, flows of incoming raw materials for basic supplies came only in a very small part from the surrounding territories. Shared practices of subsistence in regional and micro-regional human societies have been dismantled. Self-managed territoriality and localized subsistence that once produced both “good governance” in human settlements and landscapes worthy of being looked at and represented by artists have been dissolved. This is why in Europe we find ourselves today in a 4

For an integrated (social, economic and political) historical perspective, all the quoted processes can be referred to the concept of world-economy (see Wallerstein, 1981, 2004). The world-systems analysis has been recently revised with a “holistic” approach: the world-ecology (see Moore, 2007, 2011, 2014, and 2015 for an Italian translation; see also Torre, 2013). For reading specifically on the global evolution of agro-food regimes, see McMichael, 2005.

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typically modern and even post-modern condition, in which landscape is nothing but a nostalgic image of a territory which no longer exists (Raffestin, 2005, p. 58). Debray is therefore right to say “The art, the landscape, the peasant. It is losing them that you discover them” (Debray, 1992, p. 263, translation by Author). The artisan, perhaps, should be added to this short but significant list. Natural resources consumed for energetic sustenance and for the development of modern citizens’ economic life tend no longer to be locally territorialized. In an era of processed food hegemony (McMichael, 2005), they are located elsewhere in the world, following dispersed, fragmented and gain-oriented tangles of value chains and supply chains. Of course I do not mean to deny the existence of interesting cases of short chains of essential goods supplies, ever more present in Western Europe. However, they continue to be exceptional compared to the systemic rules of mass production, which produce socially and ecologically unsustainable models of economic relations (Deléage, 2013; Parascandolo, 2013). This has happened because the whole world has been unified and standardized by a global system of industrial enterprises and wide range trades conjoined with to the individualistic property order5.

Figure 2. Italian contemporary territories (1). Regional scale: megalopolitan and monocoltural landscape in lowland Northern Italy, province of Bergamo. Photo: F. Parascandolo, 2014.

5 For comprehensive introductions on these themes see Barcellona, 1987; Goldman, 1998; Sachs and Santarius, 2007; Harvey, 2010.

Figure 3. Italian contemporary territories (2). Local scale: shared experiences of urban synergetic agriculture in two Sardinia’s towns. Above: Piazza “Su Cuzone”, Nuoro. Photo by Farming Committee, 2014. Below: garden of “Mama Terra” Association, Sassari. Photos: F. Parascandolo, 2014.

In this world any reality, be it social, ecological or a mixture of both is – or is expected to shortly become – homologated to the performative rules of modern instrumental rationality (on social-ecological intertwinements cf. Moore, 2007, 2014). In a world of products and services conceived and sold for solvent consumers, world-ecology has become inseparable from world-economy, as if they were two sides of the same coin (Deléage, 1992). It is precisely in this kind of world that the usual relations between human beings, the living and their natural matrices (air, water, land) can be entirely questioned. What repercussions has the industrial and commercial production system caused on the planetary webof-life? Are the relations imposed on humanized spaces environmentally healthy for living beings, including humans? Actually, over the longue durée, all the radical and extensive transformations I have Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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mentioned have proved themselves very slightly or rather not at all compatible with the safe regenerations of planetary living cycles. For the last decade or so, the issue of climate change has acted as a full-blown scientific detector of the environmental costs of societal and terrestrial landscape remodeling carried out by “developed” human beings (for a bibliography see the one reported in http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/). The use of non-renewable fossil energy for industry, commercial transportation, construction and functioning in civil and military sectors, and precise organizational choices in the agro-food system (including of course the industrialization of livestock farming), taking into account their cumulative effects, have been the proven cause of the current massive increase in global greenhouse gas emissions, ocean acidification and other forms of pollution. The impact of modern technology has changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere and the earth's climate. It is estimated that around 1750 the preparatory period of the new era (called “Anthropocene”) began. The climatic instability period which opened approximately around 1950 with “global warming” demonstrates the by now geo-logical and no longer simply bio-logical role played by the human species on the planet. Irrespective of their interference with the conditions of reproducibility of life, technological processes triggered firstly by the West and then performed by a transnational hypermodernity, led to a planetary era of collapse in biological diversity and to a planetary mass extinction of living species (Kolbert, 2014). The scientific proclamation of Anthropocene is therefore the ultimate test of the unsustainability of most of the techniques deployed worldwide since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (Chakrabarty, 2009). To pull the threads of the previous discussion: the territoriality crisis of our times is rooted in an unceasing series of technical and technological revolutions. Historically, these revolutions tended to increase political centralization in knowledge systems and in the organisation of human life, as well as realizing continuous expansions and the rescaling of production and consumption systems. These processes were juridically supported by land privatization reforms (or land nationalizations in collectivistic states). For the last century or so, Copyright© Nuova Cultura

therefore, a distinctive “duopoly” has invasively reshaped the geographic features of Western cities and countrysides: mechanized monocultures and industrialized metropolitan areas6. After the Second World War, this destructive modern alliance was ramped up almost everywhere in the world, disrupting traditional spatial codes, landscape orders and ecological balances in the name of social development and economic growth. In this respect, political-economic shifts and spatial fixes run in parallel and have resulted in the impairment of civic and grassroots systems and forms of socio-ecological wealth.

4. Technical domination or domesticating subsistence? On driving forces in landscape shaping How does modernity conceive landscape? A good way to answer this question is to consider the design device called landscaping. A wide, panoramic and “dominating” view is regarded as a valuable landscape. For the wealthy who can afford it, material elevation seems to match a sort of “moral” elevation, and certainly a higher social status. In this way people tend to inhabit images, and not only real places. The act of landscaping incorporates an abstract conception of space and landscape, mirrored by the economic value of land rent. As a consequence, the hierarchy of real estate market prices is directly related to units and amounts of space available to sight. In some sense, the home life value of privileged people seems to be enhanced by the procedures of differentiated accessibility

Among various studies on industrial agriculture's criticalities I limit myself to the quotation of a now “classic” reference: Shiva, 1993. On the “catastrophic urbanisation” spread out on a world scale by Cityregions, Mega-regions, Mega-cities and Urban corridors (UN-Habitat categories), see Magnaghi, 2013 (pp. 32-36). For a postcolonial introduction to these geo-historical processes, see Jaffe, 1994. For an introduction to the biophysical consequences of industrial usage of fossil fuels and minerals, see Sertorio, 2009.

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to increasing units of visible space7. If this power of dominant vision becomes an important criterion in determining and programming desirable and enviable aspects of our way of life, herein lies the resulting “banalisation” of landscapes, driven by crowds of emulators of the privileged, also eager to own their panoramic homes. Thus, the “touristic” conception of the world and ourselves8 leads swiftly to urban sprawl, and to the congestion with buildings of fashionable coastal areas, heights overlooking cities, and so on.

means of drones10, a very large range of options becomes possible. Framed in an abstract quantitative grid, the world understood as a vast res extensa becomes a sort of huge videogame, although this is a very reductionist overview.

But the repercussions of the social primacy accorded to vision are much greater. Reflecting on the legitimization and diffusion of drone use, it is evident that this geomatic sensor in some way definitively reduces the world to a map9. Geopolitical rationality and technical devices used to monitor and re-program configurations of “geographical objects” must be taken into account: if the sentient living world is ignored and reduced to an Euclidean expanse, then ensembles of “physical and living things” (biotopes, biotic communities, habitats, organisms and their embodied experiences – see Weber, 2013) can be recoded in terms of Cartesian-Newtonian space. Depending on the nature of command chains involved, various kinds of algorithms can cybernetically interpret and attempt more or less vertically to control theatres of resources and strategic criticalities. From precision agriculture to the rationalization of services (such as carsharing or car-pooling systems in the field of sustainable mobility), to targeted killings by

For further reading on landscaping (empaysagement) as a simulation process see Raffestin, 1998, 2005 and Debarbieux, 2007. For the objectification of nature in landscaping and the negation of its living essence and biological balances see Clément, 2005, quoted in Tornaghi, 2014. 8 See Parascandolo, 2002 for a case study on touristic representations of landscape. For a sociological approach to individual experiences in Western “touristic society” see Perna, 2014 (especially pp. 7884). 9 For further reading on the evolution of conventional cartographic rationality see Farinelli, 1992, 2009. Copyright© Nuova Cultura

Figure 4. Landscaping strategies in a relatively small but emblematic world city: Beirut, Lebanon. Above: a recent skyscraper. Below: a sign panel that evokes an urban transformation underway11. Photos: F. Parascandolo, 2014. 10

On remotely controlled violence and its profound implications on modern human condition see Chamayou, 2013; for an introductory essay: Belpoliti, 2014. 11 For further analysis see Makhzoumi, 2011.

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Clear traces of the conflict existing between technical domination and domesticating subsistence can be found in the expansionism of modern city planning. In fact, if we extend the famous expression by Le Corbusier about the house as a “machine for living” to the scale of the territory, we understand that in modern zoned landscapes, all the areas sealed by concrete and asphalt, as much as the agro-industrial ones, can be represented as huge “machines”, respectively programmed to produce (transforming – and often deteriorating – the planet’s resources to make goods), to consume (through goods and services functional to either working or nonworking activities), to move (transporting commuters, resources, energy, materials and information on infrastructure networks, etc.), and so on. As Tornaghi (2014, p. 6) lucidly argues, we need to track “the history of planning ideas and their specific development into national planning systems, which accounts for application of modernist concepts of health and functionality to urban living space, and for citizens’ deprivation of the right to determine the shape and functions of their living environments. […] It is arguably with the artificial separation of life spheres (i.e. dwelling, working and leisure) in modernist planning ideas that criteria of hygiene and sanitization merged into planning systems and forms of urbanization based on blueprint urban zoning and disempowerment of local communities from place-making”.

These functional routes, hubs and areas, and the landscapes in which they are configured, are part of a “second nature”, more and more “mutant” and “hi-tech” because they are built by Homo technologicus as by “a god”12. Important consequences of these decisive territorial metamorphoses are of course reverberated in food systems.

The terms in inverted commas are from Marzo, 2006 (p. 216). For interesting considerations on the evolution of the “states of nature” on earth by a firstly organic phase, then a mechanical one, and finally an increasingly cybernetic phase (and also bio-industrial, as suggested by Marzo, ibid., p. 112) see Moscovici, 1968. Copyright© Nuova Cultura

As a result of the aforementioned, today’s technologies could just as easily achieve totalitarian and science-fiction versions of Benthamite panoptikon (Foucault, 1975) as they facilitate the developing of horizontal communities using tangible or intangible assets (natural commons or open source user systems, “smart sharers”, etc.). But the exercise of domination thinking does not seem to encourage the ruling classes’ willingness to favour locally self-managed models of resource use, and even less to foster democratic patterns of knowledge, or support legal reforms for the assertion of political subsidiarity. In other words, after at least one hundred and fifty years of scientific progress applied to every field of social organization, we can observe that technological innovation has been developed to satisfy the interests of power concentrations rather than those of the so-called masses13. Accordingly, innovations have continuously eroded or suppressed decentralized forms of subsistence and the food sovereignty of common people14. If landscapes are less technologically “updated” and more biodiverse (either natural or domesticated), they are however marked by specific features of vitality. These characters can be read both in a subjective sense (because they may generate significant experiences of interconnection between human beings and nature), and objectively (because they are compatible with the regeneration and the coevolution of species and living organisms). As Parascandolo and Tanca (2015) observe, everything happens “as if on the planet two antithetic and mutually exclusive tendencies were at stake. On one side it is going on ‘business as usual’, the conventional process of privatization and technicalization tied to the socio-political and techno-scientific paradigm dominant in Western Europe since the XVII century. On the other side it is emerging the opposite 13

On the evolution of applied sciences see Facheux, 2012. On ethics and politics as “hidden dimensions” of technology: Marx, 1997. 14 See Illich, 1980, and the contributions in Sachs, 2004. On issues related to food sovereignty and its recovery see Desmarais, 2007; Etc Group, 2013; Stedile, 2013 (especially part III). Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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logic, that of re-inclusion and re-vitalization, oriented to a local, territorial and landscape social action, fulfilling human needs and preserving the metabolic salubrity of the natural world”.

In my view this dialectic of “technologisation versus vitalisation” can help us understand many aspects of the present crisis. Enlivenment was the expression used by the biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber (2013) to indicate a process of (re-) vitalization of human actions towards the planet. It could lay the foundations of a new model of civilization, whose operational paradigms will no longer be founded on owner individualism and/or statist centralism, but on the participatory use of the commons essential to life. The term “enlivenment” echoes and at the same time transcends the term “enlightenment”. Weber certainly does not deny the yearning for fundamental rights and individual emancipation personified by the West, but proposes to still pursue them without manipulating nature and localized human communities, and without exceeding the limits of endurance of both in the name of controversial ideals of development. In 1944 Karl Polanyi, an academic student of economic history, published a book whose relevance was not immediately recognized: The Great Transformation (Polanyi, 2001). More than 70 years later, his reading of the dominant socioeconomic system and its evolutionary trends has proved correct. Polanyi was interested in what was left of the real world, and of social organizations, when they were subjected to market domination. What would happen if the latter were given the right to dictate all the organizing rules of everyday life? Polanyi, among other statements, wrote that “Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure. [...] Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted [...] the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. […] Leaving the fate

of soil and people to the market would be tantamount to annihilating them”15.

Significantly, Polanyi coupled landscape with neighbourhood, and soil with people, creating meaningful pairs. In fact, an “unplugged”, communitarian and sustainable organization of human existence is essentially a matter of appropriate neighborhood rules to be applied to spatial action and natural resources managing16.

5. Conclusions Reviewing this paper I come to dwell once again on the landscapes of the crisis. I use this expression as a metaphor to indicate the complex set of problems of a world in which human territoriality has been intensely “westernised” (Latouche, 2005). The fierce tumult and the crisis within the modern worldsystem may be taken as an opportunity to make a break through the flow of human activities on the earth. But this can be realized only if the ontological dimension of the crisis is also understood. The alternative visions to be created, and the healing procedures to be undertaken should be based on the “recognition that both humans and non-humans share a common membership of the selfsame web of life” (Avallone’s introduction in Moore, 2015, p. 21, translation by Author). Some alternatives are already under construction. They start from the critical appraisal of modernisation processes and arrive at the building of new ideas of communities, based on the ecological conversion of the economy (Viale, 2011), on greatly increased sharing of non-monetary social relationships (Barcellona, 1990; Bertell et al., 2013; Gesualdi, 2009), on the search for an “earth-centred and people-centred paradigm of green economy” (Shiva, 2013).

Polanyi, 2001 (pp. 76, 137), quoted in McClintock, 2010 (pp. 197-198). 16 For in-depth studies see: Olwig, 2015 and its references; Jackson, 1984; Ostrom, 1990; see also Besse, 2012. About appropriate rules for natural resources management (especially soil): Navdanya International, 2015. 15

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Figure 5. Italian workforce in 1951 17. Sources: Piccola miniera. Testi sussidiari riuniti per la Classe Quarta, Milan, Fratelli Fabbri Editori, 1952, p. 205; ISTAT, various population censuses elaborated by Author.

But how should we deal with the multidimensional crisis underway if the ruling classes continue to implement the imperatives of modernisation only through measures for enclosing commons (Ricoveri, 2013) and for making profit from territories? What room for negotiation with official institutions remains today to an active citizenship seeking a participative government of commons, landscapes and settlements on a local level?

Today, peasant communities have disappeared, since the number of those who directly provided their own and others’ sustenance has collapsed. The employment structure has undergone a complete upheaval and has been hugely “tertiarised”. The massive increase in agricultural labour productivity has allowed an intense technicalization and commercialisation of subsistence, while people not directly producing their own food have become the immense majority. Employment data updated for 2013 are roughly: 3,6% in agriculture; 7,1 % in construction only; 20,2 % in other industries; 20,4% in trade, 48,7% in other kinds of services. Is this a safe model of society?

A colossal contradiction weighs upon the world of today. The continuing advance of “anthropocenic” landscapes, intensive in goods and technology, triggers a vortex which is destroying natural resources, ecological habitats, local identities, social cohesion and opportunities for democratic self-government, further increasing climatic instability and environmental insecurity. This expansion is nevertheless still economically attractive to many centers of power standing at every dimensional scale (regional, national and global). Landscape technicalisations are encouraged by the “powers that be” because they are propitious to business and produce increases in GDP. But due to its social impact and ecological footprint, every additional act of unsustainable technicalisation is a losing battle in the framework of a war brought to natural and human communities by the predominant social order. If we speak of war, we should also consider the forms of resistance, organized by the members of tens of thousands of movements and committees which all over the world are struggling to defend their resources, habitats and cultural identities. Trying to resist territorial processes of privatization and technicalisation comes at times at a heavy personal costs. Therefore, according to Perna: “[they] are the partisans of the XXI century [...]. Unlike those who fought against Nazism and Fascism in Europe, they do not have to face armed troops who want to take over their territory politically, but technicians, economists and politicians, businessmen and multinational companies that say they want to bring ‘progress’” (Perna, 2011, p. 97, translation by Author).

In today’s world the whole paradigm of modern life is questioned, due to the evidence of its three-level intoxicating effects: on human societies, on individual well-being and on life’s support systems (McClintock, 2010). The destructive technicalisation of places, human societies and nature is still called “progress” because it is essentially based on a growth-first pathway to development. At the beginning this approach was adopted only by the West, but in Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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the long run it has become a “global” ideal. This belief in the virtues of growth is actually the ideological hard core of the globalised social order. However, when the veil of rhetoric is lifted and the developmentalist imagination is deconstructed, spaces open for the regeneration of our awareness, and landscape can recover its operational sense (Besse, 2012; Olwig, 2015). Nevertheless, the landscape cannot be “saved” alone, of course: no liveable landscape is possible without first preserving the territories, and without preserving with them our living planet (Parascandolo and Tanca, 2015). Finally, it is worth mentioning that the preservation of landscapes and territories is a logical outcome of the protection of the commons essential to life. Accordingly, as living human beings, local inhabitants and citizens of terrestrial states, we should all have the right to protect territories and natural commons recognized. (Magnaghi, 2012, Ricoveri, 2013; for in-depth studies: Ostrom, 1990; Bollier and Helfrich, 2012). This is a much more urgent and immediate-right than the obsolete and often counterproductive “right to development”. I believe that we should write it in our national constitutions, and state it as an inalienable human right, but also regard it as a binding responsibility for each and everyone of us.

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2009, pp. 275-292. 40. Magnaghi A. (Ed.) Il territorio bene comune, Florence, FUP, 2012. 41. Magnaghi A., “Riterritorializzare il mondo”, Scienze del Territorio, 1, 2013, pp. 31-41. 42. Makhzoumi J., “Colonizing Mountains, Paving Sea: Neoliberal Politics and the Right to the Landscape in Lebanon”, in Egoz S., Makhzoumi J. and Pungetti G. (Eds.), The Right to Landscape. Contesting Landscape and Human Rights, Farnham and Burlington, Ashgate, 2011, pp. 227-242. 43. Marx L., “Technology: a Hazardous Concepts”, Social Research, 64, 3, 1997, pp. 965-988. 44. Marzo P.L., Le metamorfosi: natura, artificio e tecnica. Dal mutamento sociale alla mutazione socio-biologica, Milan, Franco Angeli, 2006. 45. McClintock N., “Why farm the City? Theorizing Urban Agriculture through a Lens of Metabolic Rift”, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 3, 2010, pp. 191-207. 46. McC. Netting R., Balancing on an Alp. Ecological Change & Continuity in a Swiss Mountain Community, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981. 47. McMichael Ph., “Global Development and the Corporate Food Regime”, in Buttel F.H. and McMichael Ph. (Eds.), New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 2005, https://devsoc. cals.cornell.edu/sites/devsoc.cals.cornell.edu /files/shared/documents/McM-global-devcorp-regimeFR-pdf.pdf. 48. McNeill J.R., Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (The Global Century Series), New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 49. Mies M. and Benholdt-Thomsen V., The Subsistence Perspective. Beyond the Globalised Economy, London and New York, Zed books, 1999. 50. Moore J.W., Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, 2007. 51. Moore J.W., “Wall Street is a way of organizing nature: an interview with Jason Moore”, Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action, 12, 2011, pp. 39-53. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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52. Moore J.W., “Metabolic Rift or Metabolic Shift? From Dualism to Dialectics in the Capitalist World Ecology”, New Geographies, 6, 2014, http://www.academia.edu/758 7034/Metabolic_Rift_or_Metabolic_Shift_Fr om_Dualism_to_Dialectics_in_the_Capitalist _World-Ecology. 53. Moore J.W., Ecologia-mondo e crisi del capitalismo. La fine della natura a buon mercato, in Avallone G. (Ed.), Verona, Ombre corte, 2015. 54. Moscovici S., Essai sur l’histoire humaine de la nature, Paris, Flammarion, 1968. 55. Navdanya International, Terra viva. Our Soils, Our Commons, Our Future, 2015, http://www.navdanyainternational.it/attachm ents/article/202/Manifesto%20English.pdf. 56. Olwig K., “Epilogue to Landscape as Mediator: the Non-modern Commons Landscape and Modernism’s Enclosed Landscape of Property”, in Castiglioni B., Parascandolo F. and Tanca M. (Eds.), Landscape as Mediator, Landscape as Commons. International Perspectives on Landscape Research, Padua, Cleup, 2015, pp. 197-214. 57. Ostrom E., Governing the Commons. The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990. 58. Palermo G.C., I limiti del possibile. Governo del territorio e qualità dello sviluppo, Rome, Donzelli, 2009. 59. Pandolfi G., “Nuove estetiche nel paesaggio della neoruralità: potenzialità e problematiche aperte”, in Poli D. (Ed.), Agricoltura paesaggistica. Visioni, metodi, esperienze, Florence, FUP, 2013, pp. 79-105, http:// www.fupress.com/archivio/pdf/2594_6387. pdf. 60. Parascandolo F., “I caratteri territoriali della modernità nelle campagne sarde: un’interpretazione”, Annali della Facoltà di Magistero-Università di Cagliari, 18, 1995, pp. 139-186. 61. Parascandolo F., “Paesaggio e natura: verso un’identità progettuale?”, in Turco A. (Ed.), Paesaggio: pratiche, linguaggi, mondi, Diabasis, Bologna, 2002, pp. 155-174. 62. Parascandolo F., “Norbello e Domusnovas Canales. Lineamenti di una storia ecologica locale tra il XIX secolo e gli anni ’60 del Novecento”, in VV.AA., Norbello e Domusnovas Canales. Appunti di vita comunitaria Copyright© Nuova Cultura

63.

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of J. Armangué i Herrero, Dolianova-CA, Edizioni Grafica del Parteolla, 2004, pp. 115-139 and 195-221. Parascandolo F., “Ruralità e sviluppo del territorio in Italia: è tempo di bilanci”, in Bocci R. and Ricoveri G. (Eds.), Agricultura. Terra lavoro ecosistemi, CNS – Ecologia Politica, 2, EMI, Bologna, 2006, pp. 45-56. Parascandolo F., “Fra terra e cibo. Sistemi agroalimentari nel mondo attuale (e in Italia)”, Scienze del Territorio, 1, 2013, pp. 185-193. Parascandolo F. and Tanca M., “Is Landscape a Commons? Paths toward a Metabolic Approach”, in Castiglioni B., Parascandolo F., Tanca M. (Eds.), Landscape as Mediator, Landscape as Commons. International Perspectives on Landscape Research, Padua, Cleup, 2015, pp. 2945. Perna T., Eventi estremi. Come salvare il pianeta e noi stessi dalle tempeste climatiche e finanziarie, Soveria Mannelli, Rubettino, 2011. Perna T., Schiavi della visibilità, Soveria Mannelli, Rubettino, 2014. Polanyi K., The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston, Beacon Press, 2001. Quaini M., L’ombra del paesaggio. L’orizzonte di un’utopia conviviale, Reggio Emilia, Diabasis, 2006. Raffestin C., “De la domestication à la simulation du paysage”, Conference “Il senso del paesaggio”, Turin, ISSU, 1998. Raffestin C., Dalla nostalgia del territorio al desiderio di paesaggio. Elementi per una teoria del paesaggio, Florence, Alinea, 2005. Ricoveri G., Nature for Sale: the Commons Versus Commodities, London, Pluto Press, 2013. Sachs W. (Ed.), Dizionario dello sviluppo (It. Ed. Tarozzi A.), Turin, Ega, 2004. Sachs W. and Santarius T. (Eds.), Slow Trade – Sound Farming. A Multilateral Framework for Sustainable Markets in Agriculture, Berlin, Heinrich Böll Foundation and Misereor, 2007, http://www.misereor.org/fileadmin/redaktion/slowtradesou nd_farming.pdf. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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75. Sertorio L., La Natura e le macchine. La piramide economica del consumismo ha la base nella miseria, Turin, 27, 2009. 76. Settis S., Paesaggio costituzione cemento. La battaglia per l'ambiente contro il degrado civile, Turin, Einaudi, 2010. 77. Shiva V., Monocoltures of the Mind. Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology, London, Zed Books, 1993. 78. Shiva V., “Will Green be the Colour of Money or Life? Paradigm Wars and the Green Economy”, Scienze del Territorio, 1, 2013, pp. 120-128. 79. Stedile J.P., Riflessioni sulle tendenze del controllo del capitale sull’agricoltura, le sue conseguenze e le alternative proposte dai contadini, 2012, http://www.comitato mst.it/ node /1021. 80. Tornaghi C., “Critical Geography of Urban Agriculture”, Progress in Human Geography, 38, 4, 2014, pp. 551-567. 81. Torre S., Dominio, natura, democrazia. Comunità umane e comunità ecologiche, Milan-Udine, Mimesis, 2013.

82. Turco A., Verso una teoria geografica della complessità, Milan, Unicopli, 1988. 83. Turco A., “Il paesaggio come configurazione della territorialità”, in Aru S., Parascandolo F., Tanca M. and Vargiu L. (Eds.), Sguardi sul paesaggio, sguardi sul mondo. Mediterranei a confronto, Milan, Franco Angeli, 2012, pp. 23-46. 84. Viale G., La conversione ecologica. There is no alternative, Rimini, NdA Press, 2011. 85. Villalba B., “L’écologie politique face au délai et à la contraction démocratique”, Ecologie & Politique, 40, 2010, pp. 95-113. 86. Wallerstein I., “Spazio economico”, in Enciclopedia Einaudi, vol. XIII, Turin, Einaudi, 1981. 87. Wallerstein I., World-Systems Analysis. An introduction, Durham-London, Duke University Press, 2004. 88. Weber A., Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics, Berlin, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2013, http://www.autor-andreasweber.de/down loads/Enlivenment_web.pdf.

Italian Association of Geography Teachers

Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography (J-READING), 1, 5, June, 2016, pp. 25-35 DOI: 10.4458/6964-02

The crisis of the landscape, the crisis of the norms for the landscape, the planning of the landscape between uncertainty and second thoughts. A few basic issues Anna Maria Colavittia a

DICAAR – Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, Ambientale e Architettura, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy Email: amcolavt@unica.it Received: November 2015 – Accepted: March 2016

Abstract Landscape planning is the result of a complex and coordinated effort. The interpretation of the idea of Landscape by the Urban Planning discipline is clearly facing some hardship. In Italy, the tools of the Landscape planning currently in effect (Landscape and Cultural Heritage Code  L.D.42/2004 and subsequent revisions) include a not flexible and straightforward series of rules. At present the landscape planning discipline is facing a rethinking of its models due to the inadequacy of its founding standpoints and of some ideologically manufactured claims based in turn on a specious conception of identity. This is proven by the fact that several regional plans are having a very hard time applying basic rules and regulations to the practicality of the planning at a local level. In order to better explain the above mentioned points, we are going to present the case of the Sardinian Regional Landscape Plan (SRLP) in which several critical issues arise and converge as they stem from the uncertainty of the rules and are consequently accompanied by seriously negative outcomes. Keywords: Identities and Invariants, Landscape and Cultural Heritage Code, Landscape Planning, Norms and Landscape, Sardinian Regional Landscape Plan

1. Introduction Landscape planning is the result of a complex and coordinated effort. The interpretation of the idea of Landscape by the Urban Planning discipline is clearly facing some hardship. In Italy, the tools of the Landscape planning currently in effect (Landscape and Cultural Heritage Code  L.D.42/2004 and subsequent Copyright© Nuova Cultura

revisions) include a neither straightforward series of rules.

flexible

nor

To preside over the management of the Landscape we have, on the one hand, the advanced and exclusive vision elaborated by the constitutional legislator, and on the other a reductionist perspective of the Landscape in the sense that this is perceived and therefore treated Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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as an asset belonging to the community and is subject to an incoherent and inter dependent set of rules depending upon the regulations of the Landscape planning (Carrà, Gasparri and Marzuoli, 2012, pp. 91-98). If the European Convention for the Landscape itself demands (art. 5d) that the Landscape is integrated in the urban planning, in the cultural policies, as well as in the general policies, we can no longer circumvent the idea that the clarity of the regulations, originating from the contribution of several and diverse territorial lobbies 1, represents the foundation of the criteria to adopt for its management and advancement. This concept constitutes “the point of no return” of the territorial policies, to the extent that the regulations, besides reflecting the deepest aspirations of the local communities, may also guarantee that the communities themselves project in the landscape their rulesconformed idea of landscape. At present the landscape planning discipline is facing a rethinking of its models due to the inadequacy of its founding standpoints and some ideologically manufactured claims based in turn on a specious conception of identity. This is proven by the fact that several regional plans are having a very hard time applying basic rules and regulations to the practicality of the planning at a local level. The acknowledgment of the cultural framework of the landscape regulation is not necessarily operational in the laws, therefore it is not clear how to protect the common good when the laws disregard the principles of “public rationality” (Treu, 2011, p. 21). Recently this discrepancy had to deal with the bill “Principles regulating the public management of the territory in a changing city” (Lupi Bill, 2014) which “de facto” abdicates a systematic confrontation with the issues of the Landscape planning and results in an actual short circuit among the many different levels of planning. In order to better explain the above mentioned points, we are going to present the case of the Sardinian Regional Landscape Plan

(SRLP)2 in which several critical issues arise and converge as they stem from the uncertainty of the rules and are consequently accompanied by seriously negative outcomes. The Sardinian Regional Landscape Plan is a convincing one on many levels, such as for instance the study of the classification of the cultural invariances 3, and its contribution to prevent cases of pillaging of the coastal landscape, but it has critical cultural limits and methodological flaws directly related to the irresolution of the laws (Figure 1). One of these flaws is the lack of a strategic vision and coordination among the many authorities presiding over the territory, which confers a substantial limit to the protection and the guarantee of the Landscape interpreted as a common good. Another one is the interpretation of what constitutes the real identity of the common good which is highly debatable and controversial in itself. An additional concern is the partiality used to evaluate the regional territory: the plan only considers the coastal border which is just a part of the Landscape, therefore ruling out a very important component of the territory. Such disparity is detrimental for the Landscape as a common good because it generates conflicts, inequalities in the assigned value of the estates, and decreases the sense of belonging to the larger community. We are therefore convinced that the planning of the territory needs unequivocal rules, clear limits in the range of the possible interpretations of the norms and more responsibility on behalf of the legislators to apply restrictions instead of implementing them in an overweening unlimited fashion as too often happens today.

Italian: Piano Paesaggistico Regionale (PPR). As Alberto Magnaghi wrote: “Structural invariants are thus elements (goods, territorial types, relations between territorial and environmental systems) structuring the territory, its identity, its health, quality, landscape and potential as a lasting heritage resource”. The invariants have not varied in the long term though cycles of territorialisation (Magnaghi, 2005, p. 95). 3

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Figure 1. Historical Sardinian Regions. Source: Elaboration on Autonomous Region of Sardinia website.

2. The Premises The Sardinian Regional Landscape Plan (SRLP) was established in 2006 as one of the most important and ambitious planning experiments of the last 20/30 years and in essence represented the attempt of the Sardinian government to dictate common rules that slowed down the exploitation of the territory. These rules are supported by so called “agreements of co-planning” among the Sardinian government, the Ministry of Culture (Mibact) and the municipalities. The latter are assigned the unenviable task of updating their planning tools,

which, according to the Landscape and Cultural Heritage Code 42/2004, must take into consideration the rules and regulations of the Landscape plan (art. 145). Some municipalities attempted to attribute a feature of invariance to the rules of Landscape creation, but they have been unsuccessful, because the reading frame of the relative methodology is uncertain and incoherent. The net result has been that practically no Municipality managed to complete the updating process (that has been furtherly complicated by the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) In 2009 the new Regional Council inaugurated a season of revision of the Plan, but made the above mentioned errors, although it reduced the number of the invariances (the fewer the invariances, the fewer the problems). The Municipalities then started a new study of their territory and found specific territorial goods to invest in (to ascertain the value of a property invariably entails its appreciation and favors the growth of the local economy) and to subject the Sardinian government, the Mibact, and the municipalities to a “cooperative planning”. This means that the plan was changed again, calling into question its previous structure, but it was still far from presenting accepted and clearly stated unequivocal rules. The rules of the realization of the regional plan were also updated and the Municipalities had to reconcile them with the reality of their territories. As a matter of fact the dreaded simplification ended up with a weakening of the desired certainties because of the lack of coordination with the Mibact, despite a nonbinding agreement. In 2014 the change in the national political scenario erased the 2009 Plan (that had only been implemented in 2013), making the matter even more complicated. The 2006 plan, enhanced in 2014 with the updated Mosaic of the cultural and territorial assets, became effective once again when the regional government, with resolution No. 39/1 of October 10th 2014, overruled the D.G.R. n.45/2 of October 25th 2013 concerning the preliminary approval of the Landscape Plan. The measure followed D.G.R. No. 10/20 of March 28th 2014 that set aside resolution No. 6/18 of February 14th 2014 which had in turn ratified the review of the Sardinian Plan. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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3. The cultural framework of the

Sardinian Regional Landscape Plan: the crucial issue of Sardinian Identity The Sardinian Regional Landscape Plan, the first to be approved among all the Italian regions, is founded on the theme of Sardinian identity, the complex of criteria that shapes the safeguard and the possible re-adaptation of the landscape. The idea of Identity, a polysemous word used by the European Landscape Convention (ELC)4 must be interpreted as a relational structure, as a field strength where the tensions between naturalistic and human factors confront each other yielding an unstable and temporary balance that sometimes may endure the hardships of time. The concept of identity is not a static one, does not merely point to the past, and is not a synonym of tradition: identity is continuously shaped by the confrontation with the current times; it combines preservation with innovation, safeguard with restoration and care of the territory. From this standpoint, the aesthetic standard, particularly relevant in Italy, and the ecologic-scientific standard leads to a comprehensive view of the Landscape as a hive for the Communities (ref 2)5, carved according to the history and the culture of the local communities that inhabit the territories, altering them through the ages, sculpting their features in them, seeing themselves in them. We read in the Sardinian Regional Landscape Plan guidelines approved by the Regional Government: “the Landscape is the defining feature of the culture of a community, it deeply denotes its identity and at the same time is 4

ELC (2000), General criteria art. 5: “to legally identify the landscape as an essential component of the context the populations live in, as an expression of the diversity of their common cultural and natural heritage and as a foundation of their identity”. 5 The definition is included in the volume by Bonesio, 2007, which considers the common Landscape as the result of a complex interaction of factors. The Author, in particular, focuses on: the theme of the recollection and the inventory of the locations (Norberg-Schulz, 1989), the cultural identity of the territory (Cervellati, 2000), the structural invariants, cornerstones of the identity of the territory that last in the long term (Magnaghi, 2000). Copyright© Nuova Cultura

denoted by that […] if the landscape is both the product and the producer of the Identity, this is particularly evident in Sardinia”. The Landscape can represent, and it definitely does in Sardinia, the Island identity with such intensity that blends with the foundation and the main component of the very cultural identity of the local communities. However, we need to appreciate how the change in the usage of the territory over the last 25 years has caused a transformation of the Sardinian Landscape that is peculiarly different from the one that occurred before that and having lasted for centuries had affected the island’s appearance so profoundly. Among the factors that brought about a substantial change in the relationship between the communities and their territories and irreversibly altered the distinctiveness of the land, we have to consider the utilization of the coastal borders for tourism, the decrease in competitiveness of agriculture and sheep farming which led to the abandoning of the inner lands, the expansion of the urban areas and the desertion of the small villages (Magnaghi, 1998). These factors defaced the peculiarity of the land, the memory of the past, the sense of direction and of self-recognition of the people (Norberg-Schulz 1996). The Landscape planning, along with the political management of the territory and its sustainable development has to start from a careful analysis of the shared identity that must always be protected, enriched and constantly re-examined6. Planning means finding the signs of the past in the land, and recognizing the milestones that define the territory and allow one to be oriented; it means re-discovering the identity traits that the people during history have not consciously changed but rather piled up in the diachronic sedimentation process of their living space. If the basic standpoint of the European Convention includes both the exceptional landscapes and the ordinary ones therefore considering them as heritage from which to fish out the Identity fuel, we must seek “ways the processes of identification and belonging transform the everyday life environment into shared patrimony” (Clementi, 2002). How then can we recognize the locations, the specificities, the prominent traits that are really the expression of that cultural identity the 6

As we can read in the guidelines of the SRLP. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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communities still value as significant, aesthetically sound and therefore worthwhile being rescued and passed on to the next generation? 4. The features of the Identity: the old

town centers and the discovery of the matrix centers One of the most important elements concerning the topic of the landscape and the definition of identity, involves the determination of the town centers of ancient foundation which are clearly essential for the proposition of the detailed plans. In the guidelines for the adaptation of the municipal urban plans to the SRLP, we read: “We consider Old town centers the urban built up areas that maintain, in the planning and building techniques, the signs of ancient origin and of their own authentic residential, economic, social, political and cultural functions. In the SRLP these areas are approximately defined by the historic map collection of the 1890 IGM”7 (Figure 2).

even though approximately, based on the 1890 IGM. The attempt to define an historic urban settlement via the identification of the ancient elements that it contains (for instance the building erected before the fifties, as stated by law 1089/39, or the buildings presenting those identity features the local communities are able to pinpoint) appears at least inefficient to determine the concept of the matrix center that the writer of the SRLP presents almost at the same time. It is not clear what the writer of the SRLP means by matrix center. This term cannot be found in the ancient city planning discipline documents8; rather these texts mention a primordial nucleus that can be defined as a preexistent and permanent physical shape9 that has also a symbolic value and coincides with the foundation pole10 of a certain territory. It is the city of classic foundation that, even in Sardinia, played an important role at the source of the urban settlements (to be distinguished from settlements that do not show urban features) and acquires a meaning which goes beyond the mere distribution of functions. This opinion is now shared by the majority of the scholars of ancient urban planning, historic topography and history of the city and makes it possible to better clarify the issue of the ancient city that otherwise would be left to the disarray of the most diverse theories. This is particularly true because the definition of matrix center needs to be immediately associated to a body of strongly binding, qualitative and quantitative rules of preservations, safeguard and tutelage of the 8

Figure 2. The matrix center of Cagliari. Source: Elaboration on Autonomous Region of Sardinia website.

Two aspects appear misleading: the first is that the old town centers need to be recognized on the basis of an alleged ancient foundation; the second is that the centers need to be identified, 7

Survey Mapping Agency of Italy.

Cfr. it is useful at this point the citation of the pivotal texts concerning the ancient city planning discipline, the works of Lavedan’s, Glotz’ or more simply of Liverani’s regarding the first urban nuclei ante Greek world, or the immense work of Poete. 9 Shape here means drawing, representation. 10 Argan and Fagiolo, 1972, p. 733 underline the cardinal principle of the identification of the ancient city by the contemporary scholars: “...the monument is the most evident of the meaningful structures, the one which sets the tone to the whole forma urbis, […] it is an architectural or a plastic shape that dictates the scope of the urban space, expresses with its stability the everlasting principles or institutions and affirms its historicity with the fact that it survives the hardships of time, it matters today, it mattered yesterday and will matter tomorrow. valid tomorrow […]”. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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entire historic fabric of the city. In this scenario, the prompt of a more careful evaluation of the concept of old town center becomes more urgent and not specious, even inevitable, especially when it must be related to the larger horizon of the natural landscape, therefore overcoming its own boundaries11. The study of such combination of spaces evokes the discipline of the so called visual points, which should be regarded in the most impartial and serene way especially given the restrictions they are exposed to.

5. The Identity assets. How can we define

them? Starting from the cultural background that is anchored to the concept of identity, the SRLP introduced a new method of research that seems particularly significant. The way the Plan chose to present and discuss the historic cultural landscape theme is an excellent opportunity to make the case of its featuring elements, the so called identity assets. We read in the SRLP: “we consider an identity asset the category of a building, a location and/or an intangible value that fosters the sense of belonging of the local communities to the specificity of the Sardinian culture”. Moreover, Regional Law No. 8 of 11.25.2004, at title II, art. 9 – Discipline of the identity assets – reads: “the identity assets […] are categories of assets directly pinpointed by the SRLP or by the municipalities and to be conformed to the urban planning tools projections”; and goes on to the art. 6: “The Regional government or the municipalities have the task to set the boundaries of the identity assets to facilitate the acknowledgment of their historic and cultural specificity […] these boundaries should prevent any kind of manipulation of the identity assets […]”. The types of identity assets acknowledged by the SRLP are the following:

Cfr. Argan and Fagiolo, 1972, p. 778 ss.

buildings and areas protected in accordance to the art. 9 N.T.A.12; areas characterized by the presence of constructions and artifacts of historic-cultural value (historic-cultural elements spanning from pre-history to the contemporary era, including iconic or non-iconic representations of religious, political, military nature; industrial archeology and mines; historic architecture and manufacturing areas; specialized architecture of historic and civil significance); networks and other connective elements (historic infrastructural network; wefts and artifacts of the agro-pastoral historic and cultural landscape); manufacturing areas of historic-cultural interest (areas characterized by a strong sense of identity due to the fact that they have been venues for historically important manufacturing processes).

It is important to emphasize that the Code of the cultural and territorial assets put both cultural and landscape assets in the same category. Nevertheless, this categorization is strongly limited by the unavailability of objective criteria used to define it. The identity assets are not clearly recognizable other than through the listing of categories and typologies of artifacts found in the territory. As a consequence, the determination of the restrictions the study of the territory refers to could turn out to be incorrect due to a clear methodological defect in the form and substance13, since, as we said, it anchors the collective action to value judgements not previously codified and shared. To introduce and preserve a new category of identity assets that for all intents and purposes belongs to the notion of cultural assets and therefore of identity assets, we should be able to elaborate a range of objective criteria/values, really not negotiable14, upon which to make 12

Cfr. Technical rules for the implementation of the SRLP. 13 The reference concerns the whole SRLP dissertation about the cultural assets as not negotiable components of the territory and of the landscape. 14 We borrowed the concept of negotiable criteria from Schiavone (2007, p. 90), where the Author describes “not negotiable values, that are considered Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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politically shared decisions and manage the governance of the territory. We have to consider also the identification of alleged identity values in the territorial artifacts and the so called spontaneous identity customs that can be found locally15. These concepts are at the very foundation of the notion of identity and allow us to shape the shared features of the different communities in a super-individual quest that still manages to express the will of the collective thought. In this scenario we need to frame the classical anthropologic studies from Bateson to Mauss16, mostly intended to identify the shared traits of the social habits in human population. As Cassano (2001) states, we have to be wondering about what is happening to the common goods17, whichever the legitimation process they underwent to may be, and above all whether or not the planning of the future welfare (which at the end of the day should be the main focus of the landscape planning) is compatible with the utilization of the intrinsic richness of the territory or rather entails a loss of pertinence due to the extremisms of some environmental policies. We therefore need to clarify what the RPP means with identity asset, since the Code of the cultural and territorial assets only mentions the typologies of the assets. How the so called identity assets are included in the general category of the (common) assets classified by the Code will likely be controversial, as it affects the future preservation and restrictions to be tangibly applied to the immanent peculiarities of the territory-landscape. This issue stems from the delay between the elaboration of a proposal of restrictions and the application (extension) of the same restrictions by the Government, the Sardinian Government in this case, which represents the last useful intervention in terms of tutelage of the assets themselves.

absolute not because transcendent or eternal, but because, in a given scenario, they are unavailable for change by subjective, individual or collective action”. 15 See Tiragallo, 2007, pp. 152 ss. 16 See De Biasi and Bateson, 2007, pp. 15-36. 17 See Cassano, 2001, pp. 54-57. Copyright© Nuova Cultura

The temporal deferral of the implementation of the restrictions is an objective risk for the assets and the territory, because it elicits the expansion of the planning phase and causes discrepancies among the expectations of the Plan, the actual opportunities of the territorial development, and the impossibility to make programmed and competitive choices at a European level. Thus the definition of identity resource is a very critical topic of discussion concerning the Sardinian SRLP. It has been launched to safeguard those Sardinian identity assets that are identified as such and to lead to their unconditional legal protection.

6. What is the value of the Identity asset? In the SRLP, the identity asset can be assimilated to the concept of cultural asset and represents a new motif of the territorial section that is associated with bases on its uniqueness and its assigned value. The Plan does not clearly explain how it came up with this attribution of value though, and while it creates the need to pinpoint objective parameters particularly pertinent and relevant, it also entails the risk of causing an excessive containment of an immaterial good. Nevertheless it is worthwhile discussing the concept of identity asset and its so called identity matrix particularly because they can be a tool for useful future considerations. One of the principles the cultural asset is based on is its public utility, interpreted as historic and cultural relevance of public pertinence, regardless of its legal status. This concept involves the discipline of jurisprudence because it implies the notion of legatum at patriam, namely the legal principle according to which everything located in a public place falls within the conditio of res populi romani. This means that a public good is such when it has a public utility18. 18

Cfr. Barbati, Cammelli and Sciullo (2003, p. 21) on the notion of public cultural good: “the cultural good is therefore public not in the degree that it necessarily belongs to everybody but... because the community require, needs its cultural meaning”. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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Initially it is the public utility that establishes the asset in the institutions and the customs memory19 therefore becoming first individual memory, then collective memory and finally historic memory. The memory plays a fundamental role in the transformation of the landscape into a human artifact (territorializzazione), because it has the power to safeguard the unchanging values of a venue even when that is transformed by later models of civilization20. The long lasting cognitive and material settlings are the basis for the definition of the concept of structural invariance (Magnaghi, 2001). The invariances must be retraced into operational forms, saved (cum-serbare, keep beside oneself) and protected (curatio, take care), not turned into a museum (museum, place dedicated to the Muses), but rather transformed into new economic opportunities. In order to accomplish this plan it is necessary to build a range of values that in turn can be used to apply the necessary restrictions that regulate the usage of the territory. However the methodology adopted by the SRLP for the acknowledgment of the identity assets does not allow the drawing of a series of unchanging values perceived as such by the local populations. It is not quite clear which values the communities have to acknowledge and rely upon and not leave to the arbitrary or subjective discernment of the individual. Thus the identity asset plays an uncomfortable role with respect to the other assets: its meaning lies in that supposed “sense of belonging” to the local community that is impossible to define or measure, but, by virtue of its own uncertainty, can prevent a correct definition and generate bogus preservation rules. It is impossible to define the structure of an identity asset, because it is hard to decipher the perception of the sense of belonging. This is a mental representation consisting in a mixture of sensitivity and memory and not necessarily attributable to a purely physical or intellectual category. However to secure an identity asset it is still necessary to identify it with certainty and to describe its qualifications. Every other 19

As observed by Vernant, 2005. About the “foundation” of territorial identity see Magnaghi, 2001, pp. 17-27. 20

evaluation turns out to motivated and deceptive.

ideologically

We could then equate the identity assets to the monumental and territorial assets, thereby granting them the same criteria of measurement used for the monumental, historic-cultural and landscape assets. The new definition of identity landscape and identity historic cultural assets would allow a better balance among the assets to protect, without falling into likely and subjective manipulations that interfere with an opportune and shared attribution of value. The N.T.A. sharply defines the typologies of the identity assets by listing a specific series of objects that are however already protected in the category of the historic-monumental and landscape assets. It is not clear why it was deemed necessary to extend additional restrictions to artifacts that by definition were already granted in toto or partial tutelage. Another criticism could be directed to the section of the SRLP that establishes an excessive number of restrictions on an excessive number of identity assets identified on the basis of supposed common Sardinian typologies. It seems contradictory to associate the meaning of the identity asset that cannot be separated from its territorial context to a sort of “automatic” and generalist approach the law is using for so many artifacts, which should be intrinsically able to evoke a sense of identity and belonging for the settled populations. This perspective is questionable also because it leads to a standardization of the contributions the ancient cultures gave to the regional territory, a sort of homologation of the cultural landscape of Sardinia whose preservation is wholly entrusted to the category of the identity asset. This approach crushes the freedom the communities should have to re-interpret these categories and re-adapt them to their current cultural profile. On the contrary we should give our regulations a more competitive potential: from creating passive restrictions for the identity goods to offering them a positive, affirmative meaning in the broader context of a dialogue among safeguard, promotion and administration of the territory. To this aim the Landscape and Cultural Heritage Code (42/2004) and the SRLP of Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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Sardinia introduced the tool of the project for the Landscape: the project drew a new scenario where the identity good regains possession of its real meaning, namely of an entity the community highly values and enjoys and at the same time considers susceptible to transformation and an opportunity for economic growth.

7. The value of the rule in the safeguard

of the territory

What we have presented so far is a clearly controversial series of issues that is nevertheless useful to analyze in the attempt to clarify the community/territory relationship and to lead us to the unsettling conclusion that the crisis of the landscape is, in part, also a crisis of the rules that should guarantee the landscape itself. It would be naĂŻve if we did not wonder about what we mean exactly by the planning of the landscape and by the specific actions and measure to undertake to manage it. These issues are complex and sometimes obscure even to the legislator or the scholar of urban planning. The most important unclear subjects are: -

the adaptation of the urban planning to the regional landscape planning; the criteria the lobbies of interests need to agree upon to manage specific objectives of landscape planning; the clarity of the regulations to adopt to interpret the territorial invariances and the territorial identities.

This uncertainty brings about the inefficiency of the local plans because it freezes the actions of all the players involved. The example of the SRLP demonstrates that, in the absence of clear rules, having a structured picture of the territorial assets does not necessarily protect the landscape and the historic common goods. After all, the Plan itself emphasizes the importance of the clarity of the law to raise the level of tutelage of the assets21.

21 The Plan outlines (Version 2009), 1, 2, 4. Simplicity and clarity increase the level of protection, pp. 12-13.

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8. Unpopular conclusions We think that the content of the SRLP as pertaining to the meaning and the importance of the landscape identity goods needs to be properly revised with the final goal of the assimilation of the identity asset to the cultural asset and to the landscape itself. However we are convinced that the safeguard of the common goods cannot be focused on individual or collective interests that disregard codified criteria and models that the scientific community agrees upon and transmits to the local community. This last passage is a very heterogeneous one depending on how through history the concept of identity is conveyed. Therefore the attribution of the meaning must necessarily include the representation of the identity of the land in its recognizable physical shapes such as artifacts, but also scenarios with all their complexity. This representation can be achieved just by applying the already existing rules without inflating the complex regulations of realization listed in the RLP. In essence we wish for a direct referral to the Landscape and Cultural Heritage Code and to the idealistic classification of the assets22, given an obvious problem of scientific definitions that cannot be reduced to a mere appropriation rule. If we accept that the landscape planning also includes the urban planning, particularly when it comes to the realization of the plan (Urbani and Civitarese, 2010; Cabiddu, 2010, p. 266), it seems undeniable that the previously mentioned method weakens the concept of property, territory, identity and it makes harder to second the idea of public interest that in turn bolsters the power to impose restrictions. The concept of public interest is in fact pivotal in the discussion on nature and the goals of the urban planning discipline, particularly when it comes to the redefinition of its contents23. Despite all the revisions of the Landscape and Cultural Heritage Code (2008, 2010, 2014), the fact that â&#x20AC;&#x153;the predictions of the landscape 22

The reference is to the work of Croce. Regarding this theme very interesting Campbell and Marshall, 2006, and also Minervini, 2008, p. 166.

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planning are binding for the municipalities and in any case override the pre-existing current rules when they are at odds did not change24, thereby posing a legal conformity obligation for the municipalities, the provinces and the institutions in charge of the safeguarded areas, with the purpose of adapting the tools of the urban planning to the anticipations of the landscape planning”. Thus, if on the one hand the relationship among all the many urban managing tools seems clearer, on the other it is not clear how the local institutions will have to conform their regulations to the directives of the regional government. Words such as the statute of the locations or the territorial invariances are doomed to be ignored, although present in the description of the Plan. The issue of the rules, regulations and directives aimed to establish behavioral codes for all the key players interacting in the land and crucial to save or alter the landscape, is a very sensitive one and has become a platform of confrontation among different experiences and professional expertise. Nevertheless, the necessity and the convenience for all the interlocutors involved to find a common denominator and avoid conflicts stemming from the often contradictory rules, are evident and obvious. To this aim it could be useful to remember that the Norm and the Rule philosophically overlap, whereas the real difference can be drawn only between Directive and Norm. The former is the proposition literally containing the order, the rule; the latter (the Norm) is the result of the interpretation of the rule, a hermeneutical act. From an ambiguously written rule many different and sometimes contradictory norms can be paradoxically drawn. In our case of the landscape-theme we are frustrated to discover that the rules sometimes fill the gaps of the State legislations, where the fundamental principles for the promotion of the landscape goods are not yet solidified. The net result is that our territory is split in half: on the one hand we have the landscape assets, regulated according to an obsolete legislation that is not leading towards a sustainable advancement of the territory, and on

the other the whole remaining territory, left to the creativity of the Regional government25. Indeed the regional definitions confirm that the landscape can only be developed if it is protected at the same time. This means that any development plan presumes a safeguard plan which includes the recognition of the asset to be protected. Moreover, besides the recognition we have to dictate the possible usage of the land, what is restricted and what is allowed. Nevertheless, in the areas that do not belong to the category of the landscape goods, the constraining power of the local administrations is naturally more limited because the urban planning discipline they are subject to needs to be updated with a renewed energy but especially with the study and the approval of a new state law more suitable for the government of the territory.

References 1. Argan G.C. and Fagiolo M., “Premessa all’arte italiana. I problemi della città. La struttura organica”, in AA.VV., Storia d’Italia I. I caratteri originali, Turin, Einaudi, 1972. 2. Barbati C., Cammelli M. and Sciullo G., Il diritto dei beni culturali, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2003. 3. Bonesio L., Paesaggio, identità e comunità tra locale e globale, Reggio Emilia, Diabasis, 2007. 4. Cabiddu M.A. (Ed.), Diritto del governo del territorio, Turin, Giappichelli, 2010. 5. Campbell H. and Marshall R., “Towards Justice in planning: a Reappraisal”, European Planning Studies, 14, 2, 2006, pp. 239-252. 6. Carrà M., Gasparri W. and Marzuoli C. (Eds.), Diritto per il governo del territorio, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2012. 7. Casini L., “La valorizzazione del paesaggio”, Rivista trimestrale di diritto pubblico, 2014, pp. 385-396. 8. Cassano F., Modernizzare stanca. Perdere tempo, guadagnare tempo, Milan, Il Mulino, 2001. 9. Cervellati P.L., L’arte di curare la città, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2000. 10. Clementi A. (Ed.), Interpretazioni di pae-

See the sharp comments by Casini, 2014, p. 393. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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saggio. Convenzione europea e innovazioni di metodo, Rome, Meltemi, 2002. 11. De Biasi R. and Bateson G., Antropologia, comunicazione, ecologia, Milan, Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2007. 12. Irti N., Norme e luoghi. Problemi di geodiritto, Bari, Laterza, 2006. 13. Lupi M., Principi in materia di politiche pubbliche territoriali e trasformazione urbana, Disegno di legge proposta presentata nel luglio 2014 (Lupi Bill). 14. Magnaghi A. (Ed.), Il territorio dell’abitare, Milan, Franco Angeli, 1998. 15. Magnaghi A., Il progetto locale, Turin, Bollati Boringhieri, 2000. 16. Magnaghi A. (Ed.), Rappresentare i luoghi. Metodi e tecniche, Alinea, Florence, 2001. 17. Magnaghi A., The urban village. A charter for democracy and local self-sustainable development, London-New York, Zed Books, 2005. 18. Minervini P., “Gli spazi delle regole. Ambiti territoriali e disponibilità degli interessi”, in Bottaro P., De Candia L. and Moroni S. (Eds.), Lo spazio, il tempo, la norma, Naples, Editoriale Scientifica, 2008, pp. 155-175.

19. Norberg-Schulz C., Genius loci. Paesaggio, ambiente, architettura, Milan, Electa, 1989. 20. Norberg-Schulz C., Architettura: presenza, linguaggio e luogo, Milan, Skira, 1996. 21. Schiavone A., Storia e destino, Turin, Einaudi, 2007. 22. Schmidt C., Il nomos della terra, Adelphi, Milan, 1991; tit. orig. Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum, Koln, Greven Verlag, 1950. 23. Tiragallo F., “Su alcune pratiche di identità”, in Angioni G., Bachis F., Caltagirone B. and Cossu T. (Eds.), Sardegna seminario sull’identità, Cagliari, Cuec/ISRE, 2007. 24. Treu M.C., “Verso nuovi paesaggi. Responsabilità e continuità nelle azioni amministrative”, in Peano A. (Ed.), Fare paesaggio. Dalla pianificazione di area vasta all’operatività locale, Florence, Altralinea Editrice, 2011. 25. Urbani P. and Civitarese S. (Eds.), Diritto urbanistico. Organizzazione e rapporti, Turin, Giappicchelli, 2010. 26. Vernant J.P., Senza frontiere. Memoria, mito e politica, Milan, Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2005.

Italian Association of Geography Teachers

Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography (J-READING), 1, 5, June, 2016, pp. 37-46 DOI: 10.4458/6964-03

“Institutional” vs “everyday” landscape as conflicting concepts in opinions and practices. Reflections and perspectives from a case study in Northeastern Italy Benedetta Castiglionia a

Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche, Geografiche e dell’Antichità, University of Padua, Padua, Italy etta.castiglioni@unipd.it

Received: November 2015 – Accepted: March 2016

Abstract This paper originates from a contribution to the Conference “Crisi dei paesaggi, paesaggi della crisi. Quali vie d’uscita?” [Crisis of landscapes, landscapes of crisis. Which ways out?] held in Cagliari (Italy) in December, 2014. It focuses on the distance that exists today among the different approaches used to address the issue of landscape and the different ideas connected to the landscape concept. Starting from a model that schematises this distance in its different facets, the paper focuses on two of them, the “spatial” and the “social” dimensions, and outlines two landscape concepts, provocatively in opposition. On the one hand it identifies the “institutional landscape”, explicitly recognised but of limited spatial extension and ruled by an elite; on the other hand the “everyday landscape”, of which there is often little awareness, that encompasses the whole territory and is managed by the whole community. The European Landscape Convention, which refers explicitly to the landscape as “an essential component of people’s surroundings!” does not definitely solve this antithesis and bridge the gap between the two approaches. The results of research activity in a case study in North-eastern Italy confirmed the co-existence of these two opposite concepts in the relationships local people build with their place of life. Perceived landscape values and opinions of laypeople can be referred to the problematic practices and approaches that have intensely changed the landscape in that area and used to interpret them. An increase of awareness of different sets of values existing in a landscape seems the most appropriate strategy to overcome the opposition between the two landscape ideas and the questions of landscape change, through a wide process of “landscape literacy”, focused to the acquisition of a way to “look at” the landscape and to act responsibly on it. Keywords: European Landscape Convention, “Everyday” Landscape, “Institutional” Landscape, Landscape Literacy, Venetian città diffusa

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1. Introduction This paper focuses on the distance that exists today among the different approaches used to address the issue of landscape and the different ideas connected to the landscape concept. Starting from a model that schematises this distance in its different facets, the paper focuses on two of them, the “spatial” and the “social” dimensions, and outlines two landscape concepts, provocatively in opposition: the “institutional landscape” and the “everyday landscape”. The results of research activity in a case study, carried on with two surveys of the values that people attribute to the place where they live and the idea of the landscape that emerges, confirmed the co-existence of these two opposite concepts. At the same time, these results on landscape values and opinions can be referred to practices and approaches that have changed and continue to change the landscape in the area and used to interpret them. In addition, if we consider the landscape as a tool rather than an object – a tool able to integrate and intermediate (Luginbühl, 2004; Guisepelli et al., 2013; Derioz, 2008) –, it can potentially be used to address the conflicts and the misunderstandings deriving from the distances between ideas, approaches and practices. In particular, it seems to be a relevant educational tool, in order to raise people’s awareness on meanings and values through a process of landscape literacy. This paper, that originates from a contribution to the Conference “Crisi dei paesaggi, paesaggi della crisi: quali vie d’uscita?” [Crisis of landscapes, landscapes of crisis: which ways out?] held in Cagliari (Italy) in December, 2014, is an attempt to address the troubled questions deriving from gaps and conflicts among approaches and ideas on landscape and the critical aspects of landscape changes, and to connect each other. The considerations here reported combine reflections deriving from scientific literature and debate and field research, but also from some consulting activities held in public administrations and participation to the events related to the implementation of the European Landscape Convention and field research. Copyright© Nuova Cultura

2. Landscape is tension: a

multidimensional model In order to “address holistically the complexity of the landscape” (Gambino, 2000, p. 12), we propose first some remarks on its “multi-dimensional structure”, connected with the plurality and diversity of cultural and disciplinary approaches to the landscape, along with specific characteristics inherent in this geographical concept (e.g. the idea of the landscape as both reality and imaginary). We aim to highlight, albeit in a schematic and partly challenging way, the various dimensions of landscape complex structure. This seems particularly necessary in order to clarify some basic misunderstandings that affect the current debate on landscape, in the transversal and mutual relations between the academic world, the institutional one and civil society. These misunderstandings give rise to critical consequences in contemporary landscapes and management practices. The different dimensions that compose the structure of landscape and that emerge from analyses of the literature, official documents and narratives and discourses can be metaphorically compared to the different wavelengths of light emitted by a prism and broken down into its respective components. Each of these dimensions can be described as a tension between opposites: in fact, landscape itself has been described as tension (Wilie, 2007). Here, we consider a model (Figure 1) built on six dimensions (structure, depth, width, change, actors and exploitation), similar to six different wavelengths of light out of the prism. These dimensions are described by six couples of opposite conditions that is by six tensions between opposite ends (Castiglioni, 2007). When analyzing a text or a discourse on landscape by searching for approaches and attitudes that explicitly or implicitly drive the discourse itself we could be able to situate it in the model on a specific level between the two opposite conditions for each of these dimensions. In other words, this model may help in recognizing which idea about landscape underlies each of the discourses, texts, narratives on landscape, and therefore to understand the explicit or implicit evaluation criteria that Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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depend on each different idea of landscape and the projects and practices that follow.

LANDSCAPE STRUCTURE sum of sectors

holistic system

LANDSCAPE DEPTH only aesthetic entities

manifestation of spatial processes

LANDSCAPE WIDTH (spatial dimension of the landscape) only exceptional places

everywhere

management of changes

LANDSCAPE ACTORS (social dimension of the landscape an elite deals with landscape

everybody deals with landscape

LANDSCAPE EXPLOITATION resource for sale

resource for living

Figure 1. A multidimensional model for landscape. Source: Castiglioni, 2007, modified.

We give a simple example, considering just the dimension called “landscape depth”: looking at a mountain pasture, a scientific paper, an official document or an informal discourse can consider the landscape as an aesthetical entity, paying attention only to its visual appearance and to the maintenance of the grass. On the other hand, they can consider the driving forces and processes or the social, economic and political factors involved, such as the presence of agricultural firms, financial support for agricultural activities or general agricultural policies connected with grass-cutting activities. The consequences of the different point of view adopted are then relevant respectively at the Copyright© Nuova Cultura

If people use the same term “landscape” but mean different substances, that is if they refer to different concepts, they will then provide different actions and implicitly imagine different futures. Such miscommunication can lead to misunderstandings and conflicts, with norms, plans and projects not underpinned by a common agreement on their objectives. In addition, landscape management practices (at all scales) may not be intrinsically coherent. To address this problem, an effort of stating landscape meanings explicitly is needed. 3. Institutional landscapes and everyday

landscapes

LANDSCAPE CHANGE conservation

level of scientific debate, policies and norms, public opinion.

We focus now on two specific dimensions of landscape concept among the six presented in Figure 1: the spatial dimension, which refers to the width of the area conceived as landscape, and the social dimension, which refers to the actors involved. In the Italian case, where an old tradition of landscape top-down policies ruled by expert visions takes into consideration almost exclusively those areas that are considered exceptional, these two dimensions seem to need a wider clarification, as the oppositions that lie in them they often origin deep misunderstandings. The spatial dimension (represented by the horizontal line in Figure 2) concerns the portion of space that we consider suitable when talking about landscape: does it refer to the entire area, as claimed, for example, in art. 2 of the European Landscape Convention, irrespective of the quality of the landscape? Alternatively, is it limited to certain parts, that is, those that are exceptional, those of “outstanding beauty”, with high value from environmental, historical and aesthetic points of view? The model proposed in par. 2 presents this dimension in tension between the two opposite poles of the landscape “everywhere” and the landscape “only in exceptional places”. Similarly, considering the social dimension (represented by the vertical line in Figure 2), the question is: Should landscape be considered only in the way experts deal with it, through the

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criteria they apply and the lenses of top-down norms, or should it be considered as the product of practices of a community, where everybody interacts with it, attributes value and constantly modify the place where he/she lives? In other words: Whose landscape is this? Does it “belong” only to the (often outsider) people that have an educated knowledge on it, or to the (mainly insider) laypeople that know it as far as they live there? Taking into account these two dimensions, two concepts of landscape can be outlined, provocatively in opposition. On the one side, the “institutional landscape” is explicitly identified but limited in its areal extension and ruled by an elite. On the other hand, the “everyday landscape” refers to the entire space and is managed by the whole community, even if a low level of awareness generally informs such management. These two concepts, despite the distance between them, coexist as driving forces of land-management practices and material transformations of the local landscapes. The concept of “institutional landscape” originates from a diffuse cultural approach, at least in the Italian case, that considers landscape mainly through aesthetical, ecological or historical criteria. This approach defines the “landscape exceptionalities” (the so called “beni paesaggistici” in Italian legal frame), that are generally recognised as heritage, formally identified and safeguarded by institutions (Quaglia, 2015) through planning processes. Transformations of these landscape exceptionalities have to be authorised through special administrative procedures. Thus, the two terms “landscape” and “safeguard” are closely connected, with one implying the other. According to the logic of the “institutional landscape”, the best possible outcome is that the landscape remains as it is, does not change and retains its features. In such a landscape, the course of history seems to be stopped. The changing dimension is denied, like a framed painting or a souvenir postcard of places to visit. The “institutional landscape” assumes its value according to aesthetic canons or on the basis of an evaluation of ecological nature, as determined by expert knowledge. The criteria Copyright© Nuova Cultura

and templates for these attributions of value are produced on the basis of “aesthetic and symbolic references belonging to a common culture, shared by national or supranational societies”, developed using iconographic productions in their different types to form a kind of a “heritage culture, forged over a long time” (Luginbühl, 2012, p. 142). In reality, these criteria are not always explicit stated: they are taken for granted. Similarly, distinguishing between the “paysage remarqué” (very similar to the institutional landscape) and “paysage ordinaire” (very similar to the everyday landscape), Lelli and Paradis-Maindive (2000, p. 28) underlined the fact that the aesthetic criteria used for defining the first kind of landscape are simply “more or less shared by the actors”.

Figure 2. “Everyday landscape” and “institutional landscape”, originating from the intersection between social and spatial dimension of landscape concept.

This logic removes the ordinary citizen from playing an active role towards landscapes, as far as it is the sole responsibility of institutions or experts. They are not required to take care of the landscapes, just to respect norms directed to safeguard. If the reference concept is the “institutional landscape”, laypeople do not feel engaged with the real landscapes, apart from feeling a generic responsibility towards their environmental or cultural heritage (that can be stronger just for some people that belong to some NGO’s related to landscape conservation). Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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They delegate it to the experts and to the administrative power. The level of personal involvement is generally very low. It is often a “pre-packaged” landscape “that tends to crystallize some sample-images”, that is simplified and recognizable, but that bring “to the detriment of the creation of a sense of personal attachment” (Papotti, 2013, p. 382). The opposite concept of “everyday landscape” does not refer to codes established in advance but concerns the experiences that inhabitants have of the landscape in their daily lives in every place. This concept is similar to what Berque calls the “proto-landscape” (1995, p. 39), considered as the “pure visual relation that necessarily exists between human beings and their surroundings” (Turco, 2012, p. 35). Conversely, Cosgrove, questioning the concept, states that “for the insider, there is a definite separation of the self from the scene, the subject from object” and then “to apply the term landscape to their surrounding conditions seems inappropriate to those who occupy and work in a place as insiders” (Cosgrove, 1990, p. 38). From a different point of view, Besse, in a recent essay, highlighted the idea that it is thanks to “distancing” that “the landscape exists in front of a spectator that is external to the world that appears in front of his eyes” (2012, p. 51). Besse also referred to what Jackson called the “vernacular landscape”: “landscape is defined not as something that is opposite to the human being, as an object to look at, or to be transformed, but rather as an aspect of his very being” (ivi, p. 55). Actually, the position of people as insiders, as part of the landscape itself, is problematic, as it does not allow, or rather makes it difficult, the awareness and the explicitation of the values assigned in everyday places, by all people. Despite this general low level of awareness (to the point that we can conceive the everyday landscape as “unconscious landscape”; see Castiglioni, 2015), people do give sense and assign values to their surroundings. The most important criteria they employ are different from those used in the case of “institutional landscape” and concern mainly functionality, sense of belonging, affective bonds and social relations. The criteria that are applied depend on

local community practices. In this way, the relationship with the landscape is “a form of “practical knowledge”, a sort of tacit, inarticulate understanding by participants in a given cultural system’ (Duncan, 1992). This “everyday landscape” concept has practical consequences for spatial transformations of the landscape. The role of customs (Olwig, 2005, 2007) in the practices that the inhabitants undertake is implied, not only of norms; they potentially lead to significant changes. In fact, everyday landscapes arise from the “inventiveness and creativity of the daily producers of landscape” (Luginbühl, 1989, p. 238). This “ordinary” landscape is constantly evolving and “changes, more or less spread or punctual, imposed or agreed upon, are superimposed in a more or less anarchic way along time and space” (Lelli and ParadisMaindive, 2000, p. 29). We are talking about selfregulated transformations, “tied to the actions carried out in the landscape within the bonds of freedom or creativity beyond the control of the rules, […] to the goals that each individual or each social group sets himself and […] to the economic structure and the cultural context of a territory” (Castiglioni et al., 2010, p. 100). 4. The question of the European

Landscape Convention The European Landscape Convention refers to the landscape as “an essential component of people’s surroundings” (Preamble), but it does not resolve completely the antithesis between the concepts of “institutional” and “everyday” landscape. The second one is explicitly considered in art. 2 of the Convention. The issues of the values assigned by people, the importance of their wellbeing and aspirations, and the “public’s wish to enjoy high quality landscapes and to play an active part in the development of landscapes” (Preamble) are at the bedrock of the European Landscape Convention and of the process that has been called the “democratisation” of the landscape (Prieur, 2006, p. 17) that originates from it.

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However, the logic of the “institutional landscape” is partially present, too, even if not explicitly, in the text of the European Landscape Convention. It emerges in a few lines of the preamble and in some other passages in the text. The terms “landscape quality” or “degraded landscapes” do not refer explicitly to criteria by which to establish “quality” and “degradation”. Therefore, they remain open to a shared generic evaluation, according to the global criteria identified above. This implicit compresence of opposite concepts does not help in identifying clearly the directions of landscape policies. On the other hand, the Convention seems to include in itself the direction and the recommendations for bridging the gap between the two opposite concepts. Actually, it refers to the whole areas and to the whole population, but, at the same time, it requires “to assess the landscapes […], taking into account the particular values assigned to them by the interested parties and the population concerned” (art. 6, c). It means that landscapes should be looked at through the filters of a wide spectrum of values, including the aesthetical, ecological and historical values on the one side (the ones of the “institutional landscape”), and the functional, the affective, and the social values on the other (the ones of the “everyday landscape”). In other words, the Convention proposes a sort of overlapping of the two concepts, or – perhaps better – it considers the possibility to include in a wider concept of “everyday landscape” also exceptionalities, evaluations coming from experts’ knowledge, and the relevant criteria used in it. The route proposed by the European Landscape Convention to bridge the gap between “institutional” and “everyday landscapes” is expressed clearly in the first requested specific measure (art. 6, a): awareness raising. This measure is intended to disseminate this broad idea of landscape, in which pluralities of values and the question of transformation have to be considered.

5. People’s opinion and practices in a

case study in the Venetian plain The Venetian plain in Northeastern Italy in recent decades has undergone significant social and spatial changes: what was once a rural area has been transformed by large-scale residential and industrial developments spread in all its width, to the extent that it is called città diffusa (diffused city). Any attempt at interpreting such changes has made difficult as the traditional categories of town and countryside seem to have lost their meaning and been replaced by something difficult to be defined. In this process, the reasons of development and improvement in economic results seem to have completely overborne any other reasons, including them of preserving historical features of the rural landscape, like Palladian villas. Different scholars criticize this landscape change, from diverse points of view, such as those of environmental problems (Belloni, 2005) and loss of heritage and soil consumption (Tempesta, 2015), or denouncing existential discomfort (Vallerani and Varotto, 2006). However, what relationship is there between the local inhabitants and the Veneto landscape as it appears today? After such a rapid change, do we see a corresponding disorientation and loss of reference points associated with, reflected in the local population’s perceptions? Drawing on the issues raised by the European Landscape Convention, especially those related to ordinary landscapes and to the role of people perceptions, these questions have formed the basis of our research. We conducted two surveys, the first in 2004, the second ten years later in 2013-2014. We focus here on the results obtained in Vigorovea, a small village 15 km southeast of Padua in the municipality of Sant’Angelo di Piove di Sacco, that is one of the analysed case studies. In the past, Vigorovea was a small settlement along a straight road named “Piovese”. The village started expanding in the 1960s. In the period 1995-2005, it underwent very rapid development, with new residential areas constructed on the northeast side of the main road. These have become a kind of “New Vigorovea”. In the last ten years, the urbani-

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sation process has slowed down and rather stopped. Thus, Vigorovea represents an example of the landscape of the città diffusa, lacking any element of “outstanding beauty” or other valuable character. The first survey involved – among other analyses of the spatial context – fifteen semistructured in depth interviews with local people encountered on the main streets of the village. The second one included – in addition to twelve interviews – also questionnaires distributed to the parents of children attending the local primary school (almost one hundred of questionnaires collected; see Castiglioni and Ferrario, 2007 for more information on methodology and results of the first survey, Castiglioni et al., 2015 for the second one). Selecting, among wider questions, the ones mostly related to the aims of the present paper, this field research helped in understanding on the one hand the different meanings and values people assign to their surroundings and how they interact with them, and – on the other hand – to what extent laypeople consider the notion of landscape pertinent when referring to where they live. One of the main results of the first survey was the large distance that existed between people’s general idea of “landscape” (that can be surely reported to that of “institutional landscape”) and their ideas about the place where they lived. In the place where they lived, the people did not recognise anything that they called landscape. One male interviewee stated “As far as I know, here, there is no landscape”, indicating probably that, if aesthetical exceptionalities are not present in Vigorovea, here, there is no landscape. However, those surveyed did not feel disorientation or discomfort due to the fast change and formal disorder of their neighbourhood. On the contrary, they had a strong place attachment. Moreover, they sometimes used expressions like usefulness when describing the nicest places in their surroundings. It suggests that they more used to assign functional values to their place of life than aesthetical ones. In the second survey, the interviews confirmed that Vigorovea was viewed as a “normal” and “peaceful” place. In the Copyright© Nuova Cultura

interviewees’ opinion, the values and meanings given to neighbourhood were linked to the activities that the inhabitants performed there rather than to the visual quality of the places. “Experiential” and “social” dimensions play a role when identifying the nicest or most important places, regardless of their aesthetic quality. In general, people seem to be more inclined to use social criteria than aesthetic ones when building relations with their surroundings. As an example, the inhabitants of Vigorovea said that one of the nicest places was the area behind the church because this was a meeting place for the community. Indeed, the so-called baraccon is located there. The baraccon is a sort of large temporary shack, which was recently built, without any aesthetic considerations. It hosts many activities other than religious ones, in which people of all ages are actively involved (Figure 3). The same social criteria were applied to the new square (Mother Teresa from Calcutta square), which was negatively evaluated because “nothing interesting happens there” (Castiglioni et al., 2015).

Figure 3. The so called “baraccon” behind the church of Vigorovea. Photo: V. Ferrario, 2013.

In the second survey, the results concerning the meaning given to the term “landscape” differed partially with respect to the first survey. If the data obtained in the interviews confirmed that people had difficulty recognising “a landscape” in the place in which they lived, like ten years before, the data from the questionnaires open to different understandings. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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Twenty percent of the interviewees completely disagreed with the statement: “In Vigorovea, there is no landscape”, and 36% mostly disagreed with it. Furthermore, 37% completely disagreed with the statement: “In Vigorovea, it makes no sense to speak about landscape”. These different results do not clarify this topic. Rather, they call into question both the opinion (is it as widespread as it appeared?) and the methodology used in the survey. The diversity in ideas and approaches of what constitutes landscape was further confirmed by the answers to another question in the questionnaire, in which the participants were asked to state whether nine photographs of different places in Vigorovea did or did not represent a “landscape”. In general, those interviewed considered that the photographs of open rural/natural areas were “landscapes”, whereas majority of those interviewed (60%) thought that the baracon and other pieces of surroundings lacking valuable features were not. To some extent, these answers contradicting the previous ones, confirm the ambiguities of the issue of landscape ideas and the difficulties in dealing with them. The results of the surveys provided evidence for the distance between the two different approaches to landscape concept presented in the first part of this paper. On the one hand, people do not recognise as “landscape” what is assessed through the lenses of social, functional and affective criteria, even if they build strong relationship with it. The concept of “everyday landscape”, though identified in the academic reflection and proposed as a base of the European Landscape Convention, is not recognised as an explicit reference frame by laypeople. On the other hand, the word “landscape” suggests only something to be seen through aesthetical, environmental or heritage lenses – the “institutional landscape” –, which is not present in places like Vigorovea. A low level of awareness emerges of the different values people assign to places, according to the different criteria. This fact may be interpreted also as one of the causes of the disordered forms of this ordinary landscape, due to a parallel low level of awareness of the very criteria they apply when transforming their Copyright© Nuova Cultura

material landscape. To a certain degree, the inhabitants act following mainly functional needs (or affective and social ones), without paying attention to other aspects, like aesthetic, environmental or historical ones. In this way, the ambiguities and distances in the realm of meanings and ideas is moved to the “ambiguities” of the material landscape. 6. Conclusions: awareness raising and

“landscape literacy” as strategies for a shared landscape The distances emerging in landscape concepts and opinions both at general and local level, and the open questions on the strong change in the landscape of città diffusa and its problematic forms, call for actions aiming to raise people awareness, as the first specific measures of the European Landscape Convention definitely require. The Convention proposes – in accordance with its overall philosophy – to raise awareness on “the value of landscapes, their role and changes to them” (art. 6, a), and to promote “school and university courses which, in the relevant subject areas, address the values attaching to landscapes and the issues raised by their protection, management and planning” (art. 6, b). Landscape values and landscape change notably constitute the cornerstone of this process. Therefore, the acquisition of awareness is not an automatic step made possible by the occasional initiative, but rather a long-term process, an educational path to be promoted in formal and informal settings, which includes a number of fronts for action, all aimed at maturing capacity “read the landscape” and to share the readings. Right here we are rooted reasoning on “landscape literacy” (Spirn, 2005) as a process aimed not just to the knowledge of landscape characters. It focuses more widely to the acquisition of a way to “look” at the landscape in its dynamic and complex nature and to act responsibly on it, integrating the issue of the values attributed by the people to the landscape itself. In this perspective, everyone can learn to recognize the parts that make up the landscape itself and the values (necessarily plural) which are included in its dynamism.

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In the frame of our considerations reported in the previous paragraphs, the general aim is to move from the two distant concepts of “everyday” and “institutional landscape” to a deeper awareness of landscape and of the values, which are included in. This should happen in all places, both those exceptional – where the values set by the experts must become the common and shared heritage – and those of daily life, where the value dimensions related to practices have to find ways for explicitness and dignity. Highlighting the unexpressed value placed on the everyday landscape seems to represent a way to close the distance between the two approaches. In particular, it is possible to implement experiences – like the ones of the Landscape Observatories (Castiglioni and Varotto, 2013) – to increase the sense of “appropriation” and “ownership” towards the place where people live, “thanks to that sharing of glances, which brings different people on a same space” (Lelli and Paradis-Maindive, 2000, p. 32). In this sense, it is possible to use the landscape as an “intermediary” (Joliveau et al., 2008) and as a tool to pose questions and challenges, even if conflicting. The opportunity to meet, share glances and express different values offers a more democratic approach to spatial questions. An increase of awareness targeted at a broader involvement of the population seems the most appropriate strategy to overcome the opposition between the two landscape ideas and most of all to build, through a real process of democratization, “not so much and not only more beautiful landscapes, but especially more just territories” (Ferrario, 2011, p. 170). Acknowledgements The Author acknowledges her colleague Viviana Ferrario (University IUAV of Venice) who has shared the research on the Venetian città diffusa since its very beginning and discussed the theoretical implications, the questions, the methodology and the results of it. The Author acknowledges also Alessia De Nardi, Chiara Quaglia and Chrysafina Geronta (University of Padua) that joined the research group for the implementation of the second survey here reported. This research was presented at the IV EUGEO Congress, Rome, Italy, September 5-7, 2013 in the session entitled “Is landscape a common? Geogra-

phical diversity of landscape’s perceptions and changes through time” and at the Conference entitled “Combining Scientific Expertise with Participation: The Challenge of the European Landscape Convention” in Brussels, Belgium, April 28-29, 2014. The Author thanks the headmaster and the teachers of the primary school of Vigorovea, the parents of the schoolchildren and the inhabitants who cooperated with this research.

References 1. Belloni G. (Ed.), Contrade a venire: il Veneto dopo il duemila. Idee e voci per una regione più verde, Portogruaro, Nuova Dimensione, 2005. 2. Berque A., Les Raisons Du Paysage, Paris, Hazan, 1995. 3. Besse J.-M., “Tra la geografia e l’etica: il paesaggio e la questione del benessere”, in Aru S., Parascandolo F., Tanca M. and Vargiu L. (Eds.), Sguardi sul paesaggio, sguardi sul mondo, Milan, Franco Angeli, 2012, pp. 47-62. 4. Castiglioni B., “Paesaggio e sostenibilità: alcuni riferimenti per la valutazione”, in Castiglioni B. and De Marchi M. (Eds.), Paesaggio, sostenibilità, valutazione, Quaderni del Dipartimento di Geografia, 24, Padua, 2007, pp. 19-42. 5. Castiglioni B., “Education on landscape for children”, in Council of Europe, Landscape facets. Reflections and proposals for the implementation of the European Landscape Convention, Strasbourg, Council of Europe Publishing, 2012, pp. 217-267. 6. Castiglioni B., “La landscape literacy per un paesaggio condiviso”, Geotema, 47, 2015, pp. 15-27. 7. Castiglioni B., De Marchi M., Ferrario V., Bin S., Carestiato N. and De Nardi A., “Il paesaggio ‘democratico’ come chiave interpretativa del rapporto tra popolazione e territorio: applicazioni al caso veneto”, Rivista Geografica Italiana, CXVII, 1, 2010, pp. 93-126. 8. Castiglioni B., De Nardi A., Ferrario V., Geronta C. and Quaglia C., “Rileggendo un caso di studio nella città diffusa veneta: dimensione spaziale e dimensione sociale nelle percezioni del paesaggio”, in Castiglioni B., Parascandolo F. and Tanca M. (Eds.), Landscape as mediator, landscape as commons.

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10. 11. 12.

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International perspectives on landscape research, Padua, CLEUP, 2015, pp. 147-163. Castiglioni B. and Ferrario V., “Dove non c’è paesaggio: indagini nella città diffusa veneta e questioni aperte”, Rivista Geografica Italiana, CXIV, 3, 2007, pp. 397-425. Castiglioni B. and Varotto M., Paesaggio e osservatori locali. L’esperienza del Canale di Brenta, Milan, Franco Angeli, 2013. Cosgrove D., Realtà sociali e paesaggio simbolico, Milan, Unicopli, 1990. Derioz P., “L’approche paysagère: un outil polyvalent au service de l’approche opérationnelle et interdisciplinaire des problématiques environnementales”, 1éres Journées scientifiques ARPEnv, Université de Nîmes, 2008, http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs00363625. Duncan J., “Re-presenting the landscape: problems of reading the intertextual”, in Mondada L., Panese F. and Söderström O. (Eds.), Paysage et crise de la lisibilité. De la beauté à l’ordre du monde, Lausanne, Université de Lausanne, Institut de Géographie, 1992, pp. 81-93. Farinelli F., “L’arguzia del paesaggio”, Casabella, 1991, pp. 575-576. Ferrario V., “Il paesaggio e il futuro del territorio (osservare e programmare)”, in Paolinelli G. (Ed.), Habitare. Il paesaggio nei piani territoriali, Milan, Franco Angeli, 2011, pp. 159-171. Gambino R., “Introduzione”, in Castelnovi P. (Ed.), Il senso del paesaggio, Turin, IRES, 2000, pp. 3-19. Guisepelli E., Miéville-Ott V., Perron L., de Ros G. and Peyrache-Gadeau V., “Paysage et développement durable: un mariage contre nature?”, in Luginbühl Y. and Terrasson D. (Eds.), Paysage et développement durable, Paris, Edition Quae, 2013, pp. 115-128. Joliveau, T., Michelin Y. and Ballester P., “Eléments et méthodes pour une médiation paysagère”, in Wieber T. and Brossard J.C. (Eds.), Paysage et information géographique, Paris, Hermes, Lavoisier, 2008, pp. 257-286. Lelli L. and Paradis-Maindive S., “Quand le ‘paysage ordinaire’ devient un ‘paysage remarqué’”, Sud-Ouest Européen, 7, pp. 27-34, Toulouse, 2000. Luginbühl Y., “Paysage élitaire et paysage ordinaires”, Ethnologie francaise, XIX, 3, 1989, pp. 227-238.

21. Luginbühl Y., “Programme de recherche politiques publiques et paysages analyse, evaluation, comparaisons. Synthèse des résultats scientifiques”, 2004, http://www.deve loppement-durable.gouv.fr/IMG/DGALN_ synthese_PPP.pdf. 22. Luginbühl Y., La Mise en scène du monde. Construction du paysage européen, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2012. 23. Olwig K.R., “The Landscape of ‘Customary’ Law versus that of ‘Natural’ Law”, Landscape Research, 30, 3, 2005, pp. 299-320. 24. Olwig K.R., “The practice of landscape ‘conventions’ and the just landscape: the case of the European Landscape Convention”, Landscape Research, 32, 5, 2007, pp. 579-594. 25. Papotti D., “Guardare un paesaggio è già possederlo? La ‘democrazia del paesaggio’ fra mobilità globale, immigrazione e localismi identitari”, Rivista Geografica Italiana, CXX, 4, 2013, pp. 379-395. 26. Prieur M., “Landscape and social, economic, cultural and ecological approaches”, in Landscape and Sustainable Development. Challenges of the European Landscape Convention, Strasbourg, Council of Europe Publishing, 2006, pp. 9-28. 27. Quaglia C., “Valori” e “circostanze” nei processi istituzionali di riconoscimento del paesaggio. Esplorazioni nel caso veneto, PhD Thesis, Department of Historical and Geographical Sciences and the Ancient World, University of Padua, 2015. 28. Tempesta T., Alla ricerca del paesaggio palladiano. Un’indagine sul paesaggio delle ville venete in età contemporanea, 2015, http://intra.tesaf.unipd.it/people/tempesta/Arti coli%20per%20sito%20TT/Paesaggio%20Pall adio%20Tempesta.zip. 29. Turco A., “Il paesaggio come configurazione della territorialità”, in Aru S., Parascandolo F., Tanca M. and Vargiu L. (Eds.), Sguardi sul paesaggio, sguardi sul mondo, Milan, Franco Angeli, 2012, pp. 23-46. 30. Vallerani F. and Varotto M. (Eds.), Il grigio oltre le siepi. Geografie smarrite e racconti del disagio in Veneto, Portogruaro, Nuova Dimensione, 2005. 31. Wylie J., Landscape, London, Routledge, 2007.

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Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography (J-READING), 1, 5, June, 2016, pp. 47-56 DOI: 10.4458/6964-04

Agriculture and landscape. From cultivated fields to the wilderness, and back Paolo D’Angeloa

a Dipartimento di Filosofia, Comunicazione e Spettacolo, University of “Roma Tre”, Rome, Italy Email: paolo.dangelo@uniroma3.it

Received: November 2015 – Accepted: March 2016

Abstract The paper focuses on the relationship between human culture and the agricultural landscape. First of all, it briefly reviews the evolution of the perception of the landscape, showing how the modern era has gradually bridged a gap between aesthetic values of the landscape and cultivated landscape, culminating in the romantic vision of the landscape whereby we are still “prisoners”. The idea that the important and beautiful landscapes are “exceptional”, on the one hand, and the prejudice in favor of the “wild” and “natural”, on the other hand, still limit our perception of the agricultural landscape. However, nowadays some changes are taking place. On the one hand the recognition that all kinds of landscape - not just the “exceptional” one - deserve protection is growing; on the other hand, the cultivated land is increasingly perceived as a “rare commodity”. The paper also stresses the role that agriculture exercises in favor of the landscape particularly in a country like Italy. Keywords: Aesthetic Categories, Agriculture, Locus Amoenus, Nature

1. Introduction The subject of the present essay is not the influence of agriculture on the lie of the land. A topic of this sort could hardly be discussed in general terms, especially by a scholar of philosophy. The landscape transformations brought about by agriculture, particularly in countries home to ancient civilisations such as European countries, are so extensive, widereaching and firmly entrenched that illustrating them requires painstaking investigation and indepth competences. In Italy, moreover, as is shown by Emilio Sereni’s still crucial book Copyright© Nuova Cultura

Storia del paesaggio agrario italiano, landscape and agriculture are a close-knit pair, given the extent to which agriculture has contributed to shaping, organising and transforming our landscape throughout the centuries. The topic I will be exploring, then, is a narrower one, which concerns not the alterations made to the actual landscape but those which have taken place in our own attitude towards nature and the landscape. I will outline a twofold movement which has occurred at two very different moments. I will

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show how for a long time the kind of nature that was loved, perceived as agreeable, and hence appreciated within the landscape, was the nature developed by man, the object of agriculture or at any rate of human labour – in other words, the cultivated countryside.

2. The Love for Cultivated Landscape in Antiquity Broadly speaking – and leaving aside certain antecedents which I will be considering – it was only over the course of the 18 th century that wild, inhospitable and hostile nature came to be appreciated. Over the last two centuries, however, this idea of the wilderness has become the dominant paradigm for natural beauty as a whole. The kind of landscapes to be admired have been identified with those less affected by human intervention, for instance mountain or marine landscapes: in other words, the kind of landscapes that seem most distant from the domesticated agricultural landscape. Only in recent times – over the last couple of decades, I would say – have we witnessed a reverse movement, a rediscovery of the value of the cultivated countryside even from the point of view of the landscape, so as to restore its centrality in relation to our perception of natural beauty in general. It would not be far from the truth to argue, then, that while it took us two millennia to develop a love for the wilderness, we have only been following the inverse path for a few years. Antiquity – meaning Greek and Roman Antiquity – harboured suspicion and repulsion towards the wilderness, whilst being aware of its charm. Certainly, the issue of the perception of the landscape in Antiquity might be discussed at length, since many different opinions have been expressed on the matter, starting from J. Ritter and A. Berque’s thesis that the notion of landscape is essentially a modern one and from the opposite views held by G. Carchia and M. Venturi Ferriolo 1. Certainly, the ancient world possessed a keen sense of space and of what we may describe as the feeling of nature, as witnessed by the always clearly perceived 1

connection between given places and myths, or indeed by the very establishment of temples, sanctuaries and oracular sites in highly evocative places and – in Rome at least – by the arrangement of space for military or urban purposes2. Still, it is just as certain that the men of Antiquity detected natural beauty in nature as a whole or, conversely, in individual natural beings (for example, in the human body), rather than in a specific, concrete aspect of nature, as seems bound to be the case when we speak of landscape sensitivity. What is highly revealing, in this respect, is the almost complete lack of individualising representations of places either in art or in literature and poetry. What are most commonly found in these fields are stereotypical depictions of abstract places, such as rural environments in Theocritean poetry (but also, albeit not as distinctly, in Latin poetry) and the representation of ideal landscapes in Hellenistic and Roman painting. Now, if we keep to the level of stereotyped descriptions, it is possible to identify an underlying opposition between the locus amoenus, on the one hand, and the locus horridus on the other. This amounts to a contrast between an environment favourable to human life, and often shaped by man, and an environment hostile to life – an inhospitable environment. A pleasant environment may take the form of a verdant meadow strewn with flowers, rich in running water and offering travellers the cool shelter of shady trees. An example would be the spot on the shores of the Ilisos where Socrates and Phaedrus meet in the Platonic dialogue named after the latter. By contrast, a locus horridus will be marked by a lack of vegetation reflecting the aridness and sterility of its soil, by vastness and the lack of points of reference – as in the case of Lucan’s Libyan desert. No doubt, the locus amoenus is not always a cultivated place. However, it is an idyllic rural and bucolic setting inhabited by shepherds, if not farmers. In this respect, the saltus is not the silva, a threatening wood or forest perceived as 2 A very useful outline of the topic is provided by Bonesio's recent essay Il contributo della letteratura latina alla comprensione moderna del paesaggio, 2013.

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something alien and dangerous. Alongside the pastoral landscape we find the cultivated field and the garden, the ager and the hortus, the ancient Romans’ natural setting of choice. For the Romans the best vantage point for the observation of nature was provided by the country villa, the rural dwelling of wealthy citizens. The perception of agricultural space is always associated with that of the concrete activities that take place within it, what we would call the agricultural industries, as in Horace’s celebrated ode: “That corner of the world smiles for me beyond all others, where the honey yields not to Himettus, and the olive vies with green Venafrum, where Jupiter vouchsafes long springs and winters mild, and where Aulon, dear to fertile Bacchus, envies not the clusters of Falernum. That place and its blessed heights summon thee and me; there shalt thou bedew with affection’s tear the warm ashes by thy poet friend!” (Horace, Odes, II, 6).

A typical feature of the ancient world’s outlook on nature is the link drawn between inhospitable areas and faraway places, particularly ones inhabited by enemy peoples: the interior of Anatolia which provides the setting for Xenophon’s Anabasis, the German forests described by Tacitus, the wilderness of Caledonia that Hadrian chose to cut off from colonised Britain: “Roman culture defined the contrast between wild nature and cultivated nature through a conciliating perspective that sought to drive the dangers and snares of the former to the furthest edges of the civilised world and to assign undisputed ideological supremacy to the latter, to the point of turning it into the seal of the grandeur of the Empire” (Vitta, 2005, p. 35).

Another example might be the following epigram by Martial: “The Baian villa, Bassus, of our friend Faustinus keeps unfruitful no spaces of wide field […] but rejoices in a farm, honest and artless. Here in every corner corn is tightly packed, and many a crock is fragrant of ancient autumns. Here, when November is past, and winter is now at hand, the unkempt pruner brings home late grapes” (Martial, Epigrams, III, p. 58).

Representations of open natural spaces are rare in the Middle Ages. What are relatively common, instead, especially from the 12 th century onwards, are depictions of agricultural labour, particularly with the so-called cycles of the months. In these representations natural space is often reduced to a minimum and almost allegorised through the inclusion of an ear of wheat or vine shoot, as in the sculptural calendar adorning the so-called Porta della Pescheria of Modena Cathedral. Moving closer to the modern age, however, and directing our gaze to Northern Europe, we can almost catch a glimpse of some landscapes. For instance, the representation of the month of February in Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry, an illuminated manuscript from the early 15th century now in the Condé Museum in Chantilly, offers a view of snowcovered hills under an overcast sky and of a valley dotted with village rooftops. To be sure, what stands in the foreground are agricultural tools, a sheep pen and women huddling around a fireplace, whereas the stark forest on the right is shown in relation to the woodcutter who is collecting wood for the fire. Besides, in other cases the background only consists in a single building and its walls, as in the depiction of springtime haymaking and ploughing.

An antecedent of the modern view of the landscape may be found in Pliny the Younger's description of the environs of a country villa at Tifernum Tiberinum. The author here stresses the beauty of the place, speaking of “regionis forma pulcherrima”. In the writing of agricultural theorists from Varro to Columella, considerations regarding the fertility of the soil and high yield of agricultural estates go hand in hand with an acknowledgement of their beauty as an added value, so to speak: when having to choose between two equally productive estates, one should opt for the most beautiful one, since utilitas and voluptas must not be separated – most importantly, they should never be set in contrast. As Emilio Sereni has noted, “in Varro, aesthetic requirements coincide with rational and utilitarian ones” (Sereni, 2010, p. 60).

3. Landscape Representations in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

In Italy, the most famous – and almost unparalleled – instance of the representation of a Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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territory in relation to the agricultural work performed within it is no doubt the large fresco which Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena in 1338-1339 to illustrate the effects of Good Government. Here too we find a broad view of a hilly landscape. A procession of knights makes its way through the walls of Siena, as a country dweller moves in their direction, driving a dark-bristled pig, and other farmers carry produce into the city on mules. In the foreground, reapers are scything hay, while other men are busy harvesting wheat. In the distance, rows of vines already dot the hills. The co-presence of agricultural tasks typical of different seasons clearly betrays the allegorical character of the scene which, after all, does not illustrate any identifiable stretch of the Siena,l countryside. Although the town is undoubtedly Siena, the surroundings of the town are not exactly described: there is no description of the real places. What we have, then, is not genuine landscape painting: at the earliest, this only emerged in the West two centuries later, in relation to experiences of a different sort, not primarily related to the representation of the cultivated countryside. Thus Van Eyck’s famous Madonna of Chancellor Rolin offers the view of a river winding its way across forest and city; Antonello da Messina’s Crucifixion in Sibiu clearly shows the gulf and harbour of Messina in the background of Mount Golgotha with the three crosses; and the imaginary landscapes by Patinier (“the fine landscape painter” praised by Dürer) are all fanciful ones made up of dense forests, crags and caves. Indeed, if the prototype of the modern perception of the landscape is to be found in Petrarch’s description of his ascent of Mont Ventoux, as suggested by Burckhardt and Ritter, then what we have is the very opposite of cultivated farmland. Petrarch ascends the mountain against the advice of a shepherd, who warns him that only thorns and stones, sweat and toil await him. The emphasis is on the wild and inhospitable nature of the place, a high mountain that offers nothing agreeable to man3.

See Besse, 2000.

What emerges, then, is the contrast between a feeling of nature that for centuries was destined to remain the prerequisite of a tiny fraction of the population and the common man’s perception of nature. Petrarch does not provide the only example of the love of the mountains, which is to say of an environment not marked by human labour and indeed hostile to the presence of man. The Swiss Humanist Konrad Gessner loved the mountains and devoted a short book to the subject, De montium admiratione. Similarly, painted landscapes often feature, if not high mountains, at any rate a glimpse of semi-wild nature. Things are rather different in the case of the common man: for many centuries still, travellers and writers continued to show appreciation only of nature that had been made productive by man. In his Journal de Voyage, written in the late 16th century, De Montaigne warmly describes the beauty of the Po Valley (“a nos costés des plaines très fertiles, aiant, suivant l’usage du pais, parmy leurs champs de bleds, force arbres rangés par orde, d’où pendent leurs vignes”) (de Montaigne, 1889, p. 147). Almost two centuries later, Charles de Brosses waxes lyrical over the same landscape (“the land extending between Vicenza and Padua alone is probably worth the whole journey through Italy. No art scene is more beautiful and embellished than such a countryside”) (de Montaigne, 1858, vol. I, p. 153). The kind of landscape that elicited admiration and was contemplated with most pleasure was the cultivated plane, not the inhospitable mountain landscape. As late as the end of the 18th century, when descending into Italy Goethe had no eyes for the landscape at all until reaching Verona. At the same time, the horror of the wilderness and fear of threatening places endured. These feelings gave rise to popular legends about “accursed” mountains home to monstrous creatures. A traveller such as John Evelyn, in the late 17th century, saw the Alps as nothing but a rubbish dump in which nature had piled up all the filth and horrors from the plains 4. 4

With regard to these topics, I will refer to R. Bodei's volume Paesaggi sublimi. Gli uomini davanti alla natura selvaggia (2005). On the endurance of a view of the landscape centred on the concrete activities which may take place within it, starting from agricultural labour, see Camporesi, 1992. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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Particularly revealing, in this respect, is the curious geological theory developed by Thomas Burnet, the author of Telluris theoria sacra, who posited that the Earth was originally flat but was then corrugated, creating the mountains, as a divine punishment.

4. The Turning Point: Rise of the Appreciation of Wilderness during the XVIII Century It was only in the early 18th century that this view of the mountains started changing even in the common perception. What is often mentioned as a first sign of this change is the journey across the Alps made by the Englishman John Dennis in 1686. For the first time, an author here speaks of “delightful Horrour” and “terrible Joy”: the feelings of fear and bewilderment caused by a threatening landscape are no longer exclusively presented in negative terms, but are also regarded as a source of pleasure, albeit of a different sort from that caused by beauty. As nature came to be perceived in a new light, the feeling of the sublime in those years passed from the rhetorical domain, to which it had been confined for two thousand years, into the broader aesthetic sphere, becoming a central element of 17 thcentury poetics. Albrecht Haller’s 1732 poem on the Alps marked the consecration of the new outlook on the wilderness, paving the way for countless literary variations, as well as – at a later stage – a new pictorial vague. This was given full expression and widely promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in the novel Julie, or the New Heloise, sung the praises of high mountains and their moral influence on man: “On the high mountains, where the air is pure and subtle, one breathes more freely, one feels lighter in the body, more serene of mind. […] It seems that by rising above the habitation of men one leaves all base and earthly sentiments behind” (Rousseau, 1761). The first ascent of Mont Blanc took place towards the end of the century, in 1786, a date which marks the beginning of modern mountaineering. The practice was destined to acquire increasing popularity over the course of the 19th century, to the point that in 1871 Leslie Copyright© Nuova Cultura

Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father, claimed that the Alps had become “the playground of Europe”, a sort of vast amusement park (Stephen, 1871). Alongside the sublime, a new aesthetic category emerged in the 18th century as a way of marking a break from “beautiful” nature, which is to say nature that is well-arranged, chiefly for cultivation. The new category was that of the picturesque, a term which originally meant “suited to making a fine subject in painting”. In particular, it referred to rough, jagged, dark landscapes, by contrast to the smooth, regular and sunlit countryside. One example of picturesque art is first of all provided by Salvator Rosa’s vedute, in which a varied and irregular nature, often filled with forests, crags and caverns – a fine shelter for brigands and other villains – provides a new paradigm for the landscape. As witnessed by Kant, the sublime indicates on the one hand the boundlessness of nature – unreachable mountains and ocean expanses – and, on the other, the power of nature – storms, volcanoes and floods. The picturesque, on the other hand, does not go as far: as theorised by William Gilpin, for instance, it describes an irregular nature, a rugged, jagged land, as opposed to an orderly, flat or only slightly sloping landscape with an uneven contour. A round and gently sloping hill or a flowery meadow will be regarded as beautiful; a moor dotted with clusters of trees and streaked with gorges and ravines will be perceived as picturesque. The cultivated countryside, then, might still be considered beautiful, but not picturesque or sublime. A neat counterpart to this change of taste may be found in the history of the garden. While the architectural, geometric, well-ordered garden to some extent represents an extension of the cultivated countryside and vice-versa, as clearly illustrated for instance by Giusto Utens’ views of Medici villas, the Mannerist garden – exemplified by the Pratolino gardens and even more so those of Bomarzo – identifies a “third” nature alongside wild and cultivated nature. However, the most decisive break with the paradigm of beautiful cultivated nature was made by the picturesque garden, the English garden. Significantly known as the landscape garden, this was designed in such a way as to Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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conceal its underlying artificiality and create the impression of pure, wild nature. The gardens surrounding villas and castles, or the country mansions of English aristocrats, were not conceived as agricultural estates – unlike French and Italian gardens, which in a way stood as an intensification or magnification of agricultural processes – but were rather intended to be perceived, as far as possible, as a disorderly and spontaneous nature. The landscape garden anticipated by a few decades the vogue of the Romantic garden, which was to ensure the ultimate affirmation of the predilection for wild, rugged and dark nature, along with the love of mountain vistas with Cozens as early as in the 18th century, of frozen landscapes, as in some of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, and of stormy seas, as in Turner’s seascapes. What we find here is no longer the serene nature favoured by the Classical landscape painting of Poussin, Lorrain or indeed – well into the 18th century – Hackert; rather, it is a violent, inhospitable nature. It is no longer a pleasant and charming landscape in which one would like to live, but a barren, stark or threatening landscape in which, as Heinrich von Kleist wrote in relation to Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, “so ist es, wenn man es betrachtet, als ob Einem die Augenlider weggeschnitten wären” (von Kleist, 1992, p. 357).

5. The Gap between “Aesthetic Landscape” and Agricultural Landscape The idea of conceiving the actual landscape as a projection of landscape painting onto nature started spreading precisely in the early 19 th century and completed the process whereby the “aesthetic” landscape had gradually come to be separated from the agricultural one. The gap thus created between the kind of landscape to be admired, painted and described, and cultivated farmland was destined to remain open for almost two centuries. In fact, judging from the works of some contemporary environmental artists fond of hiking and dizzying heights, we might say that the gap remains open to this day. There are many reasons for this. First of all, what contributes to the disrepute of the agrarian landscape is the still widely held assumption that Copyright© Nuova Cultura

the only landscapes of genuine aesthetic worth are “extraordinary” landscapes – uncommon, rare and exceptional ones. This tendency obviously runs against the perception of the agricultural landscape as an aesthetically pleasing one, since by definition it is a wellarranged landscape, shaped by everyday, common practices. If only landscapes of outstanding beauty are regarded as worthy of consideration, then what will be privileged will invariably be landscapes foreign to common transactions, landscapes of the sort we can only find by moving away not just from the city but also from the countryside – for example, by attaining great heights or venturing into dangerous areas. Unsurprisingly, Roberto Longhi, who was distrustful of natural beauty, ironically remarked that for tourist guides beauty is only to be found above 1,000 metres. A second reason is probably to be sought in the endurance of an opposition as conventional as it is entrenched in common perception: the opposition between the useful and the beautiful. Although everyday experience teaches us that the two values, usefulness and beauty, do not necessarily stand in mutual contrast, and that an object, such as a building, may very well serve a specific function while at the same time constituting an artwork, with regard to the landscape the prejudiced assumption is still that only a landscape serving no utilitarian end can be beautiful – a landscaped not designed for human well-being, an unproductive one. A third reason, which in a way is the counterpart of the second one, emerges from the observation that usually people who live and work within a given landscape, exploiting it for their own purposes, have no eyes for its beauty. One might recall here Cézanne’s observations on Mount Sainte-Victoire: Cézanne portrayed it countless times, with boundless love and devotion, on each occasion seeking to delve a little further into his beloved landscape. Yet when speaking with local farmers, he found it impossible to elicit the faintest hint of wonder or admiration from them. That space was the space of their everyday labour, not a magnificent setting for it. Farmers, at any rate traditional farmers, do not appreciate – and never have appreciated – the landscape. Indeed, the latter was usually only discovered and valued by Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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burghers who spent their leisure time in the countryside or by nobles who chose to leave their city palaces for their country mansions. The love of the landscape went hand in hand with the spread of an urban culture: paradoxically, it was city living that nourished the love of the countryside. In the case of the European landscape, and the Italian one in particular, what has partially balanced these considerations, even in the past, is the awareness of the historical and cultural character of the landscape, and hence of the role played by agricultural labour with respect to its transformation and conformation (although only rarely have people grasped the full consequences of these circumstances). Elsewhere, even these scruples were missing. Let us think, for instance, of the extent to which the national conscience of the United States has been shaped by the myth of the wilderness, by the identification of the national spirit with the natural and wild roots of the environment in which it developed. While the protection of nature emerged in Europe as the protection of natural beauty, in North America it took the form of the conservation of the pristine environment, of nature yet untouched by human labour. The first large natural parks were established in America in the latter half of the 19th century: nature, in a way, replaced history as a communal bond. Hence, it represented a nature utterly different from history – not the kind of nature that encompasses human labour, but the kind that rules it out or, at any rate, makes it impossible on account of its own boundless might and vastness. This is the nature of the big parks of Yellowstone and Yosemite. Curiously enough, even European national parks, including Italian ones, were initially based on this prominent environmentalist motivation, as they were established to protect high mountain areas in territories scarcely affected by human activity, if at all, and in which agricultural transformations were limited or at any rate reduced to a minimum. Thus in the aftermath of World War I Italy established the Parco del Gran Paradiso and Parco Nazionale d’Abruzzo. Even landscape laws have long borne witness to this marginalisation of the cultivated landscape. To consider once again the case of Italy, where a pervasive and indissoluble link Copyright© Nuova Cultura

exists between landscape and agriculture, the protection of the landscape has long revolved around the idea of natural landscape, rather than that of an extraordinary combination of natural elements and artificial, historical ones. The no doubt significant Bottai law of 1939 still had picturesque beauty as its point of reference, since it explicitly referred to “panoramic beauties regarded as paintings”. Clearly, as one would expect, this law was still based on an acknowledgement of exceptional beauty, since it focused its conservation efforts on “fixed features that possess conspicuous qualities of natural beauty or geological uniqueness”. Yet even the far more recent, and equally praiseworthy, Galasso law of 1985 operates within a context in which no trace of the agrarian landscape is apparently to be found. This law protects the coastline and the shores of inland waters, particularly “mountains above 1600 metres in the Alps and above 1200 metres in the Apennines”, along with “glaciers, parks, forests, volcanoes and wetlands”. One might say that conservation begins where agriculture ends.

6. The Return to the Aesthetic Appreciation of Cultivated Land In recent decades – that is, over the last twenty-five years at most – things have taken a different turn. Farmland is no longer perceived as something opposed to the landscape from an aesthetic perspective: beauty is no longer exclusively sought in areas where we can harbour the illusion that no visible traces are left by mankind. Of course, I am not referring to an awareness of the fact that our landscape is a cultural landscape and hence a cultivated one, as landscape theoreticians have always maintained. What I am referring to is the new widespread perception of the countryside, including farmland, as a landscape. Here too, we can easily identify some of the reasons behind this change. First of all, we come across two reasons that, at face value, may seem antithetical to one another and hence irreconcilable, but which upon closer scrutiny prove to be far from incompatible. The first of these two reasons may be described as the relinquishing of the privilege formerly assigned Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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to exceptional landscapes. Not just current theories but also current views of the landscape increasingly tend to assign value even to landscapes other than extraordinary ones – places of exceptional beauty. What is increasingly taking root is the belief that the landscape consists in a network, a seamless web, as opposed to the sporadic emergence of beauties as extraordinary as they are mutually unrelated. A typical example of this new way of perceiving the landscape is the underlying idea of the European Landscape Convention. The ELC tends to consider the landscape as being coextensive with the local territory, in such a way that by its own right it incorporates both the agricultural landscape and the wilderness. The Convention, moreover, explicitly recognises that any stretch of a given territory carries an aesthetic identity, thereby acknowledging the existence not just of excellent landscapes but also of common or degraded ones. Ultimately, this is something we experience in our everyday life: we realise that a landscape conveys an aesthetic experience not just when we are elated at the sight of landscapes of outstanding beauty and harmony, but also when we are saddened at the sight of spoiled, disfigured and desolate landscapes in which we would never want to live. By acknowledging the landscape as an essential component of peoples’ living environment, the ELC delivers the agrarian landscape from its minority status, just as the Italian Codice dei beni culturali e del paesaggio does by identifying the landscape as a “territory that expresses an identity” (Codice 2004, art. 131). The presence of different degrees of value within the landscape is reflected by the multiplicity of possible courses of action identified by the ELC: from the conservation of landscapes of exceptional significance and beauty to the management of common landscapes to the reclamation of degraded ones. The second reason, which apparently stands in contrast to the one just illustrated, is the fact that farmland has become a rare asset. In developed countries – and here too Italy regrettably features high up on the list – there is less and less farmland. The number of cultivated plots of land is constantly dwindling. The UAA (Utilised Agricultural Area) is progressively decreasing. A recent volume by Salvatore Settis Copyright© Nuova Cultura

provides some data for the period between 1990 and 2005: in these fifteen years, the UAA decreased by 17.6% (Settis, 2010). Contrary to what people often believe or write, this drop is not only due to over-development, which is to say to the construction of new houses, roads, sports centres or other projects: in quantitative terms, the main factor is the extension of woodland, which has increased considerably in recent decades. From an environmentalist perspective, this might seem like a positive development; yet it worth bearing in mind that these woods are often left to themselves, whereas forests too require management and human labour, if we wish to avoid dangerous phenomena such as the spread of summer fires, poor water control and so on. Ultimately, the dwindling of agricultural land is due not so much to over-building, as to the depopulation of the countryside and the abandonment of marginal areas, especially mountain ones. This is a well-established pattern by now: after the peak in cultivated land reached around the mid20th century, the number of agricultural plots of land has steadily decreased. These data concerning farmland should further be combined with those pertaining to the number of agricultural workers, which is also progressively diminishing, as Italy approaches the bottom figures typical of highly developed countries. The number of people working in the agricultural sector dropped from 4.9% in 1999 to 3.9% in 2009. The crucial point is that in 1950 agricultural labourers still accounted for 30% of the overall workforce. The consequences of this decline are not always adequately taken into account: whereas two generations ago most families still had a close connection with the countryside (for instance, by having a father or mother with a rural background), today almost the whole of the population has no direct connection with the world of farming, which has therefore become an elusive one for most people. As a consequence, most people, including children (hence the spread of so-called “educational farms”), perceive the cultivated countryside as a new and unusual environment worth discovering. Perceptual factors too contribute to this assimilation of the agricultural landscape to the unproductive one conventionally associated with aesthetic experiences. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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Silence and solitude, which are defining features of our standard view of the landscape, by now are also associated with the cultivated countryside – at any rate, with the extensive one in which the agricultural labour is concentrated in a few days per hectare, with a small number of farmhands. These are not the only reasons: other, more “objective” ones may be found. Agriculture increasingly appears to be a crucial way of safeguarding the landscape. No matter how widespread the mistrust towards agriculture and methods of cultivation entailing the use of chemicals, one indisputable fact remains: agriculture, in all its forms, is the only artificial use of the soil that is also reversible. Agricultural land remains free land, whereas built-up land or land used for other purposes is lost forever, unless expensive land reclamation procedures are adopted. Moreover, precisely because the Italian landscape is almost entirely shaped by the relation between agricultural labour, broadly conceived, and nature, agriculture is crucial for the preservation of Italian landscapes. This is precisely shown by the spread of woodland: a natural landscape may be extremely unnatural for Italy, as it lends its territory a configuration that is utterly alien to its traditional layout. Generally speaking, within the world of agriculture an increasing awareness of this responsibility has emerged, and hence of methods of cultivation compatible with the local environment and landscape. Once again, a range of different factors contribute to this new awareness. First of all, it is worth noting that the clear-cut contrast between city and countryside, urban dwelling and country home, has been abandoned. As regards the positive perception of the agricultural landscape, we should consider not so much the phenomenon of urban sprawl, which rather leads to a degraded “third” type of landscape, as the increase in residential mobility and new forms of rural habitation, whereby a considerable percentage of city dwellers choose the countryside as their fixed or frequent abode. Alongside the new perception of the countryside displayed by outsiders who choose it as their place of residence essentially for its aesthetic qualities and wholesomeness, we are Copyright© Nuova Cultura

witnessing a marked emphasis on immaterial values, such as those connected to the landscape, in agricultural economic activities. One example is the growing phenomenon of agritourism, where the attractiveness of the landscape clearly plays a prominent role. But let us also think of the emphasis on environmental and landscape qualities that comes with many typical food products, as a way of lending them a unique “aura”. By now, even EU policies are taking into account the environmental and landscape function of agriculture (as opposed to its exclusively environmental one), by promoting traditional methods of cultivation, crosscompliance and greening practices. Several indicators of this new approach to agriculture from the point of view of the landscape may be mentioned, starting from the attention towards these new phenomenon within landscape theory, illustrated by the number of conferences devoted to the agricultural landscape. In 2003, a seminar on the subject was hosted by Italia Nostra. A few years later, the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage organised a major conference entitled Paesaggio agrario: una questione non risolta (The Agricultural Landscape: An Unsolved Question)5. On that occasion, Italia Nostra advanced a legislative proposal for the protection of Italian farmland as a whole: an explicit acknowledgement of what I have suggested so far, namely that all farmland by now is widely perceived as carrying aesthetic values worth safeguarding. Another important indicator is to be found in documents such as the European Rural Heritage Observation Guide, which explicitly associates the value of the landscape with the preservation of agricultural environments: not only the countryside and methods of cultivation, but more generally rural buildings and artefacts connected to these activities6. The emergence of a new sensitivity is further reflected by the fact that many recently established parks are not merely “environmental” parks located in uncultivated areas, but also include agricultural areas. I am thinking here of the Parco delle 5

See the acts of the conference: Di Bene and D'Eusebio, 2007. 6 See Agnoletti, 2010.

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Cinque Terre in Liguria and the Parco del Ticino between Piedmont and Lombardy. 5.

In moving towards a conclusion, I wish to refer to the confirmation provided by a book and two films. The book is Giorgio Boatti’s Un paese ben coltivato. Viaggio nell’Italia che torna alla terra e, forse, a se stessa: published in 2014, it explores several Italian regions to identify the new kind of farmer, far from indifferent to the landscape and its safeguarding, whom I have referred to as a new rural dweller. The two films, also released in 2014, are centred on country life. As the reader may have guessed, I am referring to Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders and Jonathan Nossiter’s Natural Resistance. In these films, the directors successfully combine an interest in particular settings with a focus on two typical agricultural productions, possibly the most ancient ones within our civilisation alongside oil production – I refer to honey and wine. These two tales, associating the most deep-rooted rural traditions in Italy with new, unexpected protagonists, provide a fitting ending for an essay on agriculture and the landscape.

References

13.

1. Agnoletti M., Paesaggi rurali storici. Per un catalogo nazionale, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2011. 2. Besse M., Voir la terre. Six essais sur le paysage et la géographie, Arles, Actes Sud, 2000. 3. Bodei R., Paesaggi sublimi. Gli uomini davanti alla natura selvaggia, Milan, Bompiani, 2005. 4. Bonesio L., “Il contributo della letteratura latina alla comprensione moderna del paesaggio”, in Baldo G. and Cazzuffi E. (Eds.), Regionis forma pulcherrima. Percezioni, lessico, cate-

7. 8.

10. 11.

12.

14. 15. 16. 17.

gorie del paesaggio nella letteratura latina, Florence, Olschki, 2013. Camporesi P., Le belle contrade, Milan, Garzanti, 1992. Carchia G., Per una filosofia del Paesaggio, in “Quaderni di estetica e di critica”, 4-5, pp. 13-21. Codice dei beni culturali e del paesaggio (D.L. 22 Gennaio 2004, n. 42). de Montaigne M., Le Président de Brosses en Italie. Lettres familières écrites d’Italie en 1739 et 1740, vol. I, Paris, Didier, 1858. de Montaigne M., L’Italia alla fine del secolo XVI. Journal de voyage en Italie en 1580 et 1581, Città di Castello, Lapi, 1889. Di Bene A. and D’Eusebio L. (Eds.), Paesaggio agrario: una questione non risolta, Rome, Gangemi, 2007. Rousseau J.-J., Julie ou la nouvelle Heloïse. Lettres de deux amans, habitan d’une petite ville au pied des Alpes, Première Partie, Lettre XXIII, 1761. Sereni E., Storia del paesaggio agrario in Italia, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2010. Settis S., Paesaggio Costituzione Cemento, Turin, Einaudi, 2010. Stephen L., The Playground of Europe, London, Longman, 1871. Venturi Ferriolo M., Etiche del paesaggio, Rome, Editori Riuniti, 2002. Vitta M., Paesaggio. Una storia fra natura e architettura, Turin, Einaudi, 2005. von Kleist H., “Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft”, in Apel F. (Ed.), Romantische Kunstlehre, Frankfurt am Mein, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992.

Italian Association of Geography Teachers

Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography (J-READING), 1, 5, June, 2016, pp. 57-65 DOI: 10.4458/6964-05

The smart city: urban landscapes in the current crisis Silvia Arua a

Dipartimento di Economia e Scienze Aziendali, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy Email: silvia.aru@pec.it Received: November 2015 – Accepted: March 2016

Abstract This article aims to investigate the notion of the smart, technological and interoperable city that has found growing attention in Europe and thus also in Italy, as a possible escape from the current and on-going economic, political and social crisis, and as a driving force for the creation of post-recession cities. In the article, the idea of “slyness” applied in the Italian context to the concept of landscape, (Farinelli, 1991) is borrowed to present the urban model of “smartness” on two levels of analysis: the first is the discursive representation as it emerges from policies and from grey literature; the second is related to the (possible) socio-territorial consequences of its application. In doing so, the paper gives space to the representative and discursive levels, as much as to the processes of territorialization implicit in the smart city paradigm. Keywords: Smart City, Social-Economic Crisis, Technology, Urban Policies

1. Introduction The smart city discourse is one of the few, if not the only one of a certain entity, to propose an image of prosperity and progress in a phase dominated by the pessimism induced by the prolonging effects of the crisis (Rossi, 2013, p. 53). During the current economic, political, social and cultural crisis, a new model of urban development has emerged and spread across Europe: the smart city. The smart city model believes that the diffusion of technology is the best way to keep together sustainability and urban economic

development. A city is smart if it can, in the first place, integrate a “strategic set” of initiatives related to infrastructures, technologies and digital services, aimed at improving the quality of life of its citizens. In view of the scarcity of resources, the smart city and those community and national programmes promoting it become important elements to envisage how the cities of tomorrow will be planned and built. As in the concept of landscape, the smart city has a double-sided dimension to it. It refers both to the reality of a territory as well as to the (multimedia) ensemble of its representations (Farinelli, 1991, uses the term “sly” to define landscapes because it encompasses “the thing” and “the image of the thing”). Thanks to this Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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feature, the smart city landscape also takes on an aspect of “slyness”. On the one hand it displays a precisely constructed shape through discursive representations and images while on the other, it does the same through concrete actions. Given the relative newness of this urban model and its recent genesis, on a discourse and imaginary level the smart city landscape exhibits highly structured foundations and seems understandable only in relation to specific sociocultural and political processes. The discourse on smart city landscapes doesn’t come at a later time, compared to an external and “already given” reality, pre-existing to its enunciation (Barnes and Duncan, 1992)1. On the contrary, it is a productive and not neutral act affecting the way in which ideas on the future of the city evolve into concrete plans of action 2. The performative power of discourse is a central issue, and emerges clearly when we look at urban policies (Rose and Miller, 1992). The political and legislative contexts reveal the existence of such discursive systems more distinctly than others (Mole, 2007), and also show their role in spreading certain territorial “smart” actions. For this reason, it is important to pay special attention to the means by which the discourse on smartness is broached, and how the status of smart city can be achieved in contemporary urban realities. 1

The semantic complexity of the term “landscape” – that is perhaps the result of the many approaches to the topic – generates other conceptual frameworks for presenting and understanding the smart city and its proliferation both in terms of the “collective consciousness” and territorializing acts. Given the prominence assumed by discourse features in the “smart city landscape”, it was considered here more useful to start from this level and then proceed freely to highlight the pros and cons of some “territorial interpretations” of smart ideas. An in-depth analysis of the various meanings of the term landscape has been developed by the Author in other publications, to which we refer the reader (Aru et al., 2012; Aru and Tanca, 2015). 2 This conceptualization of landscape is of course tied to the idea of discourse developed by Michel Foucault (1971) and used by postmodern and poststructuralist scholars in critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1995; Barker and Galasinski, 2001; Phillips and Hardy, 2002; Phillips and Jorgensen, 2002; Rydin, 2005). Copyright© Nuova Cultura

What is a smart city? What are the risks and what is the potential of the smart city model when weighed against the current economic and social crisis3. In order to find possible answers to these questions, section 2 will briefly evaluate the first level of reasoning (how the smart city is imagined and described); while section 3 focuses on the more “concrete” aspects of the smart city paradigm, focusing on its critical points and the latent potential of the “smart city” model. Even though this paper is a discursive rather than an argumentative essay, from an analytical point of view it will look at some of the academic articles that embrace a critical approach (Hollands, 2008; March and RiberaFumaz, 2014; Söderström et al., 2014; Vanolo, 2014). One reason for this is to better understand whether or not transforming existing cities into smart ones really will provide a way to prevail over the structural conditions that have produced the recent economic crisis, or if they will turn out to be a product of the political and economical neoliberal system that is at the root of the very crisis itself.

2. Smart City, a utopia within reach. Here and now The smart city presents itself as a potentially rich paradigm, thanks to the numerous impressions, hypotheses and indications regarding its shape, organization and management (Crivello, 2014; Vanolo, 2014). It is defined by the European Commission as “a place where the traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital and telecommunications technologies, for the benefit of its inhabitants and businesses. With this vision in mind, the European Union is investing in ICT research and innovation, and developing 3

The line of reasoning here proposed is based on a series of impressions and theoretical reflections, even though it is the result of a series of more detailed analyses carried out during the period of research on “Smart Torino. Opportunità e rischi del paradigma della città intelligente” led by the Centre for Research EU-POLIS (Politecnico and Turin University) since 2012. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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policies to improve the quality of life of citizens and make cities more sustainable in view of Europe’s 20-20-20 targets”4. Yet the complex ensemble of normative and legislative measures that have defined this paradigm first on a Community level, and then on a national one, makes it difficult to reconstruct the genealogy of the concept (Vanolo, 2014). The smart city seems to be more the result of a series of entrepreneurial insights – with a subsequent capitation of community activities aimed at contrasting the crisis – than a concrete product of a scientific and academic reflection. IBM’s model Smarter City/Future City exemplifies this, dealing particularly with terms like planning and management, infrastructure, etc. All this is in spite of the noticeable increase in academic studies in the last few years, which have tried to offer explanations for this (complex) genealogy as well as for the various meanings that the term “smart” has assumed at different times and in different contexts (Chourabi, 2012; Crivello, 2014; Neirotti et al., 2014). If we look at the discursive representation – textual as well as visual – beginning with the analysis of an intentionally large and diversified number of sources5, we see a marked recurrence of terms and images, configuring the smart city as a sort of “achievable utopia”, an “ideal-type” urban constellation that addresses various aspects of urban life (transport, the environment, quality of life, etc.) (Kourtit and Nijkamp, 2012, p. 93; Vanolo, 2014) together with the related sectors of the economy (from housing to mobility issues, from environmental problems to industry) (Rossi, 2013). Similarly to what has been done on a European scale, the Italian public bands issued for the financing of “smart” actions, talk about “the development of innovative models, aimed at providing solutions to problems on an urban and metropolitan scale through a combination of technologies and

Cfr. http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/smart-cities. More specifically: the Campaign Europe 2020, on a national scale the MIUR competitions (cfr. Note n. 1), grey literature published online, and the images of “smart city” in Google Search results. 5

integration and inclusion models”6. A Smart City is a city where technology is used pervasively, and it is described as Innovative, Inclusive, Interactive, Intelligent (ICity Rate, 2012)7. It represents the ‘technological’ transformation of the city, viewed as the best strategy to keep together sustainability, urban economic development and social inclusivity. The representation of the smart city can thus “stimulate a positive collective consciousness for growth and development” (Rossi, 2013, p. 68) even though one consequence is that it can appear to be “opaque” and not quite so welldefined. Such an innovative view could be applied especially to the very idea of smartness in an urban space, resulting in a somewhat uncritical expectation for concrete, stable, recognizable and extensive results. Utopia is achievable because it constitutes the ultimate goal resulting from a series of progressive steps, all related to the realization of specific indicators, suited to measuring the performance of smart initiatives in different urban contexts8 (de Luca, 2013). In this scenario, the adoption of metaphors recalling a veritable “race to develop” in the latest Italian I-City Rate report9 (2015) comes as no surprise, with individual cities competing for the podium, and more importantly, the allocation of more financial resources: “The three leading cities in 2014 have confirmed their position on the podium, though with the following changes in performance: Milan has sprung forward, with Florence following closely behind, while Bologna has registered a sudden halt” (ICity Rate, 2015). 6

Art. 1, comma 6, p. 6, Decreto Direttoriale n. 84/Ric., 2th March 2012 – Smart Cities and Communities and Social Innovation. 7 Cfr. http://www.icitylab.it/il-rapporto-icityrate/edizione2012/. 8 The six dimensions of smartness, as described on a European scale after the 2007 research carried out by the Wien and Delft Polytechnic Schools and by Ljubljana University (Griffinger et al., 2007), are: smart economy, smart mobility, smart governance, smart environment, smart living, smart people. In the European indicators, each of these dimensions is articulated in different voices, each one with its own indicator. 9 The annual report of the Italian smart cities. Cfr. http://www.icitylab.it/il-rapporto-icityrate/edizione2015/dati-2015/. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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3. The Smart City: from discourses to territories Since the development of the Smart City paradigm is relatively recent, it is easier to speculate on discursive plans, or on the impressions that people have formed of smart policies, from companies with a smart approach, or from the grey literature on the theme, rather than on the consequence of smart actions, either because “territorial transformation” has often not yet taken place, or because some actions labelled as “smart” were really present in the political policies before the term had come into use. For this reason, when we talk about “smart” practices, we are talking about all those practices which can be thought out, redefined or reconfigured as smart. With this premise, these practices recall two “conceptual” orders. First, we mean those practices which spread chronologically before the advent of the smart city paradigm, and which underwent a smart ‘reconfiguration’ later (for example: the creation of cycling lanes; the diffusion of public transport phone apps). Then, we have the ideas of practice, i.e. those ideas which are contained in nuce in the paradigm, but which haven’t yet been realized. By taking this two-tier approach to our analysis, we can form a better idea of the different connotations the term “smart city” has assumed across the international panorama; if we consider what really makes a city “smart”, i.e. those elements which are truly innovative when compared with the past and which should help resolve the crisis, it is possible to identify two main varieties of smartness, associated with either a “soft” or a “hard” idea of innovation. The “hard” version of the smart city sees innovation as the use and widespread application of leading-edge technologies, while the “soft” one places more emphasis on the involvement of social networks and the utilisation of human resources as the main engine for territorial development. The latter approach involves making the most of an urban system (and a socioanthropic subsystem) in which social capital ensures the achievement of adequate liveability levels through an appropriate use of available resources (i.e. a widespread awareness).

The “hard” variation of smartness views smart cities in technological terms, construing them as a potentially digital system of systems. This is a vision that has also been too often conveyed by European indicators, which have ascribed to these hard aspects a preponderant role in the classification of smart or less-smart cities. Initially, it was a vision that led to the commercialization on a broad scale of innovative solutions for sectors of great relevance and financial weight, such as the energy sector. The “soft” variety can be found instead in the instrument of the “ideas contest” which is present in European projects (governance strategies), as well as between the lines of those explicitly dedicated to Social Innovation10, even though these too openly talk about the use of technological devices 11. Understanding what the characteristic traits of smartness are and which version ought to be adopted in policies financing the realization and running of a “smart city” is by no means a secondary consideration. Indeed, in this development model, it is the smart city itself that guides the appraisal of needs. Which problems demand attention? Which exigencies ought first to be attended to? Further, which areas require action, which subjects are to be involved and which sectors and projects need more support, particularly in terms of financial resources (Toldo, 2013). When it comes to its realization in the actual transformation of a city, the smart city could paradoxically reinforce those “distorted” processes already at work, as well as advancing alternatives to overcome the crisis itself (Tables 1 and 2).

10 The notions of Social Innovation and Smart city have been directly associated, especially in the area of policies (and the ensuing debate therein) (Pollio, 2013). 11 For example, the 2012 contest “Smart Cities and Communities and Social Innovation” financed some of the projects in Turin elaborated by young people under 30. At least two of these projects centre on the implementation of the SBG (Solidarity Buying Groups) and on the systematizing of the Urban Vegetable Gardens in the province.

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Risks

Potentialities

Excessive and exclusive development of technological innovation.

Potentialities linked with technological development in terms of social and territorial inclusion (e.g. development of forms of “bottom-up power”).

Main risks linked with this include: Innovation

- Social and/or spatial exclusion connected with the digital divide.

Innovation

- Excessive development of technology, with solutions exclusively destined to those problems which can be solved by means of a technological approach.

Public-private relationship

- New forms of facing territorial changes (new “bottomup” logic vs. old “top-down” logic)

Excessive privatization of some sectors and erosion of the welfare state.

Private investments as a driving force for an economic reboot at a time when public finances are experiencing a crisis.

Table 1. Main risks linked with the “Smart City” model.

It is especially the large global companies – IBM, Cisco Systems and Siemens – that convey the idea of a growth-oriented and technologically innovative smart city. They are engineering the practical evolution of the smart city, creating protocols, especially in environmental issues (de Luca, 2013; Toldo, 2013). If smartness tends to a certain type of innovation – adopting the development of specific top-of-the-notch technologies as its first objective – the risk is that the broader and more complex urban problems would end up falling off the agenda, replaced by those problems which are considered a priori solvable by technological solutions12.

Turin’s case, with its Master Plan To Smile, and more in general the Italian case, are a wonderful example of how an instrument which takes into account the complexities of “urban intelligences” to orientate transformations (in terms of policies) can –and should – be pursued. Cfr. http://www.torinosmartcity.it/wpcontent/uploads/2013/11/SMILE-MASTERPLANPER-TORINO-SMART-CITY.pdf. Copyright© Nuova Cultura

Social innovation becomes more and more present in the declarations and in the actions of the smart city. The Main potential linked with this is:

Public-private relationship

Better rationalization of public finances to allocate to other spending sectors. Support for the diffusion of start-up companies.

Table 2. Main potentials linked with the “Smart City” model.

The risk is that society is placed at the service of innovation, and not vice versa. As soon as it becomes real in instigating a city’s transformation, the smart and technological city may paradoxically reinforce some exclusion processes for those cities that cannotor are not considered suitable candidates for smartness, both in terms of space and (naturally) of society. It’s a post-politic vision (Swyngedouw, 2007) that again questions the very concept of citizenship (Balibar, 2012), one that assumes a greater value – and greater acknowledgement – when it can be integrated

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into a vision of the smart city and its operative potential. On a strictly discursive level, the smart city is – as we have already said – an inclusive city, a context where economic growth and regeneration need to live side by side with social and environmental sustainability. It is not just a matter of simple coexistence; the underlying notion is that no true development is possible without the practical resolution of grave social problems. Yet, even those projects and actions that aim to promote social inclusion are overtly connoted in technological terms. Take for example the projects selected by the Italian Government in the project Smart City&Communities and Social Innovation13 which, not by chance, identified “Welfare technologies and inclusion” as one of the 16 lines of action to be considered. Some of the aims of these actions contained in the EU document are: “inclusion of risk categories and the prevention of forms of social distress, through the development of innovative services based on the use of ICT technologies and directed towards the solution of problems for disabled people, the social inclusion of immigrants from foreign countries, the support to low-salary families, the reinsertion in the education system of drop-out youngsters, the improvement of the access to welfare and health services”. Clearly, technology has been placed at the forefront as a central resource for social action. Like any other resource, its value and importance are defined in terms of specific socio-cultural contexts and cultural models. In a world that is becoming increasingly smart (or that strives to become so) the possibilities offered by technological devices become fundamental in order to avert modern forms of exclusion (Santangelo, 2016). In countries where smartness is emerging as a model for the future city and a guide for urban politics, not having access to the world of technologies could lead to increasing levels of exclusion for tomorrow’s citizenship (in a broad sense).

The MIUR – Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca – through the announcement Smart City&Communities and Social Innovation has destined 655 millions of euros. Copyright© Nuova Cultura

Naturally, there is no contradiction between the use of technology and (for example) advancing social inclusion. Until recently, although the majority of the actions regarding the implementation of ICT in urban environments have initially been of the “topdown” type, things are likely to change in the future. New unified platforms for urban living are being experimented with – see IoT (Internet of Things) and IoS (Internet of Services) – which may well enable technology to develop more open and shared platforms (Hernández-Muñoz et al., 2011). In some specific contexts, technology has been highly effective in activating new forms of bottom-up power, which has resulted in processes of (re)appropriation of urban spaces and/or in negotiation dynamics among powers, with varying conflictual levels for each State. So, according to such a scenario, they would not only activate exclusion processes, but also processes of social and territorial inclusion (Aru, Puttilli and Santangelo, 2014). Another aspect that strongly characterizes “today’s city of the future” relates to the new forms of public-private partnership (PPP) mobilized by the “smart city project”: the private sector explores profitability spaces in public areas, while the public is guarantor both for the availability of these spaces and the profit accruing from the capital invested. Crisis and the austerity conditions, though, seem to reduce the “bargaining power” of the State towards the large private companies. Aside from any communitarian claims, some critical studies – Hollands (2008) the most famous – present the smart city as the umpteenth tag that tries to cover neo-conservative logic (Söderström et al., 2014; Vanolo, 2014; March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2014). The Smart city is unquestionably aligned to the neo-liberal model and, as such, it is more oriented towards growth and technological innovation than to being a solution for revenue redistribution (Raco, 2013). According to this construal, it is the need to attract private investment that motivates the predilection for high profitability smart actions and innovations (leading-edge technologies that stimulate the revamp of neo-liberal economic modalities) instead of any interest in across the board social innovation. The financial crisis of the last seven years has in fact driven many Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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Western governments to implement even more systematically the neo-liberal model and the logic of profitability at the cost of an increasing privatization of larger sectors of the welfare State (education, healthcare etc.; cfr. Raco, 2013)14. This privatization process risks placing important social and political issues that once were the responsibility of the State into the hands of “external wise-men” (as in the case of private companies) or entrusting solutions to technology, seen – and presented – as infallible and trustworthy instruments especially because “they aren’t human”, and thus cannot be corrupted by the possibility of human error. Another critical point hidden in certain ideas of innovation is that some ideas of smart development are chosen (and modelled) without an in-depth territorial analysis first evaluating the impact (and the functionality) of certain “protocols”. As valid as they may be in certain contexts, they won’t necessarily work in other scenarios. The “soft” version of the smart city, the one more strictly linked with the idea of social innovation, stresses the notion of nonneutrality in the innovation processes in context, superseding a strictly technical vision of smartness as it is often conveyed by European indicators (de Luca, 2013).

4. Conclusion. Starting again from the territory “[T]here is no unique global definition of SC, [...] the current trends and evolution patterns of any individual SC depend to a great extent on local context factors. City policy makers are therefore urged to try to understand these factors in order to shape appropriate strategies for their SCs” (Neirotti et al., 2014, p. 35).

Due to their demographic relevance and prevalent economic role, urban environments are the first to feel the most tangible effects of the crisis, such as the reviewing of welfare expenditure and how available resources should be utilised (Santangelo, 2016). Both the “hard” and the “soft” aspects of the smart city paradigm are plainly manifest. A city is smart if it can put all its knowledge and competence to use in a smart perspective, which entails constructing dialogue, working on forging unity between different subjects and practices, as well as on developing human capital. Yet the concurrent existence of these two forms is not always taken into account in a smart city’s territorial transformation. Continuing with a sports metaphor, the key to the challenge for local administrations lies in the importance that is given to each of the components of innovation for every single action of territorial advancement and change. The different souls that inhabit the smart city, as well as the new dichotomous spectrum of territorial and social exclusion or inclusion they have activated, are by no means the natural result of “neutral” dynamics. For this reason, many people such as Massey in For Space (2005) are calling for a responsible geography, taking territories and their complexity as a starting point. So what is most necessary today is to start from what is going on (or what is missing) in individual territories, and to abandon the idea that there is only one valid “smartness”, measurable away from the territorial context. We should also abandon the idea that “intelligence” always needs to be gauged in terms of technological developments, because urban problems are never always solvable through technological solutions15. In this sense, the role of territory becomes crucial, since the word denotes a “space for living, where life 15

Moreover, the ongoing privatization process and the new idea of the smart city seem to have made the act of consuming even more important, reinforcing the idea that the citizen is, first of all, a consumer of services rather than an object (and subject) of collective rights, with all the consequences that this equation can have in terms of social justice and democracy. Copyright© Nuova Cultura

The case of Turin, with its Master Plan To Smile, and more in general the Italian case, are an excellent example of how an instrument which takes into account the complexities of “urban intelligences” to orientate transformations (in terms of policies) can – and should – be pursued. Cfr. http://www.torinosmartcity.it/wpcontent/uploads/2013/11/SMILE-MASTERPLANPER-TORINO-SMART-CITY.pdf.

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projects are formed by individuals and society as a whole. It constitutes a web of relationships and fluxes on different geographic scales, between local and global”, where no action can fail to consider the knowledge and the awareness “of the possibilities and the limits that the territory offers, of the human and environmental resources available, of the critical aspects to face and the opportunities that can be seized” (Giorda and Puttilli, 2011, p. 17). Taking the territory as a starting point means understanding and giving space to the multiple urban intelligences, as the social varieties of smartness indicate. Collective intelligences that stay consistent with the social dimension can be seen as driving forces for territorial resilience, and as a way to resist and reinvent themselves when dealing with severe economic and social crises. Acknowledgements The Author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for the careful review and the valuable comments, which provided insights that helped improve the contents of this paper.

References 1. Aru S., Paranscandolo F., Tanca M. and Vargiu L. (Eds.), Sguardi sul paesaggio, sguardi sul mondo. Mediterranei a confronto, Milan, Franco Angeli, 2012. 2. Aru S., Puttilli M. and Santangelo M., “Città intelligente, città giusta? Tecnologia e giustizia socio-spaziale”, Rivista Geografica Italiana, CXXI, 4, 2014, pp. 385-398. 3. Aru S. and Tanca M. (Eds.), Dare senso al paesaggio II. Convocare esperienze, immagini, narrazioni, Milan, Mimesis, 2015. 4. Balibar É., Cittadinanza, Turin, Bollati Boringhieri, 2012. 5. Barker C. and Galasinski D., Cultural Studies and Discourse Analysis, London, Sage, 2001. 6. Barnes T.J. and Duncan J.S. (Eds.), Writing Worlds: Discourse, text and metaphor in the representation of landscape, London, Routledge, 1992.

7. Chourabi H., Nam T., Walker S., Gil-Garcia J. R., Mellouli S., Nahon K. and Scholl H.J., “Understanding Smart City Understanding smart cities: An integrative framework”, System Science (HICSS), 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on. IEEE, 2012, pp. 2289-2297. 8. Crivello S., “Urban policy mobilities: the case of Turin as a smart city”, European Planning Studies, 23, 5, 2014, pp. 909-921. 9. de Luca A., “Oltre gli indicatori: verso una dimensione politica della smart city”, in Santangelo M., Aru S. and Pollio A. (Eds.), Smart City. Ibridazioni, innovazioni e inerzie nelle città contemporanee, Rome, Carocci, 2013, pp. 87-106. 10. Fairclough N., Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language, London, Longman, 1995. 11. Farinelli F., “L’arguzia del paesaggio”, Casabella, 55, 1991, pp. 575-576. 12. Foucault M., L’Ordre du discours. Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970, Paris, Gallimard, 1971. 13. Giorda C. and Puttilli M. (Eds.), Educare al territorio, educare il territorio, Rome, Carocci, 2011. 14. Hall S., Massey D. and Rustin M.. “After neoliberalism: analysing the present”, Soundings: A journal of politics and culture, 53, 1, 2013, pp. 8-22. 15. Hernández-Muñoz J.M. et al., Smart cities at the forefront of the future internet, BerlinHeidelberg, Springer, 2011. 16. Hollands R.G., “Will the real smart city please stand up? Intelligent, progressive or entrepreneurial?”, City, 12, 3, 2008, pp. 303320. 17. Kourtit K. and Nijkamp P., “Smart Cities in the Innovation Age”, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 25, 2, 2012, pp. 93-95. 18. March H. and Ribera-Fumaz R., “Smart contradictions: the politics of making Barcelona a self-sufficient city”, European Urban and Regional Studies, 2014. 19. Massey D., For Space, London, Sage, 2005. 20. Mole R.C.M., Discursive Constructions of Identityin European Politics, Basingstoke Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Neirotti P., De Marco A., Cagliano A.C., Mangano G. and Scorrano F., “Current trends in Smart City initiatives: Some stylised facts”, Cities, 38, 2014, pp. 25-36. Phillips N. and Hardy C., Discourse Analysis: Investigating Processes of Social Construction, Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage, 2002. Phillips L. and Jorgensen W., Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method, London, Sage, 2002. Pollio A., “Città hacker e politiche mashup”, in Santangelo M., Aru S., Pollio A., Smart City. Ibridazioni, innovazioni e inerzie nelle città contemporanee, Rome, Carocci, 2013, pp. 69-83. Pollio A., “Technologies of austerity urbanism: the ‘smart city’ agenda in Italy (20112013)”, Urban Geography, 2016, pp. 1-21. Raco M., “The new contractualism, the privatization of the welfare state, and the barriers to open source planning”, Planning Practice & Research, 28, 1, 2013, pp. 45-64. Rose N. and Miller P., “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government”, British Journal of Sociology, 43, 1992, 2, pp. 172-205.

28. Rossi U., “Smart city, crisi economica e sopravvivenza del capitalismo”, in Santangelo M., Aru S. and Pollio A. (Eds.), Smart City. Ibridazioni, innovazioni e inerzie nelle città contemporanee, Rome, Carocci, 2013, pp. 5368. 29. Rydin Y., “Geographical Knowledge and policy: the positive contribution of discourse studies”, Area, 37, 2005, 1, pp. 73-78. 30. Santangelo M., “A (more?) intelligent city”, Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Volumen Especial, 2016, pp. 66-77. 31. Söderström O., Paasche T. and Klauser F., “Smart cities as corporate storytelling”, City, 18, 3, 2014, pp. 307-320. 32. Swyngedouw E., “Governance Innovation and the Citizen: The Janus Face of Governance-beyond the State”, Urban Studies, 42, 11, 2005, pp. 1991-2006. 33. Toldo A., “Smart environment e governance ambintale”, in Santangelo M., Aru S. and Pollio A. (Eds.), Smart City. Ibridazioni, innovazioni e inerzie nelle città contemporanee, Rome, Carocci, 2013, pp. 107-133. 34. Vanolo A., “Smartmentality: the smart city as disciplinary strategy”, Urban Studies, 51, 5, 2014, pp. 883-898.

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Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography (J-READING), 1, 5, June, 2016, pp. 67-78 DOI: 10.4458/6964-06

Sardinian rebirth landscapes. An aesthetician’s outlook Federica Paua

Institut Catholique de Toulouse, Equipe de recherche Métaphysique, histoire, concepts, actualité, France Email: federpau@gmail.com Received: November 2015 – Accepted: March 2016

Abstract The following study, whose field of research is aesthetics, aims to analyze the Sardinian Rebirth Landscapes. Throughout this paper, we’ll use this expression to describe the landscapes which derived from the crisis of the industrial sector in Sardinia. Their study will be exclusively performed in an analytical manner through the use of critical thinking, as is proper in the philosophical method. The end result is a reflection which uses categories and interpretative tools typical of the field of aesthetics, which is my sole field of competence. The essay stems from considerations inspired by a photograph. This photograph presented a chance to deeply scrutinize our reality as to bring forth its evident contradictions, and to consider how these very contradictions have undertaken the features of this recession. A recession which has claimed its spaces of visibility in what I’ve named the “Sardinian Rebirth Landscapes”. The second part of paper focuses on the complexities involved in analyzing these landscapes. Keywords: Cathedrals in the Desert, Industrial Landscapes, Rebirth Landscapes

1. A “means to take a closer look and further highlight relations” The purpose of this paper is to put down in black and white my considerations for fourth edition of the Landscape Studies International Day’s. In 2014, its leitmotif was Landscape crisis, crisis landscapes. I believed this was an important occasion to bring my own perspective as an aesthetics scholar to a convention organized by the University of Cagliari, Faculty of Humanities. As in previous editions, experts from various disciplines participated, making this opportunity even more interesting and stimulating. Aside from aestheticians, geographers, economists, and urbanists were also present. These scholars offered the audience a Copyright© Nuova Cultura

different perspective on landscapes from mine, albeit not in contrast with it. I believe this multitude of points of view is always useful when analyzing landscape spaces, and it was essential in tackling the 2014 convention topic of discussion. It seems to me a short premise on the topic is due, as my analysis of the subject matter at hand precisely follows my thought processes following this experience. In particular, it was there that I came across a photo shoot on rundown industrial landscapes and, more in general, landscapes originating from the recession. For this very reason, I feel it’s necessary to refer to Eugenio Turri’s words as he points out Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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that photographic images can “depict landscapes as we see them” but they “highlight their components and connective elements” (Turri, 1994, p. 1). These words can be found in the pages of Paesaggio e fotografia: il tempo e la storia, a paper which contains his presentation from a seminar held at the Institute of Human Geography of Milan State University: L’immagine fotografica nella ricerca antropogeografica (Photographic images in anthropological geography research) on January 18th, 1994. This analysis resonates with the contents of a recent essay by Marcello Tanca, where he states that “photography [...] proves itself […] capable of profoundly influencing our way of seeing things […], allowing us to see the world ‘for the first time’” (Tanca, 2015, p. 109). Over time, I’ve made these considerations my own and I find that they are also perfectly summarized in Roberta Valtorta’s reflections when she writes that photography is a “means to take a closer look and further highlight relations” (Valtorta, 1995, p. 4). I feel compelled to specify that it is indeed in virtue of this fact that my research on the subject started from a photograph and went on by following a narration through images. However, taking into account that various geographers participated in the fourth annual Landscape Studies International Day, I’d like to stress that my use of images is very far from the visual research avenues pursued in the geographical field and whose contributions in the past decade have been extremely valuable. (Rossetto, 2006; Vecchio, 2009; Cassi and Meini, 2010; Bignante, 2011; Gemignani, 2013; Meini and Ciliberti, 2015; Tanca, 2015). In fact, my analysis wants to be of an aesthetic nature. That’s why it is entirely centered on the critical exercise of reason. Hence, photographic images are only used as a useful chance to reflect and question reality. A chance to show its blatant contradictions and study how they have taken the shape of a crisis which conquered its spaces of visibility in what I’ve dubbed the Sardinian Rebirth Landscapes in the title of this essay. With this expression, of course, I refer to those landscapes on the island which were a byproduct of the so called “Rebirth Plans” (Piani di Rinascita). The one from 1963 (bill 588: June Copyright© Nuova Cultura

11, 1962) and the one from 1974 (bill 268: June 24, 1974). Both of these plans were chiefly centered on establishing heavy industry complexes on the island. However, because these industrial stimulus plans evidently disregarded the natural social and economic propensities of the territories they were implemented on, they proved to be a failure from their inception. To better understand what we’re discussing, we have to point out that at first the “Rebirth Plan” for the Sardinian economy, suitably with the territory’s economic inclinations, involved a substantial refinancing of the agricultural sector which at the time was the island’s social and economic foundation. However, the booming expansion of the industrial sector in Northern Italy in the ‘50s prompted a shift in the Italian development plans. These, in turn, fully involved Sardinia. The main financing tool used by the Italian government to favor this Rebirth was the CIS, Credito Industriale Sardo (Sardinian Industrial Credit). This public institution was created in 1953 with the purpose of financing future industrial enterprises. Nevertheless, as noted by Paolo Piras, the presence of these new types of businesses, which had up to then been completely extraneous to Sardinia, had two immediate social and economic effects. “Farming and agriculture which had always been the main source of income for Sardinians and, at first, were the prime beneficiaries of financial aid, saw a progressive decline both in territories destined to these types of activities and in the workforce actively involved in them. Consequently, the migration trends towards the new job centers accelerated causing a spike in the depopulation phenomenon which continues to this day” (2012-2013). The effort to implement such an extraneous economic model, which, mind you, was completely foreign to the whole island, not just part of it, quickly gave rise to a structural economic crisis. Hence, this recession has deepseated roots and it originated well before the more recent one which we have been experiencing in recent years. Ultimately, when we refer to these Rebirth Plans, we are referring to an economic model Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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which in Sardinia ended up manifesting severe contradictions. These contradictions spread across the island from North to South and became evident in its landscapes while mirroring the distribution of the planned industrial complexes. So what was the end result? The lack of awareness of Sardinia’s social and economic reality, didn’t lead to the island’s highly proclaimed modernization process. Instead, it solely promoted an industrialization process without any real growth or development (Sabattini, 2012). Nevertheless, I’d like to take a few steps back to the photo attached at the end of this paper since, as I mentioned before, this was my analysis’ starting point. It is my duty to give authorship credit for this photo, as well as all the others which I will utilize in this essay. Except for two, the last two in the series. Their Author, by the name of Fabio Petretto, approached me last summer about writing a critique on an exhibition he was putting on display in Sassari in occasion of the MENOTRENTUNO Photography Festival1. Petretto is a landscape photojournalist and the landscapes immortalized by his lens all follow a unique thread: they depict degraded industrial landscapes where decline is most evident. Petretto’s landscapes are dirty, polluted, and covered in rust. The photo which inspired my essay, at first glance, doesn’t quite fit the theme (Figure 1). In fact, contrary to the pictures described above, it doesn’t depict an industrial landscape at all. Even so, this picture is still undeniably tied to the thread of industry and its recession in 1 MENOTRENTUNO is an international photography exhibit festival dedicated to young photography professionals which are strictly selected under 31 years of age. It’s run by the non-profit cultural association Su Palatu_Fotografia which was founded in Sardinia in 2011 in collaboration with the Soter publishing company. The festival is held bi-annually. The 2014 edition spread over 18 exhibits which involved Sardinian towns and cities and drew some sort of “photographic map” embracing the whole island. This edition was also enhanced by a series of off-circuit exhibitions titled A. Banda.

Sardinia. Its main feature is a strong architectural sign, a tower, which dominates its center. It’s the Aragonese tower of Porto Torres. This tower is an unmistakeable symbol for this city which happens to be home to one of the most important industrial complexes built as part of the Rebirth Plans. A white cross appears in the foreground and, together with the ones that can be seen immediately behind it, it might lead the viewer to believe it depicts a cemetery. Nevertheless, if you, like me, have had a chance to visit Porto Torres and see this building in person, you will know that there is no cemetery there. Moreover, cemeteries in Sardinia are typically vertically built and consist of differently colored burial recesses. So what is the meaning of this alluding white cross? In order to understand this shot, we’ll need to refer to this photo’s temporal location. It was taken at a very specific time in the history of Sardinia’s industrial crisis during the winter between 2009 and 2010. Specifically, it was taken on November 23, 2009, the day which officially began the decline of Porto Torres’ petrochemical industry. On this day, layoffs were announced for the workers of Vynils, a PVC raw materials manufacturing plant, as production officially came to a halt. Most workers were now on unemployment insurance. From that moment on, the Vynils laid-off workers began a long and extenuating fight for their jobs. Protests flared into somewhat dramatic initiatives through which Sardinia’s industrial recession gained prime national media coverage and brought its issues to the forefront of newspapers and news broadcasts the nation over. Among the initiatives taken by the laid-off workers, two are particularly worthy of mention. One was the occupation of the former maximum security Asinara penitentiary, which had been shut down about a decade earlier. While in the occupied penitentiary the workers used a website, L’isola dei cassintegrati (which roughly translates to Island of the Unemployment Insurance Collectors and was a reference to the Italian equivalent of the show “Survivor”,

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dubbed in Italian as “The Island of the Stars”) 2, to let the public know how they spent their days and to spread awareness3. Before that, the workers had also occupied the Aragonese tower4. This initiative was highly emblematic because the tower, as mentioned above, was the iconic symbol of Porto Torres. It wasn’t just a matter of occupying a building, but rather the act of claiming for their own a well known symbol with which the entire central and Northern Sardinian community strongly identified. So, back to our picture. It was during this time of unrest that the workers gave life to a “protest within the protest” by installing a white cross cemetery in front of the tower. The reference was to burial rites was obvious, but what were these workers burying? Their jobs, plain and simple. With this metaphorical gesture, they chose to announce to the world the death of petrochemical occupation in Porto Torres. Furthermore, at that time, their gesture echoed far and wide as there were many other similar open disputes on the island which involved workers from companies such as Alcoa, Euroallumina, and Rockwoll. Generally speaking, we could say that during that historic phase of the Sardinian recession, it was quite easy to draw a veritable map of the industrial crisis on the island. In doing so, one would find that the recession spread from North to South and exactly mirrored the outlines traced by the two Rebirth Plans. In other words, Sardinia witnessed the extreme backlash caused 2

Here is the website’s URL: http://www.isola deicassintegrati.com. 3 Fiorella Infascelli shot a documentary film about the 2010 Asinara penitentiary occupation titled Pugni Chiusi (Closed Fists). The film won the Controcampo Award at the 2011 Venice Film Festival. 4 Two fundamentals articles on the occupation of the tower can be found on the two main Sardinian newspapers, L’Unione Sarda and La Nuova Sardegna. The first “Vynils, nuova mobilitazione: operai sulla Torre Aragonese”, on “L’Unione Sarda”, January 7, 2010. The second: “Porto Torres, i lavoratori della Vynils occupano la Torre aragonese”, on «La Nuova Sardegna», January 7, 2010.

by an economic model which was never able to take off on the island. Once again, we must return to the photo since it is our starting point and the origin of all my considerations. While it is true that this picture struck me at first glance, it is also true that its title was even more food for thought. Its Author titled it: Le morti bianche: presenti, passate e future_Porto Torres (in English: “White Deaths: present, past, and future_Porto Torres”) 5. The error in the title is quite evident. Sure, the workers were burying their jobs, but white deaths are an entirely different matter. So, what happened? Was there a mistake on the photographer’s part? Or was it intentional? Well, it was obviously intentional. The photographer was hinting at another well known fact. The same jobs those workers were fighting tooth and nail for, were also the agent that caused more cancer-related deaths, proportionally, than those caused by the Ilva plant in Taranto, an infamous industrial complex in Southern Italy which rose to the public eye and is considered to be the prime example of the damage caused by heavy industry. I realize such claims need to be backed with supporting data. For this reason, we must open a parenthesis to talk about the Nurra region located in northwest Sardinia. The area is west of the town of Porto Torres and sprawls over territories belonging to the Porto Torres, Sassari, and Stintino municipalities. To the north, it’s bordered by the Golfo dell’Asinara coast, to the east by the Rio Mannu river, and to the west by the Stagno di Pilo pond. During the sixties the area’s natural beauty, both of the inland and marine landscapes, was such that a radically different economic development model could have been viable over the Rebirth Plan which was entirely based on the establishment of the chemical industry sector. The area is located inside the Gennano 5

In Italian, white deaths refers to occupational fatalities. This is a very controversial topic as Italy has a particularly bad track record in this field. Italy is the European country with the highest number of workrelated fatalities.

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hydrographic basin benefited from a vantage position for the transportation of raw materials and finished goods. Hence the SIR, Sarda Industrie Resine, was born in Porto Torres over a surface of twenty-one million square meters. The “Consorzio per il nucleo di sviluppo industriale di Sassari-Alghero-Porto Torres” (Sassari-Alghero-Porto Torres Industrial core development consortium) was founded in September of 1962. Soon, a full-scale industrial harbor was developed on the Gennano pond are which was progressively covered in all kinds of waste and debris. Over ten years, as highlighted by Alessandra Puggioni in her doctorate thesis, SIR took up an important role in the “Piano chimico nazionale”, (National chemical plan), since it directly treated 5.2 million tonnes of oil and produced 430 thousand tonnes of raw materials for the chemical sector. “What still surprises me to this very day when studying the SIR plant in the Sardinian northwest” is the “absence of […] any kind of preoccupation with its potential environmental risks. The dream of thousands of new jobs overruled the environmental preservation issues which would eventually develop into a fullblown emergency” (Puggioni, 2013, p. 13). But let’s move on to more recent history. In 1982 the Porto Torres industrial pole was under the management of ENI, Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (National Hydrocarbons Authority). “Currently, the Porto Torres industrial conglomerate sprawls over 2311 acres, 1280 of which are destined to industrial activity. Of these, about half are occupied by abandoned petrochemical plants that are no longer in use” (p. 18). But the most important fact is that with Law 179, dating July 31st, 2002, the area was declared a Sito di Interesse Nazionale (SIN, National Interest Site) because of the dangerous contamination levels and environmental risk factors. However, already in 1963 the local newspaper La Nuova Sardegna had published an article denouncing that “a little under two months ago the SIR petrochemical plant had begun its production cycle and chemical waste is being channeled into the sea killing fish of all species and sizes” (Inquinano in mare le scorie degli stabilimenti petrolchimici, 1 marzo 1963. Copyright© Nuova Cultura

Title: “Petrochemical plant waste pollutes the sea”). Nowadays, from the Cancer Registry of the Sassari Province we learn that in the short span between 1992 and 2001, in the area between Castelsardo, Porto Torres, Sennori, Sorso, and Stintino there was a 77% rise in tumor cases in men, and an 89% increase among women 6. The most recent data was published by the Italian Epidemiology Association (Associazione italiana di epidemiologia) in the periodical S.E.N.T.I.E.R.I. It can be found in the first supplement of number 38 which was published in March-April, 2014. Quoting from SENTIERI directly: “The SENTIERI Project represents the first comprehensive analysis of the health impact of residence in National Priority Contaminated Sites (NPCSs). For the first time, it considers three distinct health outcomes: mortality (20032010), cancer incidence (1996-2005) and hospital discharges (2005-2010). The Report includes a commentary explaining methodology and approach, as well as remarks on the causal association between environmental exposures and investigated health outcomes based on the a priori assessments of the epidemiological evidence […]. The approach put forward by SENTIERI was among those sanctioned by the World Health Organization to conduct an initial description of the health status of residents of contaminated sites” (p. 126). A part of this study study is also dedicated to the Industrial Areas of Porto Torres (SS). In regards to Mortality, it states: “In both men and women there is an above normal incidence from all causes, tumors, and respiratory diseases when compared to regional reference data” (p. 33). But that’s not all, further on the lung tumors and respiratory diseases in the Porto Torres SIN are clearly linked to the emissions from the petrochemical plants and refineries present in the area (p. 127).

6 See also the news article “Mappa dei veleni, Porto Torres e Sassari peggio di Taranto”, in “La Nuova Sardegna”, 2014, which denounces the severe air pollution in Sassari and Porto Torres.

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On top of what emerged thus far, we must add that there is alarming data concerning all areas affected by the Rebirth Plans in Sardinia. In total, there are eighteen areas which are considered at risk, amounting to seventy-three municipalities and for a combined population of about 850 thousand. Or in other words, a little over half the island’s total population. These areas were subdivided into industrial, mining, and military areas and were analyzed in the “Health status report on the population of areas affected by industrial, mining, and military activities in the Sardinia region” which was published in the first 2006 supplement of Epidemiologia & Prevenzione (pp. 5-95) (Epidemiology & Prevention). This study was ordered by the Regional Public Health Department of Sardinia (Assessorato alla Sanità della Regione Autonoma della Sardegna) and was carried out by a team of doctors, statisticians, and epidemiologists coming from the Universities of Udine, Turin, and Florence under the supervision of Annibale Biggeri, an epidemiologist and medical statistician from the University of Florence. However, what matters most to our broader scope is that what has emerged so far, when put into relation with the continuing job crisis in the Rebirth Plan areas and with its socioeconomic causes, traces the highly contradictory framework of Sardinia’s industrial sector from its very inception. It is in light of these contradictions that we must keep reflecting on the picture which was my analysis’ starting point. The image and its title, in fact, still inspire further thought. We’ve come face to face with a photograph that speaks to us about the fight for a fundamental right: the right to work. On the other hand, it is also about another fundamental right: the right to life. Hence, we have these two fundamental rights which, as we’ve seen, in the areas of the Sardinian Rebirth such as Porto Torres, are mutually exclusive. So, if in some areas of Sardinia these two rights, which by their very definition belong to all human beings, are mutually exclusive, reality itself is presenting us with a glaring contradiction. On my part, I can claim that I’m not the least bit surprised that, in Sardinia, such a contraCopyright© Nuova Cultura

diction has undertaken the features of a violent crisis, which manifests itself in several guises: economic recession, unemployment, and social crisis. I am not even surprised that the word crisis has somehow managed to reclaim its etymological meaning. In Greek, the word κρίσις comes from the verb κρίνω: “to separate.” This verb originally referred to the threshing process, which is the final step in the harvesting of wheat and which entails the separation of its elements. Nevertheless, just one level of abstraction above that, the word κρίσις was used as “choice”, hence the act of choosing, as per Franco Montanari in his Vocabolario della lingua greca (Montanari, 2001). To choose, then, in our scenario, between two fundamental rights: the right to life, and the right to work. In Sardinia, hence, this contradiction is materialized in the shape of a recession which stems directly from the implementation of the two Rebirth Plans. A recession which claimed its spaces of visibility in what I call Rebirth Landscapes, as mentioned briefly above.

2. Interpreting and reading Rebirth Landscapes Interpreting, and reading, if you will, these landscapes is no easy task. To do so, in fact, we’ll need to start from afar. The complexity lies on the conceptual level so we’ll be forced to scrutinize the problematic idea of industrial landscapes, because such are our Rebirth Landscapes. I am well aware that such a statement will have to be backed by sound reasoning. To better explain it, I will refer to article number 2 of the European Landscape Convention whereby tutelage is established not only for “exceptional landscapes”, but also for “everyday life landscapes, and degraded landscapes” (European Landscape Convention, October 20, 2000, article 2). The fact that degraded landscapes are explicitly mentioned, hence including the industrial Rebirth Landscapes which we are analyzing, is well worthy of note. This is Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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because the concept of landscape is considered independently of pre-established beauty and originality canons. In other words, there was a shift from a “narrow” definition of landscape, as in a beautiful landscape, to a much broader definition, one that maintains that Everything is a Landscape, to quote Lucien Kroll (1999). I feel the need, however, to specify that everything is a landscape because everything became a landscape. Once again, we’ll need to take a step back to think, given that degraded industrial landscapes, as Paolo D’Angelo underlines in his book Philosophy of Landscape, are born of an age, the modern one, which is entirely based on the dominance of the artificial over nature (D’Angelo, 2010, p. 12). It’s an age that is strongly defined by industrialism and the idea of progress associated with it. At the base of the dominance of the artificial over nature, we find the Baconian category of dominion which is typical of modern science 7. The Frankfurter thinkers Horkheimer and Adorno discussed this at length (1969) and much later, even Rosario Assunto would re-elaborate on the topic in his reflections on urban aesthetics (Assunto, 1983). Concurrently, we can’t forget that the modern age also rejected all interest in landscapes. On the subject, Luigi Zoja, in his Giustizia e Bellezza (Justice and Beauty), poignantly stated that in the course of the history of Western society, beauty started getting in the way of “efficiency, speed, and economic quantification” thus being branded as “anti-functional and antieconomic” (Zoja, 2007, pp. 22-23). In light of this, it is much easier to understand why an age that rejected their value spurred degraded landscapes. These are strongly characterized by the fact that they’re as far as they could be from the exceptional beauty described by Assunto in his essay Landscape and Aesthetics (Assunto, 1973). However, we could argue that Assunto, in spite of having sparked interest towards landscape matters in Italy and abroad, still 7 Regarding the Baconian dominion category, see the utopian story by Bacon: Bacon, 2013. On the matter, please refer to: Rossi, 1952, pp. 14-17; Cioni, 1995, p. 10; Rossi Monti, 2006, p. 1009.

conceived landscapes according to a “narrow” definition, as we previously described it. We must also duly note that this definition of landscape was the leading thread which influenced Italian landscape legislation, starting from the first law of 1922, not surprisingly promoted by Benedetto Croce, all the way to the Galasso bill of 1985 (D’Angelo, 2010, pp. 133152). Here in lies the complexity of interpreting the Rebirth Landscapes as they relate to the concept of industrial landscapes. Only by taking into account this complexity and the difficulties that stem from it, we can attempt an interpretation of the landscapes in question. Yet, we must once again trace back all the way to the Sardinian sixties and seventies when the industrial complexes outlined by the two plans began production. The operation was accompanied by intense propaganda bombardment which was spearheaded by the use of visual messaging: the use of documentary films and newsreels played a very important role. Needless to say, the propaganda proved extremely effective. This was not only due to the use of motion pictures, but mainly because there was a crafty consistency between the visual formulas employed and the underlying narrative rhetoric that accompanied them. The plants were immediately dubbed as cathedrals in the desert, following a negative expression coined by Luigi Sturzo in 1958. But beyond its negative connotation, today we can say that this expression really hit mark. This is even more true in reference to movies such as Libero Bizzarri’s Un’isola si industrializza (1964) (An Island becomes Industrialized), Carlo Fuscagni’s Un’altra Sardegna (1967) (Another Sardinia), Romolo Marcellini’s Sardegna industria e civiltà (1969) (Sardinia, industry, and civilization), and Antonio Cara’s L’industrializzazione: il futuro è già cominciato (1972) (Industrialization: the future has already begun). All of these movies used a well-studied composition to contrast the desolate Sardinian great outdoors and futuristic industrial landscapes. The latter were modeled after Italian landscapes, particularly those of Northern Italy. They symbolized modernity and the concrete promise of continuous productivity, as opposed Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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to the thankless nature which wasn’t very productive at all. Hence, images in motion which reproduced landscapes that were also in motion. These landscapes gave the idea of production without end and, an important detail, which were floodlit long after sunset. Quoting Giulio Iacoli, we can say that within those landscapes electrical light represented the “supreme artifice […] elevated to economic ratio” (Iacoli, 2008, p. 76). It was the result of never-ending production which would have brought steady jobs to Sardinia. Jobs no longer tied to the ebb and flow of seasons as the ones in agriculture and farming which were the island’s main economic sectors before the Rebirth Plans. The productivity in question, was that of heavy industry, the kind that never stops. It is common knowledge that the production cycle of petrol, just like that of aluminum, to name two, cannot be stopped without halting production as a whole. So now more than ever nature and its landscapes were presented as static and ungrateful, in opposition to the unrelenting activity of industrial landscapes. As can be expected, this contra-position resounded deeply with the collective imagination. Its futuristic landscapes, depicted ever in movement, held a promise of industrial modernization with stable jobs and prosperity. In hindsight, to shed light on this contrast, we could have just as easily looked deeper into the meaning of the expression cathedrals in the desert. Dubbing the industrial plants in such a manner helps us understand their definition. For what does our intellect do when it defines? From the origin of the word, we can grasp that it outlines meaning, it confines it. It confines meaning into one meaning. So, by referring to them as cathedrals in the desert, we had already focused our attention on the contrast between man-made, scientific modernity and nature, while also making it very explicit in the process. We must also notice how equating nature to a desert was not accidental. We can easily say that the desert is the quintessential representation of inhospitable nature. A place that man cannot render productive by giving into its whims. His only option, then, is to tame it through science and technology. The result of this domination are industrial landscapes. For these, Eric Copyright© Nuova Cultura

Dardel’s words sound truer than ever. In L’Homme et la Terre. Nature de la réalité géographique, he writes that landscapes are not, in essence, made to be looked at but they are “the way man makes its way in the world, they are the place of a struggle for life” (Dardel, 1986, p. 35). So the contrast between the world of technology and the dimension of nature evoked by the expression cathedrals in the desert has become a reality in many of the Sardinian Rebirth Landscapes. One of the many examples is the Scala di Giocca cement factory (Figure 2) which can be seen on the road to Sassari, near Muros. I remember the utter feeling of loathing which grasped me the first time I saw it. This landscape hit me with its stark contrast between the degraded, man-made, lifeless landscape, and the lush natural one which framed and invaded it. The end result offended my senses and felt completely dis-harmonic8. However, this is not always the case. What we see at Scala di Giocca is very different from what happens at the petrochemical plants. The petrochemical landscape of Vynils, immortalized in Petretto’s photographs (Photos 3 and 4), is just one of the many examples in Sardinia. To study them, it could be useful to compare the images from a few of them: the ones from Porto Torres and Portovesme in Sardinia, and the ones in Milazzo or Piombino and many more like them. What happens when we embark in a visual comparison of pictures depicting these landscapes? One thing, and one thing only. At first glance, we are unable to tell them apart. Why? Because these images depict highly standardized landscapes, where we can see the same identical chimney stacks, the same shapes of human planning. As with all landscapes, even heavy industry landscapes are cultural ones. Hence, referring to Martin Schwind’s analysis of cultural landscapes could prove useful to study them. In Kulturlandschaft als geformter Geist, the German 8

Here, I am referring to the first part of a very poignant book title: Rognini, 2008.

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geographer states that every landscape is the sum of: forms created in the present, forms that were created in the past and are still alive today, forms which were created in the past but are no longer alive, and forms created in the past of which only traces remain (Schwind, 1964). Applying these analysis criteria to our image comparison, we realize that among the many reasons for which Porto Torres and Portovesme are indistinguishable is that these landscapes appear to live in an eternal present, given that they no longer present any trace of past stratification. Even in plants that have now fallen into disuse, the immediate past takes on the semblance of a present that erased all preexisting historical traces. Furthermore, while in the case of Scala di Giocca we could see a rich contrast with the natural landscape, in petrochemical landscapes, we can observe how nature has become almost transparent. It slowly blends in the background to the point of fading away, as to leave room for the uncontested dominion of the artificial. It is only in light of this that we can reclaim ownership over the negative connotation that distinguishes the expression cathedrals in the desert as it refers to the Rebirth industrial complexes. We will turn around and claim that those very factories created the desert, not only from a productivity standpoint 9, but even from a mere visual one; the one most relevant to us as we’re speaking about landscapes.

3. What are the possible outcomes for the Sardinian Rebirth landscapes? So what are the possible outcomes for the Sardinian Rebirth landscapes? The European Landscape Convention has already outlined some solutions in its planning works which should concern landscapes that were degraded by industry. In most cases, these projects will have to be preceded by major environmental remediation work, especially in the case of petrochemical plants which exhibit all the signs of unchecked pollution. On the matter, we 9

See Paolo Carboni’s film: Cattedrali di sabbia (2010) (Sand Cathedrals).

cannot fail to mention the November 10, 2014, Italian bill 162 which followed the approval of the so-called “decreto Sblocca-Italia”. To all effects, this bill decrees that in all territories under Italian jurisdiction there will be no environmental remediation work. Without remediation, there cannot be any further planning. At the same time, we cannot ignore the fact that Sardinian public opinion has become very aware of environmental and landscape matters. Case in point, thirty Sardinian mayors, expressing the sentiment of their communities, appealed against the “Sblocca-Italia” at the Corte Costituzionale (Constitutional Court). To this, we can add some examples of virtuous environmental protection battles carried out by associations and committees. In Sardinia, one of the many cases involves the No al Progetto Eleonora Civic Committee (No to project Eleonora) which was born to oppose the Saras s.p.a. plans to perform drilling surveys to look for oil and natural gas in the Arborea territory. As stated on their blog, since it’s foundation in October 2011 the committee’s only purpose has been to “prevent project Eleonora from being carried out. Its plan involves drilling for liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons in our territory”. The area affected by project Eleonora sprawls over 44,300 acres within the Oristano Province, particularly in the Arborea municipality, a town with a population of about four thousand. On December 18 th, 2009, the Regione Autonoma della Sardegna (Autonomous Region of Sardinia) signed a concession for the search of liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons in the area. In order to start the process of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), in June 2011, the company Saras s.p.a. presented an environmental study titled “Sargas Project” to the office of the “servizio della sostenibilità ambientale, valutazione impatti e sistemi informativi ambientali (SAVI)” (environmental sustainability, impact assessment, and environmental information systems service, known as SAVI) at the Autonomous Region of Sardinia Department of Environmental Protection.

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But what exactly did the Project Eleonora entail? It included plans for a 2850 meter deep exploratory drill site to look for natural gas and its construction site infrastructure. The drill site would have been located 187 meters from the S’Ena Arrubia pond, a wetland area with a high concentration of wildlife protected by the International Ramsar Convention. This is an area of outstanding natural beauty and is also under tutelage as an SIC, ZPS, and IBA. But that’s not all, because 400 meters south of the planned dig site there are houses and some farming businesses. To the west, there’s a town camping ground. The committee created to oppose the Saras s.p.a. project was composed of students, blue-collar workers, researchers, farmers, and white-collar workers. “We’re simple citizens who have been asking themselves a simple question since finding out about Saras’ plan to create an exploratory dig site within our municipality: is it compatible with our territory?

Figure 1. F. Petretto, Le morti bianche: presenti, passate, future (Porto Torres).

We’ve done research and we’ve discussed at length with experts, we’ve examined similar cases and we’ve come to a conclusion: this project is incompatible with our territory. It’s incompatible with the territory of Arborea and all of Sardinia” (No to Project Eleonora blog). It is very clear to everyone involved that the committee, which by the way won its legal battle, was initially founded to protect the community’s economy which is chiefly based on intensive farming. On top of that, we have to add that this administrative body also fought for its environment and that, in due course, it also began to put in place measures to safeguard its landscapes. Examples such as this deserve our undivided attention.

Figure 2. F. Petretto, Cementeria Scala di Giocca (Muros).

Figure 3. F. Petretto, Vinyls (Porto Torres).

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3. 4.

5. 6. 7. Figure 4. F. Petretto, Vinyls (Porto Torres).

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. Figure 5. P. Saracino, Milazzo_7293.

14. 15. 16.

17. Figure 6. A. Cani, Portovesme.

References 1. Adorno S. and Neri Serneri S., Industria, ambiente e territorio: per una storia ambientale delle aree industriali in Italia, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2009. 2. Adorno T.W. and Horkeimer M., Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmen, Frankfurt am Main, S. Fischer Verlag Copyright© Nuova Cultura

18.

19. 20.

GmBH, 1969. Assunto R., Il paesaggio e l’estetica, 2 voll., Naples, Giannini, 1973. Assunto R., La città di Anfione e la città di Prometeo. Idea e poetiche della città, Milan, Jaca Book, 1983. Bacon F., New Atlantis, Global Grey, 2013. Bignante E., Geografia e ricerca visuale: strumenti e metodi, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2011. Cassi L. and Meini M., Aldo Sestini: fotografie di paesaggi, Rome, Carocci, 2010. Cioni V., Filosofia e letteratura dell’industrialismo, Milan, Mursia, 1995. D’Angelo P., Filosofia del paesaggio, Macerata, Quodlibet Studio, 2010. Dardel E., L’uomo e la terra. Natura della realtà geografica, Milan, Edizioni Unicopli, 1986. Epidemiologia & Prevenzione, 30, 2016, suppl. 1. “European Landscape Convention”, 2000, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/sys tem/uploads/attachment_data/file/236096/84 13.pdf. Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana, n. 166, 03-07-1962. Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana, n. 184, 15-07-1974. Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana, n. 262, 11-11-2014 (suppl. ord. n. 85). Gemignani C. A., L’occhio sul paesaggio. Archivi fotografici locali e patrimonio rurale della montagna appenninica, Milan, Franco Angeli, 2013. Iacoli G., “La conquista della profondità di campo. Su alcuni snodi discorsivi tra valorizzazione della luce e modernità letteraria”, in Zanella F. (Ed.), Città e luce. Fenomenologia del paesaggio illuminato, Parma, FA Edizioni, 2008, pp. 74-78. “Inquinano in mare le scorie degli stabilimenti petrolchimici”, La Nuova Sardegna, 1963. Kroll L., Tutto è paesaggio, Turin, Testo & Immagine, 1999. “Mappa dei veleni, Porto Torres e Sassari peggio di Taranto”, La Nuova Sardegna, 2014. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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21. Meini M. and Ciliberti D., “La fotografia di paesaggio come specchio per l’autorappresentazione. Linee metodologiche e primi risultati di una ricerca”, in Castiglioni B., Parascandolo F. and Tanca M. (Eds.), Landscape as Mediator, Landscape as a Commons, Padua, Cleup, 2015, pp. 165-181. 22. Montanari F., Vocabolario della lingua greca, Turin, Loescher editore, 2001. 23. Piras P., “Italia e Sardegna: un caso di colonialismo industriale”, in Paginauno. Bimestrale di analisi politica, cultura e letteratura, 30, dicembre 2012-gennaio 2013, pp. 24-29. 24. “Porto Torres, i lavoratori della Vynils occupano la Torre aragonese”, La Nuova Sardegna, 2010. 25. Puggioni A., “Aspetti geografici e normativi delle bonifiche delle aree inquinate del Nord Sardegna”, Ph.D. Thesis, XXVI, 2013. 26. Rognini P., La vista offesa. Inquinamento visivo e qualità della vita in Italia, Milan, Franco Angeli, 2008. 27. Rossetto T., “Fotografare per la ricerca geografica. Note sull’esperienza di Marcello Zunica”, Rivista Geografica Italiana, vol. CXIII, 1, 2006, pp. 147-158. 28. Rossi P., “Prefazione”, in Farrington B. (Ed.), Francesco Bacone filosofo dell’età industriale, Turin, Einaudi, 1952, pp. 7-20. 29. Rossi Monti P., “s.v. Bacon Francis – V. La Bibbia, la religione, la scienza”, in Enciclopedia filosofica, Milan, Bompiani, 2006, vol. II, pp. 1008-1011. 30. Sabattini G., “Il problema del Mezzogiorno oggi”, in Atzeni F. (Ed.), La ricerca come passione: studi in onore di Lorenzo Del Piano, Rome, Carocci, 2012, pp. 511-526. 31. Schwind M., Kulturlandschaft als geformter Geist, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964.

32. S.E.N.T.I.E.R.I., n. 38, 2014, suppl. 1. 33. Tanca M., “‘Come una persona che comincia a vedere per la prima volta’. Paesaggio e fotografia in Vidal de la Blanche e Jean Brunhes”, in Vargiu L. (Ed.), Esplorare nel passato indagare sul contemporaneo. Dare senso al paesaggio, Mimesis, Milan-Udine, 2015, pp. 109-127. 34. Turri E., “Paesaggio e fotografia: il tempo e la storia”, OCS, Osservatorio Città Sostenibili, 1994, pp. 1-12. 35. Valtorta R., Gabriele Basilico. L’esperienza dei luoghi. Fotografie 1978-1993, Patocchi, Udine, Art&, 1995. 36. Vecchio B., “La fotografia come strumento di riflessione sul territorio”, Memorie geografiche, 8, 2009, pp. 335-347. 37. Venturi Ferriolo M., Etiche del paesaggio. Il progetto del mondo umano, Rome, Editori Riuniti, 2002. 38. “Vynils, nuova mobilitazione: operai sulla Torre Aragonese”, L’Unione Sarda, 2010. 39. Zoja L., Giustizia e Bellezza, Turin, Bollati Boringhieri, 2007. 40. https://noprogettoeleonora.wordpress.com/. 41. http://www.ocs.polito.it/biblioteca/articoli/tu rri_2.pdf.

Filmography 1. Bizzarri L., Un’isola si industrializza, 1964. 2. Cara A., L’industrializzazione: il futuro è già cominciato, 1972. 3. Carboni P., Cattedrali di sabbia, 2010. 4. Fuscagni C., Un’altra Sardegna, 1967. 5. Infascelli F., Pugni chiusi, 2010. 6. Marcellini R., Sardegna industria e civiltà, 1969.

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Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography (J-READING), 1, 5, June, 2016, pp. 79-88 DOI: 10.4458/6964-07

Cagliari’s urban landscape: a commons? Marcello Tancaa

Dipartimento di Storia, Beni culturali e Territorio, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy Email: mtanca@unica.it Received: November 2015 – Accepted: March 2016

Abstract Cities are the mirror of globalization; they reproduce and anticipate the same trends and contradictions from the inside. The controversial notion of urban landscape is here explored in connection with the commons paradigm, those resources which have been studied by Elinor Ostrom, Nobel prize for economic sciences in 2009 and Author of Governing the Commons, the fundamental text for the study of collective institutions and the governance processes of natural and artificial resources. In the text the landscape is excluded from the list of commons because these identify self-governed microsystems of local-territorial resources, that is to say, a set of practices and rules of access and fruition that are the exclusive pertinence of the users of local communities. The landscape is perhaps more similar to public goods, with one condition: that its fruition from a specific point of view does not impede the aesthetic, affective, patrimonial and identity appropriation of others, nor compromises its own existence. Nevertheless, apart from this, the “health” of urban landscape is given by the simultaneity and compresence of different spaces, as is shown by the “fight” against the commercialization of public spaces of the inhabitants of the Marina neighbourhood in Cagliari. Keywords: Cagliari, Commons, Landscape, Ostrom, Sardinia, Urbanscape

The beauty of women is only skin-deep. If men could only see what is beneath the flesh and penetrate below the surface with eyes like the Boeotian lynx, they would be nauseated just to look at women, for all this feminine charm is nothing but phlegm, blood, humours, gall. Odo of Cluny (c. 878-942 AD) Saint of the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church

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1. Introduction This work is another product from a wider reflection, which has already generated the essay Il paesaggio come bene comune. Alla ricerca di “buone pratiche” per l’organizzazione del territorio [Landscape as a common good. Looking for “good practices” in territorial organization] (Tanca, 2014) and the volume Landscape as mediator, landscape as commons. International perspectives on landscape research (Castiglioni et al., 2015). The question mark that is present in this title (Cagliari’s urban landscape: a commons?) is born from the convergence of two other research lines: (i) the problem of the relationship between the concept of landscape and commons, intended as territorial typicalities strictly linked to the history and the ecological and socio-economic assets of the local milieux; (ii) a reflection on the perception and fruition of public spaces in Cagliari, that is connected to more in-depth research on spatial justice (Cattedra and Tanca, 2015). There is no doubt that the notion of “urban landscape” is a controversial, if not problematic, one, since it puts together two supposedly heterogeneous ideas, that should not really stay together. Historically, the idea of landscape evokes a typically extra-urban space, where “the noblest objects of nature”, as Alexander von Humboldt called them in his Ansichten der Natur, stand out: Ocean, the forests of the Orinoco, the Savannahs of Venezuela, the solitudes of the Peruvian and Mexican Mountains (Humboldt, 1850, p. IX) – images of a somewhere else that is at the same time the anti-city, the other-from-the city, “stranger to the destinies of mankind”, as Humboldt writes again (p. 6) a metaphor of freedom as it is perceived by bourgeois culture, as autonomy from the politic, in other words, as emancipation in nature from the dominating political and behavioral models. If we turn our attention to the field of artistic representation, the image of the city isn’t celebrated by landscape painting, but in Vedutism, a pictorial genre halfway between cartography and painting, strictly related to topographic drawing in the sharpness of the trait (Romano, 1991; Quaini, 1991). The continuity of the constitutive elements testifies it (blueprint-type point of view, clarity, precision, etc.) from Hartmann Schedel’s Map of Rome (1490) to Caspar van Wittel’s View of the Piazza Navona (1699), in a line that takes us as far as Canaletto’s works. As Françoise ChenetFaugeras (1994) observed, we will have to wait

until the second half of the XIX Century and Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens in order to acknowledge (or return to) a dignity to the urban landscape, a privilege that had been conceded, until that moment, to the “contemplation of nature” only. It is only then that the neurosis of the “swarming city”, Paris, the city of “yards” and ateliers, of the “deserted Seine” and the Louvre, of prostitutes and spleen, will rise side by side with the descriptions of an exotic nature far away; and it is not a coincidence either that this paradigm shift takes place in an era that sees a radical transformation of the urban scenario in the principal European cities. Chenet Faugeras’ thesis deserves some attention from this perspective, because of the little Copernican revolution it introduces the way in which to conceive the relationship between landscape, nature and city. The urban aspect is not, as we usually think, one of the possible declinations of landscape; on the contrary, it is the landscape that becomes “a modality of the urban” (ChenetFaugeras, 1994, p. 27). In other words, there is no landscape that is not also intrinsically urban, because it is seen and defined by someone who is watching it from a specific point of view, which is the city itself: “the landscape – even its void version, without buildings and exclusively rural – is seen from the city, by a citizen, and it’s built through its stare” (ivi, p. 29). What interests us more in this definition is the emphasis that is put on the stare as a “point of view” on reality, which unveils a dialectic relationship between landscape, nature and city. The landscape is other-from-the-city, a nature to contemplate aesthetically; yet, the necessary condition to appreciate nature aesthetically resides in putting a distance from it with the adoption of an “urban life” (Simmel, 2011, p. 519). If, first of all, it is the way we gaze at things, the point of observation that we choose to adopt, which defines the nature of the things that interest us, what happens when we stop looking at nature from the city to direct our attention to the urban landscape? A possible answer is given by Leibniz’s Monadology (1714), where, in §57, we read: “And as the same town, looked at from various sides, appears quite different and becomes as it were numerous in aspects” (Leibniz, 1898, p. 248). To this first consideration, the source of the so-called “perspectivism”, we add another, this time from Leibniz’s short essay On social life (1679): “Thus one can say that the place of others […] is a place proper to help us discover considerations which would not otherwise come to us; and that everything which we would find unjust if we Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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were in the place of others must seem to us to be suspect of injustice” (Leibniz, 1988, p. 81). In these two fragments Leibniz is not just simply stating that the vision of the city from different points of view enables us to observe different things; but that the city does not exist as a “total” object, a reassuring and definitive unit. In order to bring into focus a global image that is as variegated and accurate as possible, it is necessary to multiply the points of observation. The result of this operation goes well beyond the specific case: a single look at the city is, for its own nature, misleading; the compresence of different gazes (of different evaluation criteria, different observation practices, etc.) overcomes the limits that every individual point of view holds, and it is a necessary condition to discover new things. Truth – if you want to use a pompous and disused word – needs an integrated confrontation between different versions of reality; its discovery or definition is not a lonesome or a solipsistic practice, because it tackles the ability to see things with the eyes of the other, to put ourselves “in the place of others”. The considerations here expressed imply a methodological pluralism: the more the eyes on things, the higher the probability to intercept shards of meaning (and injustice) that otherwise would remain unknown. This will not consume the world’s richness of details – the virtually infinite series of relationships among things – but at least it will enable us to “discover considerations which would not otherwise come to us”. That forces us to do our best to appraise the plurality of points of view and perspectives analysis. Still, in order to put it into action, this observation program requires the respect of the subject’s mobility. Bernardo Secchi often repeated that “urbanism is made by feet” (even on his last visit to Cagliari, in February 2014, some months before his passing). The city is a space we experience with our body: “bodies in movement that with their movement explore territories […] Bodies of men and women, bodies that meet houses, sidewalks, pieces of asphalt and stone, cars and trains, pools and gardens” (Secchi, 2000, p. 143). This principle is immediately linked with the idea expressed by Armand Frémont, who, quoting René Musset, talks about a géographe aux pieds crottés (Frémont, 2005, p. 28), a restless geographer, with feet stained with mud (so geography can be done with feet, too!), and with James Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception (1986). These otherwise heterogeneous approaches have in common the rejection of the idea on which the Copyright© Nuova Cultura

modern experience of landscape is based: a static subject, staying motionless in contemplation of what is put in front of him – reality is a still image. On the contrary, the experience of places implies movement, and for this reason it necessarily passes through our body, forcing us to confront ourselves with the hardships connected to corporeity (“bodies that meet houses, sidewalks, pieces of asphalt…”). We have to walk, we have to move, to change our point of view, if we really want to catch different aspects of reality. In every city, in Cagliari too, it’s sometimes enough to walk a few yards to meet, cross, bump into different things. 2. Landscape is a commons? The term “commons” (which has a specific meaning, and a well delimitated field of use) has come into use with increasing frequency, with the risk of transforming it into an “axiologeme” (Antelmi, 2014, p. 53): that is a generic expression, a fashionable word, a successful slogan to be used as a predicate in a growing variety of situations. The increasing extension of a concept comes at a price: its heuristic charge is weakened, with a (potential) trivialization of the term. From this point of view, quoting two apparently antithetic statements, such as Giovanna Ricoveri and Salvatore Settis’, may help us recognize some of the strong points and some of the weaknesses connected with the inclusion of landscape in the commons category. Ricoveri traces the borders of an open and elastic phenomenology: “It is not possible, and besides it would be a mistake, to define commons precisely, once and for all. Their strength and raison d’etre depend instead on the specificity of a place, and the flexibility with which local communities are capable to adapt to change” (Ricoveri, 2013, p. 29). If for the first scholar the ontology of collective resources is inclusive and subject to variations in time and space, Settis denounces the inflation risk of this formula and suggests a less open phenomenology: “We easily talk about commons when we want to defend anything that is considered in danger”. And again: “As with every other inflation [in the Author’s examples, with a clear reference to the Italian debate, an occupied theatre, sports, night trains are considered commons], this one can have negative consequences too, producing the wearing out of the formulas and reducing their efficacy” (Settis, 2012, p. 61). I think the two points look more distant than they really are; in Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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my opinion they integrate perfectly. In order to answer our first question – how to define, in a Kantian sense, the conditions of possibility that allow us to affirm that the landscape and commons belong to the same area of propositions –, we have to remember Elinor Ostrom’s theories. In her book Governing the Commons, the fundamental text for the study of collective institutions and the governance processes of natural and artificial resources, the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences says: “The central question in this study is how a group of principals who are in an interdependent situation can organize and govern themselves to obtain continuing joint benefits when all face temptations to free-ride, shirk, or otherwise act opportunistically” (Ostrom, 1990, p. 29). In Ostrom’s use of the word, the term commons identifies the auto government microsystems of local-territorial resources: reservoirs, fishing and grazing areas, forests, etc. Her analyses are always based on documented and well delimited empirical cases: irrigation systems in Spanish huertas, fishing areas in Canada, Sri Lanka and Turkey, grazing areas in the Swiss Alps (for example in the village of Torbel), the game reserve of Native Americans. All these cases 1 represent a challenge to the conventional theory based on a rigid dichotomy between what is public (the State) and what is private (the market): “These cases clearly demonstrate the feasibility […] of robust, self-governing institutions for managing complex CPR [common-pool resources] situations” (ivi, p. 103). Moreover, notwithstanding their differrences, these empirical cases have a fundamental trait in common: all the microsystems of use of common goods have relatively small dimensions. The reason is simple: autoorganized systems of resource management have more chances of being successful if the limits of the collective resource and the actors who have the right to access to it are clearly defined. Local communities of small and middle dimension – the most meaningful case involves a community that is no more than 15,000 units big – seem to have an advantage when it comes to communicating and reaching internal agreements, establishing some management rules and observing them. In short, there are no common goods without a shared common idea, 1 And we may add the Italian examples of Marano’s lagoon, of civic uses in Sardinia, of Valdotaine consorterie, Costacciaro’s Università degli Uomini Originari etc. (Arena and Iaione, 2012; Cacciari et al., 2012).

an agreement that makes the appeal to external authorities for the observation of rules absolutely superfluous. Does landscape respect these criteria? Can we include it in this perspective and consider it sic et simpliciter as commons? My answer is no. If we read Governing the commons carefully, we realize that the reported case studies relate to territorial systems which, while they maintain a landscape component, cannot simply be reduced to it. Commons are defined by the (shared) rules of their functioning; while their fruition is “internal” to local communities, the vision of the landscape mobilizes a subject contemplating a territory from a certain distance, which is, for this reason, “external”. When we “translate” commons’ theory from a landscape point of view we have to address Farinelli’s witz of the landscape (Farinelli, 1999), that is the innate ambiguity and duplicity of this concept, which is at the same time “the thing” and “the image of the thing”, “a way to see” and “an ensemble of existing things”, the expression of a tension that is at the same time aesthetic and scientific. Including the landscape among the commons without meditating enough on this aspect, we lose ourselves in a labyrinth of contradictions: - as a visual asset, panorama, imago loci, tour d’horizon, and in the absence of unfavorable atmospheric conditions, the landscape is visible to anyone, under the condition, stated by Leibniz, that the “point of view” be accessible; - as an ensemble of practice, resources, local and territorial peculiarities, the commons respond to a precise access to and fruition of rules which are the exclusive pertinence of the users, that is to say, of the local communities. In the first case, fruition is free and open to anyone, of public domain, and for this reason it is included in the category that Ostrom (2010) defines as “public goods”: non-rival and nonexclusive goods2; in the second case, we deal with common-pool resources, which are not exclusive but rivals. The problem of a greater or lesser accessibility to landscape is not only a 2

The rivalry of a good (later redefined by Ostrom subtractability of use) is as high as its fruition by some reduces the possibility of access of others; it is low, if this possibility is not inhibited. The exclusivity (later redefined by Ostrom difficulty of excluding potential beneficiaries) identifies instead the possibility to inhibit or not inhibit access by the users. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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theoretical problem, but it reflects the cohabitation rules that society is based on, and the way we rule the access to resources. As Anne Sgard highlights: “The accessibility to the landscape implies not only the free access to a point of view, but also the freedom to move freely between places, and the non-obstruction of the stare: so, the actual appropriation of the landscape often comes with the limitation of accessibility, sometimes even with the privatization of a public space. The most grotesque example is the illegal appropriation of the access to the sea: French law defines the foreshore as a public space, accessible to anyone; in spite of this, beaches and coastal areas are regularly bought out by private owners who interdict the access, or by touristic structures (beaches with admission charge, private terraces, etc.). The accessibility criterion highlights the conflicts between the land appropriation of the owner of the site and the aesthetic, affective, patrimonial and identity appropriation of visitors; it points out the symbolic dimension of landscape and, for this reason, it shows its strength” (Sgard, 2010, p. 26). The “access right” falls into crisis when it is frustrated in at least one of the two following ways: a) by the conflict between the aesthetic, affective, patrimonial and identity appropriation of places (connected to the non-obstruction of the stare) and the estate appropriation of resources; b) by the conflict between the freedom of movement and the privatization of public space. As we will see in the following paragraph, the inhibition of the “freedom to move at will through spaces” and the “limitation of the access to public spaces” can have a negative influence on the landscape’s “health” in general, and more specifically on the urban landscape: as soon as the possibility of differentiating spaces and the free access to resources is denied, then we are putting the premises for a situation which is potentially a generator of inequalities3.

Inequalities or injustice? According to Vincent Veschambre the term injustice contains a value judgment that can be shared, or not, while “even if to talk about inequalities [inégalités] is never neutral, they relate to measurable and localizable phenomena, therefore objective facts” (Veschambre, 2010, p. 265).

3. Cagliari and its urban landscape Urbanscape represents a specific and concrete case of application of the discourse around the commons to landscape, and for this reason is particularly effective to grasp the aporias. Without forgetting that our discourse is developed on two different levels, which are separate but not necessarily alien to each other – one about the landscape as a “way of looking”, whose appropriation is free and open to anybody, and the other about public spaces as an ensemble of “existing things”, organized by rules of access and fruition, but more and more often exposed to the risk of privatization and commercialization – and that these two plans (the significant and the signified) are held together by the landscape’s witz, we will try to focus our attention on an empirical case, represented by the city of Cagliari, the region’s capital and principal urban center of Sardinia, chosen as a concrete example of a number of processes that redefine the relationship between public and private. As with other Italian and foreign cities, Cagliari also has been affected by transformation processes of its urban landscape on a “cultural” basis. The political, administrative and economic centre of the region, after impersonating for some years the ambiguous role of the “hinge” (Boggio, 2002) between the interior and the exterior parts of the island, has undergone a crisis since the 80s, whose most evident signs are demographic decrease and the ageing of the resident population. In thirty years, its residents have decreased by almost 50,000 units, from 197,517 inhabitants in 1981 to 149,883 in 2011 4. As we have already mentioned, this phenomenon has been accompanied by a decline in birth rates and the ageing of the resident population: in thirty years, between 1981 and 2011, the under-25 percentage of population passed from 43.3% to 19.35%, while the over65s rose from 9.3% to 24.37% (Comune di Cagliari, 2014). The crisis is also evident from the physiognomy and the configuration of places; it is especially manifest on an infrastructural level, characterized by delays and void proliferation in urban spaces and street furniture, and by the fragility and scarce quality of architectonical decorum, which is the mirror and effect of the absence of a project direction – 4 At the same time, due to the counter-urbanization phenomenon, the residents in Cagliari’s metropolitan area have increased from 176,371 in 1981 to 262,935 in 2011.

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especially in the historic city centre. Following a tested pattern (Harvey, 1989, 2007; Jessop, 1997; Swyngedouw, Moulaert and Rodriguez, 2002; Pratt, 2011a and 2011b) the “recipe” to overcome this phase and encourage Cagliari’s regeneration has been found in the establishment in a “new urban policy” inspired by the neoliberal ideology, which tries to make the city competitive through marketing and urban branding (symbolized by the slogan “Cagliari, capital of the Mediterranean” and a series of development incentive interventions of a “cultural” nature that will be better presented in

Cattedra and Tanca, 2015). A risk connected to this kind of operations of urban regeneration is the transformation of the city from a place where social heterogeneity and the differences in terms of values and practices are given with the maximum spatial closeness (Loda et al., 2011, p. 59) to an entrepreneurial city, i.e. a space guided and redefined depending on the inner workings of economic competition, not always governable or even clear to its own inhabitants (Figures 13).

Figure 1. “The non-obstruction of the gaze...the aesthetic, affective, patrimonial and identity appropriation of places...”. A point of observation of the urban landscape in Santa Croce Street in Cagliari. Photo: M. Tanca.

Figure 2. “The estate appropriation of resources through the privatization of public space...the limitation of freedom of movement”. Dehors in Santa Croce Street in Cagliari. Photo: M. Tanca.

Figure 3. These two plans (the non-obstruction of the gaze and the limitation of freedom of movement) are held together by the landscape’s witz that ensures their coexistence. Photo: M. Tanca.

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When operations like this end up in the adoption of models of urban coexistence imprinted with forms of consumerism, with the tendency to eliminate the uses of space which are not suitable to the consumeristic modality (ivi, p. 60) the same chance to see more things, and get to know the city better as “the place of difference” (Secchi, 2000, p. 78) is weakened and neutralized. Even though the plurality of the places to gaze from appears as a fundamental requirement to overcome the limits that any “situated” point of view implies (fragmentation, incompleteness and partiality), it alone is not enough if we contemplate, in front of our eyes, a uniform and monotonous landscape, always identical: the plurality of points of view and the plurality of situations observed appear as the two sides of the same coin. Let us say it once again: urban landscape is a public good as long as its fruition by those who contemplate it from a specific point of view does not hamper the aesthetic, affective, patrimonial and identity appropriation by others, nor compromises the very existence of the resources. Yet, if we move our gaze from the image of the thing to the details that form this landscape, to the very thing, we will realize that this is complex and articulate, and that on the inside it is divided into spaces and very different property regimes: in addition to proper public spaces such as roads, squares, parks, stations, libraries and gardens, we have private goods, which are exclusive and rivals, as in the case of a parking lot or the private yard of a house; club goods, non-rival but exclusive and characterized by the presence of fee services, such as pay and display parking lots; and, last of all, common goods, such as urban gardens and neighborhood commons, and/or temporary experiences of reuse of neglected spaces or buildings, managed on a shared rules basis by a “third” party. The plurality of property regimes for urban spaces can be emblematically represented with a scheme like the following, proposed by Pierre Donadieu, which highlights the aspects of its interconnection and variety (Figure 4).

We can deduce that, if it is licit to talk about the urban landscape’s “health”, this must necessarily contemplate the pluralism of the forms of fruition and appropriation of spaces, and where this pluralism fails, conflicting situations can be created, where urban coexistence modalities are put at stake. This kind of conflict is shown, for example, in the opposition of a group of people from the Marina neighborhood, one of the historic neighborhoods in Cagliari, to the comercialization of some of its public spaces (streets and squares), which is linked with the touristic revamp of the city. The name discloses the proximity of the neighborhood to the port, and represents the nearest destination for cruise passengers disembarking in the town (Iorio, 2014) and looking for services and attractions (food, shopping, etc.). The problem lies in the coexistence of an adequate fruition of public ground and the right of citizens (especially residents)5 to a peaceful environment against the interests of public and commercial establishments and their owners. A mediation is not always easy to reach, if the truth be told, as the most recent news never fails to ruthlessly remind. Among the episodes of this hardly ever idyllic relationship between the demands of public actors and their private counterparts, we will remember here the petition that was forwarded to the mayor by Marina’s inhabitants in June 2013. While they understood that the valorization of the city center would necessarily imply the meeting of tourists’ needs, the petition signers claimed the use of the street network and the little squares of the neighborhood as an everyday space, not entirely absorbed by economic functions. In particular, the “tablination” – the invasive spread of bar tables in the open air, a phenomenon which is favored by Cagliari’s Mediterranean climate and the consequent lengthening of the tourist season, and by the recent conversion of Marina into a pedestrian area –, which has become one of the most peculiar traits of the neighborhood, was bitterly criticized. 5

Figure 4. The categories of landscape goods and services: a) pure public goods; b) commons made public; c) commons; d) privatized commons; e) pure private goods; f) private goods made public. Source: Donadieu, 2012, p. 12. Copyright© Nuova Cultura

The protests of Marina’s inhabitants are especially frequent in summer, when the nightlife buzz goes on until morning (Figure 5). Cfr. the vast documentation that is present on the Committee Rumore No Grazie (No Noise Thanks)’s website http://rumorenograzie. wix.com/index which gives voice to the issues of the residents of Marina and Stampace, the other historical Cagliari neighborhoods. In July 2015 the Piano comunale di classificazione acustica, which establishes precise parameters for noise emissions in the different areas of the city, was finally approved. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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Figure 5. A blanket shouting the protest of the inhabitants of a condo in Marina: “cercasi regole, basta schiamazzi notturni” (Looking for rules. Stop with night squalling). Photo: M. Tanca.

Wishing for a concerted management of public spaces, the petitioners called for the right to “children that a free space, without tables, chairs and glasses which alter it and make it unsafe for play could exist and resist” (Unione Sarda, 2013). The reference – an inevitable one, in a neighborhood especially lacking in adequate public areas – is the Santo Sepolcro square, suitable for hosting ludic activities for children from Marina and adjacent Stampace, but which is experiencing an intense commercialization (Cagliaripad, 2013). Even though there are people who have named this controversy “table war”, maybe it is a bit too much to be talking about an “urban fight” in this case; yet, it is also true that, in Turco’s words, we are facing a conflict between an self-centred and a heterocentred territorialization (Turco, 1988, pp. 144-147) generated in this case by the impossible overlapping of the objectives, which are thought of, promoted and directed from the inside by the residents’ community, and from the outside in the other case. It is no coincidence that the residents appeal as in the text we have quoted, to a “natural” fruition of the public space, which is, first of all, “free”. Another element that should not be underestimated is the use that this kind of “bottom-up” mobilizations makes of instruments such as social networks, which make communication viable and permit a participated Copyright© Nuova Cultura

organization. We can find an example of this with the two Facebook pages “Marina: viabilità” and “Piazzetta San Sepolcro: giocare liberi da gazebo e tavolini”. The first one is defined as an “open group of dialogue and confrontation about living problems in Marina and other historical Cagliari’s neighborhoods. These living problems include road conditions, pedestrian areas, and the use of common spaces”. The latter, we read, “reunites members interested to the protection of San Sepolcro square in Cagliari, which has been destined for years to Marina and Stampace’s children, who can play freely there, and which has been partially occupied by the tables of a bar since 2013 thanks to an indiscriminate concession of the municipality. For this reason, we intend to coordinate activities safeguarding the square and the right of the citizens-children to play”. Aggregating ideas, proposals, contacts, images and contents provided directly by the residents, these two pages represent communication channels that are alternative to official ones, making it possible to catch in real time (and without mediations) the instances and testimonies of city users that not always to find immediate reception on traditional media. Even with all the limits that are related to this form of communication, operations like this one remind us of how the urban landscape is internally animated, and crossed with apprehension and different ideas on what we want our cities to be.

4. Conclusions: the urban landscape between privatization and social practices of a public city For the reasons we have tried to explain, it is difficult for the landscape to be included in the ranks of commons. Its fruition in fact lacks those features that Ostrom assigns to this kind of goods: it would rather seem that it is, for its intrinsic characteristics, closer to public goods than to common-pool resources. There is no doubt that we can heavily modify its visible aspect, and that there are thousands of ways to bring about its death (Dagognet, 1982); yet, as long as the aesthetic, affective, patrimonial and identity appropriation remains non-rival and nonexclusive, the landscape will belong to everyone without being owned by anybody. The problems arise instead from the obstruction of the gaze and the limitations connected with the access to public spaces. Is it not the case that Marina’s inhabitants’ protest against the commercialization of the espace vécu a reminder of the irreducibility of the inhabitant into a consumer, and of the imposItalian Association of Geography Teachers

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sibility of reducing the city to a unique parameter of economic growth? An answer that has been given by the municipal administration, and which can perhaps be interpreted as an attempt to affirm once again the ability of the public to embody the general interest, consists in the approval, in April 2014, of the Regolamento per le occupazioni di suolo pubblico (Guideline for the occupation of public land)6. This document shows us the relational aspect of urban spaces, their quality of being significant, filled with meaning by the multiple social relationships (peaceful or conflictive) that are instilled on the physical and material characteristics of places. The text – which especially takes into consideration the components of the city Centre including Marina and Yenne square (a sort of a liminal space between Marina and Stampace, with a strong commercial vocation owing to the presence of beach umbrellas and gazebos of the overlooking restaurants – starts with an important assumption: the anthropic charge makes “urgent and necessary” the regulation of spaces destined to restoration in the open air, linking directly the “high concentration of eating posts” and “the entity of spaces apt for these uses” present in the area. But, most of all, the Guideline, acknowledging the need to guarantee the exercise of those functions typical of public spaces, the conservation of the identity aspect, the aesthetic coherence of places, and, once again, the residents’ quality of life, forbids the concession of public places in the squares of the neighborhood, Piazza Santo Sepolcro included. The problem remains open, and it is not easy to predict that other fights awaiting the inhabitants of Cagliari’s historic neighborhoods. So we will say, in conclusion, that a city, in order to maintain its public character, needs to maintain both its plurality and the coexistence of practices and social spaces intact (Mazzette, 2013), or, quoting Leibniz, it must guarantee the presence of spaces that do not hamper the assumption of the other’s point of view – “open” spaces, from which it is possible to see the city from different points of 6

More precisely: Regolamento per le occupazioni di suolo pubblico di pertinenza di pubblici esercizi e attività commerciali nel quartiere Marina, nella centrale Piazza Yenne e zone limitrofe nelle more del completamento del piano di settore (deliberazione del Consiglio Comunale No. 19, 8 April 2014). The guidelines were prolonged for the year 2015 with the Delibera 222/2014. The new guideline on street furniture (approved in spring 2016) presents more restrictive measures that provide for stiffer penalties.

view. Their suppression “must seem to us to be suspect of injustice”.

References 1. Antelmi D., “Avventure del linguaggio: beni comuni”, in Turco A. (Ed.), Paesaggio, luogo, ambiente. La configuratività territoriale come bene comune, Milan, Unicopli, 2014, pp. 4573. 2. Arena G. and Iaione C. (Eds.), L’Italia dei beni comuni, Rome, Carocci, 2012. 3. Boggio F., “Cagliari: la cerniera si è rotta”, L’Universo, 2, 2002, pp. 148-162. 4. Cacciari P., Carestiato N. and Passeri D. (Eds.), Viaggio nell’Italia dei beni comuni. Rassegna di gestioni condivise, Naples, Marotta & Cafiero, 2012. 5. Cagliaripad, “Piazza Santo Sepolcro, i tavolini sfrattano i giochi dei bambini. I genitori: ‘La piazza è di tutti’”, 2013, http://www.cagliari pad.it/news.php?page_id=3451. 6. Castiglioni B., Parascandolo F. and Tanca M. (Eds.), Landscape as mediator, landscape as commons. International perspectives on landscape research, Padua, Cleup, 2015. 7. Cattedra R. and Tanca M., “Ambizioni e strumentalizzazioni culturali come risposta alla crisi. Discorsi e metamorfosi urbane a Cagliari”, 2015, http://www.documentigeografici.it/index.php/docugeo/article/view/73/67. 8. Chenet-Faugeras F., “L’invention du paysage urbain”, Romantisme, 83, 1994, pp. 27-38. 9. Comune di Cagliari, “Atlante demografico di Cagliari 2014”, http://www.comune.cagliari. it/resources/cms/documents/AtlanteDemografi co2014_1.pdf. 10. Dagognet F. (Ed.), Mort du paysage? Philosophie et esthetique du paysage: actes du colloque de Lyon, Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 1982. 11. Donadieu P., Sciences du paysage. Entre théories et pratiques, Paris, Lavoisier, 2012. 12. Farinelli F., “The Witz of Landscape and the Astuteness of Representation”, in Buttimer A., Brunn S.D. and Wardenga U. (Eds.), Text and Image: Social Construction of Regional Knowledges, Leipzig, Institut for Landerkunde, 1999, pp. 38-53. 13. Frémont A., Aimez-vous la géographie?, Paris, Flammarion, 2005. 14. Gibson J.J., The ecological approach to visual Italian Association of Geography Teachers

15.

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perception, London, Erlbaum, 1986. Harvey D., “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism”, Geografiska Annaler B, 71, 1, 1989, pp. 3-17. Harvey D., “Neoliberalism and the City”, Studies in Social Justice, 1, 1, 2007, pp. 2-13. Iorio M., “Tra mare e terra: i crocieristi a Cagliari”, in Tanca M. (Ed.), Un lungo viaggio nella geografia umana della Sardegna: studi in onore di Antonio Loi, Bologna, Pàtron, 2014, pp. 175-187. Jessop B., “The Entrepreneurial City: Reimaging Localities, Re-designing Economic Governance, or Re-structuring Capital?”, in Jewson N. and MacGregor S. (Eds.), Realising Cities: New Spatial Divisions and Social Transformation, London, Routledge, 1997, pp. 28-41. Loda M., Aru S. and Cariani D., “La convivenza urbana nello spazio pubblico fiorentino: pratiche sociali e negoziazione della differenza”, Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana, XIII, IV, 2011, pp. 785-799. Mazzette A. (Ed.), Pratiche sociali di città pubblica, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2013. Ostrom E., Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action, Cambridge, Cambridge University press, 1990. Ostrom E., “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems”, American Economic Review, 100, 3, 2010, pp. 641-672. Pratt A.C., “The cultural economy and the global city”, in Taylor P., Derudder B., Hoyler M. and Witlox F. (Eds.), International Handbook of Globalization and World Cities, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2011a, pp. 265-274. Pratt A.C., “The cultural contradictions of the creative city”, City, Culture and Society, 2, 3, 2011b, pp. 123-130. Quaini M., “Per una archeologia dello sguardo topografico”, Casabella, 575-576, 1991, pp. 10-17. Ricoveri G., Nature for sale: the commons versus commodities, London, Pluto Press, 2013. Romano G., Studi sul paesaggio: storia e immagini, Turin, Einaudi, 1991. Secchi B., Prima lezione di urbanistica, Rome, Laterza, 2000. Settis S., Azione popolare: cittadini per il

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bene comune, Turin, Einaudi, 2012. Sgard A., “Le paysage dans l’action publique: du patrimoine au bien commun”, 2010, http://developpementdurable.revues.org/8565. Simmel G., The Philosophy of Money, London and New York, Routledge, 2011. Swyngedouw E., Moulaert F and Rodriguez A., “Neoliberal urbanization in Europe: Large-Scale Urban Development Projects and the New Urban Policy”, Antipode, 34, 3, 2002, pp. 542-577. Tanca M., “Il paesaggio come bene comune. Alla ricerca di ‘buone pratiche’ per l’organizzazione del territorio”, 2014, http://www. ecologiapolitica.org/wordpress/wp-content/ uploads/2014/02/Tanca-Marcello.pdf. Turco A., Verso una teoria geografica della complessità, Milan, Unicopli, 1988. Unione Sarda, “Marina e tavolini: per risolvere il rebus Cagliari chiama un urbanista”, 2013, http://www.castedduonline. it/cagliari/centro-storico/9896/marina-e-tavo lini-per-risolvere-il-rebus-cagliari-chiama-unurbanista.html. Veschambre V., “Apprehender la dimension spatiale des inegalites: l’acces au ‘conservatoire de l’espace’”, in Bret B., Gervais-Lambony P., Hancock C. and Landy F. (Eds.), Justice et injustices spatiales, Nanterre, Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2010, pp. 263-279. von Humboldt A., Views of Nature: or Contemplations on the sublime phenomena of creation, London, H.G. Bohn, 1850. von Leibniz G.W., The monadology and other philosophical writings, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1898. von Leibniz G.W., Political Writings. Translated and edited with an Introduction and notes by Patrick Riley, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Italian Association of Geography Teachers

Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography (J-READING), 1, 5, June, 2016, pp. 89-94 DOI: 10.4458/6964-08

Degrowth as a territorial-landscape project Serge Latouchea a

Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Orsay, France Email: serge.latouche@free.fr Received: November 2015 – Accepted: March 2016

Abstract The landscape, especially in a country like Italy, is today entirely man-made, and is the other face of urban civilisation. We are faced with a paradox: we enjoy a very high competence of landscape architects, urban and ecological planners, and we have a disastrous landscape, that is the result of the crisis of civilization. The fabric of local societies and urban landscapes can be reassembled and preserved only by inserting them in the construction of a degrowth society. As part of promoting a serene society of degrowth, relocalization cannot be only an economic issue. Politics, culture, and the entire way of life must regain their territorial anchoring. The keyword is autonomy, obtained through actions aimed to “re-territorialise”, to re-find a site and re-inhabit it, to organise rural and urban bio-regions. A route of de-industrialization will also be needed. Since the landscape is part of the commons, a policy of degrowth will imply the protection of the landscape as well as the search for the common good. Keywords: Autonomy, Common Goods, Degrowth, Deindustrialization, Reterritorialization

Introduction Today, particularly in a country like Italy, the landscape has been completely humanised. Wild nature no longer exists in the pure state, and everything has been modified either directly or indirectly by human action, in particular by agricultural and industrial economy and urbanisation. Consequently we can summarise by saying that the landscape is the reverse or the other side of urban civilisation. The town is part of the landscape and the landscape can be urban. Above all the city contributes to creating – but increasingly to destroying – the landscape: Copyright© Nuova Cultura

directly, for example, by creating the peripheries or indirectly by means of the creation of motorways, mines or scattered residential areas. If the city is in crisis, for example as Detroit is, the landscape is too, and likewise agriculture. Before modernity no-one spoke of landscape or city planning, but at the most of gardens and architecture. And yet, in the western world, the beauty of landscapes, like that of cities, has been constructed over the centuries – from the Middle Ages to the Baroque age – through the different ways of living and working of men, and at times, also thanks to the good governance of princes or Italian Association of Geography Teachers

Serge Latouche

republics, like those of Sienna and Florence. We find ourselves before a paradox. We enjoy wonderful economic wealth and if we are to believe the statistics, the GDP of our countries has increased by about sixteen times with respect to the pre-industrial period (1860). Furthermore, at the very moment in which the urban and landscape disaster into which today’s world seems to be irremediably sinking, we benefit from a great number of top architects, town planners (even in the field of environmentally friendly homes) and landscapists. This architecture is often very attractive when one considers small units (in particular detached houses or prestigious constructions), but on the whole it is overall very disappointing, since it fails in the goal of making cities and, above all, because it has not managed at global level to avoid the decomposition of the urban fabric, uncontrolled urbanisation of the territory, urban expansion into the landscape, the increase of ugliness of every day contexts and the destruction of the environment, without mentioning the failure to reduce energy consumption and the carbon footprint. The final analysis of the great Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza is one of urban and landscape disaster: “The most serious thing is the devastation of the territory, the failure in the use of the ground as a discipline…we witness the end of an order of things that prefigures something else that we still do not know. And this was undoubtedly inevitable. But, in the short term, the quality is marginal and we find ourselves before a disaster” (Siza, 2003). The urban and landscape disaster that is before us all is the result of a logic that evidently escapes the architects, town planners and landscapists who, in an attempt to remedy this, have been caught up in this and are the accomplices of the disaster. “Today – writes Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio, everything has been poisoned by duplicity, with no drive being pure and direct. It is in this way that the countryside has become landscape’, or the representation of itself” (Baudrillard, 2004, p. 67). In Europe today it is the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and real estate speculation that make, and above all unmake, the rural landscape as much as the urban one. Nor are the national protection measures, like the Italian Code of Cultural and Landscape Heritage, or the European ones like Copyright© Nuova Cultura

the European Landscape Convention, or the excellent work of landscapists like Gilles Clément able to put a stop to the catastrophe: they can only limit it. The present crisis, which could slow down or even stop the process, and thus represent the opportunity for a reversal of trend, further aggravates the disaster, letting fields go to rack and ruin, and reducing the already poor resources allocated for the financing of the safeguard of protected areas and the environment. In order to understand the territorial and landscape approach of degrowth it is important to begin to understand in what way the society of growth generates territorial disaster, to then go on to the observation of the landscape and town planning implications of the degrowth project.

2. The territorial and landscape disaster of the growth society The landscape disaster that is before us all is the consequence of logics that, quite obviously, escape the landscapists, town-planners and, in an ever increasing manner, the very protection bodies themselves. And yet, these bodies become the accomplices of the disaster at the same time that they attempt to seek to remedy the damage. We are before a form of schizophrenia. We still live in productivist cities, devised and organised around vehicles and in shapes that are claimed to be rational. It suffices to think of Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse with its segregation of spaces, industrial areas and lifeless residential quarters (Cochet, 2009, p. 247). In his Manifesto del Movimento futurista of 1909, Marinetti is the forerunner of the Le Corbusier project of razing Paris to the ground and wants to destroy Venice in the name of progress: “Deviate il corso dei canali per inondare i musei! [...] Prendete picconi e martelli! Minate le fondamenta delle venerande città!”. Ceausescu realised a similar project in Bucharest, and Pompidou died too soon to carry through the plan for a motorway to cross the capital of France; in the meantime, Brussels has become an example of the destruction jointly

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carried out by speculation and modernisation. We have even invented the verb “bruxelliser”. We can speak of a destruction of cities in times of peace (Michea, 1999) – with the fragmentation of historical centres and the unbridled real estate speculation that drives the middle and lower tiers of the population towards the outskirts, the proliferation of shopping malls, the spread of residential areas, the emergency of the towers, the gutting aimed at the construction of motorways and the multiplication of “nonplaces”, stations, airports, hypermarkets (see the analysis by Marc Augé and Marco Revelli), and congested traffic. All this contributes to the wearing down of the territory, with disastrous effects on the landscape. This is one of the symptoms of a greater crisis generated by what I would better define as “hyper-modernity”, rather than “post-modernity”. Following the industrialisation of the 19th century, medieval and Baroque towns were destroyed by modernity, giving rise to problems and enormous hardship as described in the novels of Dickens, Zola and Verga. Nevertheless, at that time a certain balance was still respected or re-established by means of the construction of the grands boulevards (the example of Haussmann’s Paris is emblematic of this). And even when the relationship of respect with the landscape was not maintained (it suffices to think of the coal and iron mines and other industrial disasters), the catastrophe was still partially limited by the fact that humanity did not surpass two billion in number and that industrialisation only concerned a few countries. This relative equilibrium conferred another just as relative an equilibrium to the urban fabric between the society, with its resilient traditional morals (work ethics, sense of duty of honour and honesty), its institutions (army, education, the fine arts) and the capitalist economics of unlimited gain. The disintegration of this equilibrium was consumed by what we call “globalisation” or “internationalisation”, which symbolically begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It is not the spread of exchanges or finance at planetary level that is new (this had existed at least since 1492), it is the inverse, the commodification and financialisation of the world. With the formula introduced in 1986 by Ronald Regan and Margaret Copyright© Nuova Cultura

Thatcher, called “the three Ds” (deregulation, desupervision, and de-facto decriminalization), the “pancommodification” of the world literally takes place. Everything becomes the subject of trafficking, even the human body, blood and genes. It goes from a society with market to a society of market, from a society with growth to a society of growth, which can be defined as a society dominated by a growth economy and which tends to be sucked up by this economic model. Growth for growth’s sake thus becomes the main aim in life, if not the only one. The cancer of “Growth” with the capital letter is not limited to destroying cities: it tears apart the territory, corrodes the sense of place and unravels the social fabric. It is the triumph of ugliness. Back in 1972, Bernard Charbonneau, the French ecologist and forerunner of degrowth, had denounced the negative consequences of productivism on the landscape and the environment in his illustrated book La fin du paysage (Charbonneau, 1972). There is the “explosion of the urban”, according to the expression coined by Tiziana Villani (2010). This is a process of artificialisation of life. Man claims to recreate the world better than God and nature. GM crops, nanotechnologies, cloning, industrial fish farming etc. are an example of this. The culmination of this would be the cyborg, the artificial man. Nowadays the most evident outcome of all this is the transformation of the real world, the one in which we are condemned to live in the midst of rubbish dumps and waste. The bankruptcy of Dubai and its unoccupied 800 metre tower represents a symbol of the failure of the American dream and its urbanism. The productivist city belongs to the past, but the destruction of the world that it has generated follows on. According to Alberto Magnaghi: “La via senza ritorno della deterritorializzazione è stata aperta con la recinzione dei beni comuni, con la privatizzazione e progressiva mercificazione dei beni comuni naturali (la terra, per cominciare, poi l’acqua, l’aria, le risorse di energia naturale, le foreste, i fiumi, i laghi, i mari, etc.) e con quella dei beni comuni territoriali (le città e le infrastrutture storiche, i sistemi agro-forestali, i paesaggi, le opere idrauliche, l’igiene, i porti, gli impianti per la produzione di energia)”. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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And he adds: “La nostra civiltà non produce paesaggio, e ancor meno produce i luoghi dei quali il paesaggio sarebbe espressione. Essa si occupa di altro, e contribuisce anzi a distruggere i luoghi lasciati in eredità dalla storia. [...] Con i paradigmi economici propri dello sviluppo, la civiltà contemporanea ha prodotto principalmente effetti distruttivi del paesaggio e dell’ambiente, distruzione dei luoghi, ha prodotto l’aggressione degli elementi che sul lungo periodo strutturano l’identità di una regione, e il degrado attuale della nostra urbanizzazione diffusa post-urbana. [...] Con il territorio sono stati sepolti: il paesaggio, il luogo, la città, la campagna. In cambio abbiamo i non-luoghi, le discariche e le bidonville” (Magnaghi, 2014, pp. 36-47).

In 1977, the American architect Charles Jencks came (rather hastily) to the following conclusion: “Modern architecture died in Saint Louis, Missouri, on 15 July 1972 at 3.32 pm more or less), when the sadly Pruitt-Igoe notorious housing development programme, and more precisely some of its imposing high-rise blocks received their deathblow and were blown up with dynamite” (Rey, 2014, p. 11). This entrance into post-modernity, despite a few positive experiences, has unfortunately not changed much at all. Before the present economic-financial crisis we already had a systemic crisis of the territorial-urban-landscape complex. This crisis is both political and societal and therefore the remedy must be so too. This is the reason why the degrowth project must necessarily go through a refounding of policy, starting with the polis and its relationship with nature. The urban/landscape project is necessarily second to the societal organisation project. The urban “disaster” is not due to a failure of architects and landscapists, but to a crisis of civilisation. The local and urban fabric cannot be recomposed and the landscapes preserved or reconstructed except through the realisation of a degrowth society.

3. The degrowth project and its urban and landscape implications In order to outline what the town-planning, architecture and landscape could be in a degrowth society, the sense of the project must be defined and the urbanistic and landscape implications be seen. First of all, as a rallying cry degrowth insists on the need to abandon the plan of development for development’s sake, growth for growth’s sake. It is clearly not the caricaturing reverse of such a senseless project, which would consist in proposing degrowth for degrowth. In particular, degrowth is not negative growth. It is obvious that a simple slowing down of growth drives our societies into a vortex of unemployment, and the abandoning of those social welfare, cultural and environmental support programmes that guarantee a minimum level of quality of life. We can imagine the catastrophe that would be produced by a negative growth rate! The rallying call of degrowth has above all the aim of stressing the urgent need to abandon the senseless growth project as an end in itself. We should be speaking of a-growth (just as we speak of atheism) rather than degrowth. To be precise, it is a question of the abandoning of a faith and a religion: that of economy. The problem of cities and territory that have been destroyed and which must be entirely rethought has to l be seen in the wider context of a world that has been torn apart by the loss of references and the crisis of the localised place. The urban disaster is accompanied by the rural disaster and the destruction of the landscape. However, in the viewpoint of the construction of a serene degrowth society, relocalisation is not simply economic: politics, culture, the sense of life must find their territorial anchorage. The keyword is autonomy. What is certain is that today’s protection is not enough. Most of the time it is a question of lists of good intentions denouncing the symptoms without tackling the causes. The first article of the European Landscape Convention states as follows: “ ‘Landscape’ means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors”. And Article 5 states: “an essential component of people’s surroundings, Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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an expression of the diversity of their shared cultural and natural heritage, and a foundation of their identity”. The problem is that in reality all this does not result in the protection of such component. The distinction made by UNESCO between different examples of cultural heritage, aimed at justifying the protection of some areas and the exclusion of others is perverse, since, as stated by Magnaghi, if we take the reasoning to its extreme consequences, the area recognised as being protected is so starting from a difficult procedure that has the goal of taking away some areas of the territory from development (achieving the remarkable level of 18% of the European territory). From a certain point of view, such areas undoubtedly represent the patrimony that today permits us to experiment new models of human settlement based on the quality of life, and thus renegotiate such an individual thinking of the territory. Nevertheless, such procedure was set up with the intention of defending those areas of the territory of natural and/or cultural value which were saved from the eco-catastrophic rules of development that govern the rest of the area, that is 82% of the European territory, in which most of the population happens to live (Magnaghi, 2014, p. 19). This same extension of the conversion/innovation binomial to the whole territory is proposed both in the European Landscape Convention (focussed on the lifestyle of the populations), and in the Italian Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape (which proposes landscape projects concerning the regional territory in its entirety). It is easy to understand how fragile such protection is, especially in times of economic crisis. Furthermore, it is a question of containing the disaster by attacking the symptoms, while, on the contrary, degrowth sets out to fight the causes. Relocalisation therefore has a central position in the actual utopia of serene degrowth and deviates almost immediately into political programmes. However a bad localism also exists. As Magnaghi stresses, it happens that local economic sectors carry out rapacious localism: “Conoscendo bene l’anima del luogo, utilizzano le risorse socio-territoriali fino all’esaurimento del patrimonio (umano, territoriale, ambientale), per infine delocalizzare la produzione lasciando dietro di sé il degrado” (Magnaghi, Copyright© Nuova Cultura

2014, p. 20). Instead, the territory must first of all belong to those that take care of it. In this sense the theory of degrowth seems to renew the old formula of the ecologists: “think globally, act locally”. To relocalise the economy and life is a sine qua non condition of sustainability. If the degrowth utopia implies a global thinking, today it can be realised only by speaking of territories. This is riterritorializzare (according to Alberto Magnaghi’s expression, 2003), to rediscover a site and reinhabit it. “Si deve cambiare radicalmente la visione del problema per passare dalla terra come contesto, spazio topografico, supporto tecnico omologato della città-fabbrica fordista, dalla ‘macchina per abitare’ lecorbusiana e dalla città digitale dell’informazione, al territorio come soggetto, prodotto umano vivente costituito di luoghi dotati di personalità, secondo la definizione che fu di Vidal de la Blache” (1908) (Magnaghi, 2014, p. 14).

The territory should be considered as an immense work of living art, produced and preserved in time by the populations inhabiting it. In this case it will be a common good, since it represents the essential environment for the material reproduction of human life and the establishment of socio-cultural relations and public life. One can also dream of creating urban bioregions. The bioregion or ecoregion can be defined as a coherent spatial entity which conveys a geographical, social and historical reality. This could be rural or urban – a distinction that is unfortunately endangered. The urban bioregion, made up of a complex set of local territorial systems and having a strong ecological self-sustainability capacity, has the aim of reducing “external diseconomies” and energy consumption. A reconversion will be necessary, along with a certain degree of deindustrialisation. The result of this deindustrialisation, achieved through sophisticated but eco-friendly equipment, would be the proof that it is possible to produce diversely. If even the self-produced part were

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not total, it would be important nonetheless (Granstedt, 2007)1.

4. Conclusion While awaiting the necessary change in world “governance” and the coming to power of national or regional governments that have endorsed their objection to growth, numerous local players are embarking upon the fertile road of the degrowth utopia. While the local project has obvious limitations, we do not underestimate the possibility of an evolution in the policies in this field. The following are worthy of mention: the Network of the new municipality, the network of the slow cities, the post-carbon cities, the various experiences of the virtual cities. The movement of the transition towns born in Ireland (in Kinsale, near Cork) and which flourished in England (in Totnes), is perhaps the form of construction “from the bottom” that is closest to a degrowth society. These cities, according to network map, primarily aim at energy selfsufficiency in view of the end of fossil fuels and, more generally, at resilience; it meamings the capacity to face the challenges of the ecological crisis2. Considering that the landscape is an integral part of the common good (the commons), coherently with a policy of degrowth the protection of the landscape must be part of the search for the common good.

3. Gorz A., “Crise mondiale, décroissance et sortie du capitalisme”, Entropia, 2, 2007, pp. 51-60. 4. Granstedt I., “Du chômage à l’autonomie conviviale”, Lyon, A plus d’un titre éditions, Coll. La ligne d’horizon, 2007. 5. Hopkins R., The Transition handbook. From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, Foxhole, Dartington, Totnes, Green Books Ltd, 2008. 6. Magnaghi A., Le projet local, Sprimont, Mardaga, 2003. 7. Magnaghi A., La biorégion urbaine. Petit traité sur le territoire bien commun, Paris, Eterotopia, France/rhizone, 2014. 8. Michea J.-C., L’enseignement de l’ignorance et ses conditions modernes, Castelnau-le-lez, Micro-Climats, 1999. 9. Rey O., Une question de taille, Paris, Stock, 2014. 10. Siza A., “Intervista con Dominique Machabert”, Techniques et Architecture, 2003. 11. Villani T., “La décroissance à l’âge de la révolution urbaine: écologie politique et hyperpolis”, Entropia, 8, 2010.

References 1. Baudrillard J., Le pacte de lucidité ou l’intelligence du mal, Paris, Galilée, 2004. 2. Charbonneau B., La fin du paysage, Paris, Anthropos, 1972.

At the end of his life André Gorz developed similar ideas (2007). 2 The concept is borrowed from physics and scientific ecology and can be defined as the qualitative permanence of the network of interactions of an ecosystem or, more generally, as the capacity of a system to absorb disruption and reorganise itself essentially preserving its own functions, structure, identity and retroactions. See Hopkins, 2008. Copyright© Nuova Cultura

Italian Association of Geography Teachers

MAPPING SOCIETIES Edited by Edoardo Boria

Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography (J-READING), 1, 5, June, 2016, pp. 97-102 DOI: 10.4458/6964-09

A matter of ethics and cartography. The map of the ambassador and the map of the journalist Edoardo Boriaa a

Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy Email: edoardo.boria@uniroma1.it Received: April 2016 – Accepted: May 2016

Abstract Instead of being a neutral technical product as is generally believed, geographical maps are the subjective representations of a precise vision of spaces and the holders of performative power. This article uses the example of maps that give different interpretations of the political situation in the Crimea, disputed between Russia and Ukraine, in order to reflect on the plurality of possible cartographies and the reasons giving rise to them. The choices of the two real protagonists of the incident being described, an ambassador and a journalist, express two different ways of interpreting maps. Continually disputed between those wanting it for the synthetic description and those using it for an analytical interpretation and those evaluating it for its legal value, maps are thus epistemologically uncertain and ethically delicate objects. Keywords: Crimea, Ethics, Geopolitical Maps, Narratives, Performative Power

1. Introduction The reality perceived through the senses is always changing and uncertain. This is the essence of the imaginary journey that leads Parmenides to the home of the Goddess of Justice (Dike), who shows him the existence of two paths of knowledge: one of truth (aletheia, άλήθεια) having reason as its source, while that of opinion (doxa, δόξα) has the senses as its source and is always illusory and misleading. Two different pathways of knowledge are also present in the event that I am taking cue from in order to reflect on the ethics of cartography and on the ambiguities that the traditional inter-

pretation of geographical maps still generates, according to which it is a neutral technical instrument and not a partial and subjective cultural product.

2. Two irreconcilable narratives The event is the following: on December 30th, 2015 on the website of the Italian journal of geopolitics Limes a map was published showing the Crimea with the same colour as Russia, a solution which in the language of political cartography indicates sovereignty (Figure 1).

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Figure 1. Detail of a map that appeared on the website of the journal Limes on December 30th, 2015. Source: http://www.limesonline.com/perche-limes-rappresenta-la-crimea-sotto-la-sovranita-della-russia/88930.

The representation is different from the political maps usually found in circulation, where instead the Crimea has the same colour as the Ukraine, a state whose sovereignty is almost unanimously recognised by the international community1. The Limes representation was not the only cartographic representation that made the Crimea part of Russia. Prior to this the very popular Google Maps had been diplomatic, if not ambiguous and opportunist: in its Russian version the Crimea was Russian and in the Ukrainian one it was Ukrainian, for all the others the sovereignty seemed rather undefined. Also other protagonists of cartography on the web such as OpenStreetMap and Bing Maps had adopted solutions of convenience (https://hitech.mail.ru/news/new-krym-maps/).

In the days following the deposition of the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich in February 2014, an insurrection organised by Russia took control of the Crimea, putting a pro-Russian government in charge. A successive and controversial referendum a few weeks later decreed the annexation of the Crimea to Russia. Protests by the Ukrainian government and most of the international community followed, that accused Russia of having violated the territorial integrity of the Ukraine. Copyright© Nuova Cultura

In perfect coincidence with the publication of Limes, again on December 30th, 2015 the Russian branch of Coca Cola, on the occasion of the publicity campaign for the New Year, published a Christmas representation of Russia on the most diffused Russian social network (Vkontakte) where the Crimea did not appear (Figure 2). The protests by users led the multinational to make an immediate correction. In publishing the correct map (correct for some but not for others, obviously) Coca Cola complied with the solution already adopted previously by their rival Pepsi Cola and made an official apology: “Dear community members! We sincerely apologize for the situation. The map has been fixed. We hope for your understanding” (Figure 3). Immediate new protests from the Ukraine this time made quite a stir. The far right leader Oleh Tjahnybok exploited the incident, asking for the boycotting of Coca Cola in his country (http://ria.ru/world/20160105/1355039648.html).

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Figure 2. Bring in the New Year with Coca Cola (first version). Source: http://sputniknews.com/russia/20160105/1032723513/coca-cola-map-russia-crimea.html #ixzz45WP1Gi9g.

Figure 3. Bring in the New Year with Coca Cola (second version). Source: http://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/cocacola-made-russia-very-angry-and-started-a-boycott-inukraine-with-this-map--bJ1mPv8xnx.

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Other similar incidents have become more and more frequent in the last months. In listing them, the Spanish daily newspaper La Vanguardia (January 15th, 2016, p. 12) also cites the case of Limes, which was far from being over with the publication of the map but had a particularly meaningful follow-up. In fact the editorial initiative fuelled the diplomatic protests of the Ukrainian ambassador in Italy who, just as the ambassador in France had done a few months beforehand with regard to the 2016 edition of the Larousse atlas, publically expressed his protest by signing a letter sent to the editorial staff of the journal and diffused by the Facebook profile of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry on January 9th, 20162. The editor of the journal immediately replied to the ambassador in no uncertain terms, stating the reasons for his choice3. The news of the controversy spread thanks to numerous news releases and went on in the following weeks with other official declarations from the embassy, to which the 2

This is the text that the public could read on Facebook, where the Italian version was preceded by that in Ukrainian: “In reference to the publication on the site of the journal ‘Limes’ of the map of the Russian Federation including the Crimea, the Ambassador of the Ukraine in Italy E. Perelygin has made an appeal to the Editorial staff of the Italian journal of geopolitics to change the map of Russia in conformity with the internationally recognised frontiers of the Russian Federation. Therefore, continues the Ambassador to the editorial staff, “I would like to consider such omission a merely technical error and not a provocation that would represent a challenge directed at the territorial integrity of the Ukraine, completely ignoring the consolidated position of the European Union and the UN with regard to the non-recognition of the occupation of the Crimea by the Russian Federation” (http://italy.mfa.gov.ua/it/press-center/news/43704karta-ukrajini-u-vidanni-limes-maje-buti-privedenau-vidpovidnisty-do-norm-mizhnarodnogo-prava). 3 In his reply the editor wrote: “Dear Mr. Ambassador, in relation to the public appeal you kindly made to me, I would like to point out that the map to which you refer reflects the actual reality. When the Crimea with Sebastopol returns to actual Ukrainian sovereignty, we shall do everything to produce a map representing such reality. I am certain that you will agree with me that for a journal of geopolitics to neglect the reality of the situation would be a technical error” (http://www. limesonline.com/perche-limes-rappresenta-la-crimeasotto-la-sovranita-della-russia/88930). Copyright© Nuova Cultura

journal replied by informing all its thousands of readers of the incident in the January 2016 issue of the paper edition. The verbal crossfire triggered reactions over the web which took the form of hundreds of comments posted on the two sites. Some contested that fact that the map “legitimised an inacceptable abuse of power” and others recognised the limitations of the representation: “A map is evidently less flexible than politics” (comments to be found at http://www. limesonline.com/perche-limes-rappresenta-lacrimea-sotto-la-sovranita-della-russia/88930 and https://www.facebook.com/limesonline). The controversy rebounded on other websites and social media. Obviously the Russians were the most grateful to the journal, as is shown by the thousands of hits on the Russian site Sputnik which reported the news (Figure 4). Among the many comments there those who in their defence of the journal addressed the ambassador and all those who were of his same same opinion with an emblematic sentence: “Get it into your heads, Limes is not De Agostini”4. Even if perhaps unaware of this, the Author had underlined a very important point: the existence of a plurality of cartographic discourses, all legitimated by one specific point of view and thus all irremediably subjective. There is the ambassador’s discourse, which is one of institutional, formal and abstract cartography, and there is the journalist’s, which looking at the actual level of political reality interprets it as being closer to reality.

3. The moral of this story The incident raises a number of questions: why didn’t Limes correct its map while Coca Cola did, as well as apologising for the mistake which for many is not a mistake? But, above all, why didn’t the Ukrainian ambassador intervene with just as much formality when articles appeared in Limes or other media outlets explaining Russia’s reasons and instead did so at the moment in which a map appeared in the journal? 4 The Istituto Geografico De Agostini is an historic Italian cartographic company with a solid reputation for a scientifically rigorous production and in line with the official political viewpoints.

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Figure 4. Italian Publication Finally Understands Crimea is Part of Russia. Source: http://sputniknews.com/world/20160109/1032884477/italian-magazine-crimea.html.

The answer to the first question is simple: the Coca Cola map was aimed at promoting the company brand and more inclined to meeting the political-geographic tastes of the customers of the rich Russian market while the Limes one accompanied a geopolitical analysis carried out autonomously by political power addressing a by and large neutral public like the Italian one. Equally simple is basically the answer to the second question too, which refers to the difference between a written article and a map. The official status of the map assigns an authoritative value to it as if it were a notary of the territory; a cadastral map, for example, proves the ownership of a piece of land. In this way, for the ambassador the Limes map risks certifying the official Russian possession of the Crimea. It is just as simple to explain why the journalist used it (and self-produced it): because for him the map has no authoritative value but an informative and interpretative one; since it must be functional in the analysis of the real ongoing dynamics, it tends to record the actual situation, and if such situation has not (yet) been officially recognised this matters very little.

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The point of the incomprehension is thus clear: two different concepts of the value of the map, with the ambassador terrorised by seeing a situation taking shape (even if only in the cartographic symbols) that the state that he represents refuses; the journalist on his part, anxious to explain the details of the incident to his readers. The latter refuses all charges because he does not feel that he has any responsibility, and it is evident that his maps do not have the power to officially decree a political situation. But are we really sure that his map is irrelevant in the interpretation of the political reality? Here comes into play the question of the performative value of cartography, so powerful as to overturn the relations of performative power on the land and the one proposed by maps, generally wrongly considered in favour of the former. Traditionally, maps are seen for their descriptive function: a visual device that shows the territorial distribution of a given element or phenomenon. Instead, they go well beyond this, not only for their capacity to reveal, as

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demonstrated by many Authors5, as above all for their marked ability to construct a reality and stimulate actions that are coherent with such construction, that is, actions that intervene on the territory to adapt it to what is foreseen by the map (Dematteis, 1985, pp. 95-103; Jacob, 1992, pp. 48-52, 350-352 and 384-386; Wood, 1992; Farinelli, 1992, pp. 65-70; Ó’Tuathail, 1996, p. 31; Casti, 1998, pp. 22-34; Minca and Białasiewicz, 2004, pp. 31-48; Dell’Agnese, 2005, pp. 27-29; Besse, 2008). In this viewpoint, the map is a formidable instrument of ontological production of reality, an extremely efficient agent for the construction of places. As the power of visual imagination contributes considerably to creating the conditions of intelligibility of reality by the thinking subject, it can be deduced that the by-product of reality is not the map but exactly the opposite. By applying these considerations to our case of the Crimea, it seems that the performative potential of the map is perfectly clear to the ambassador, while the journalist appears to (or pretends to) underestimate it: the Limes map does not prove the Russian annexation of the Crimea but promotes its acceptance with the public.

4. 5. 6.

10.

in Laboulais I. (Ed.), Les usages des cartes, Strasbourg, Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2008, pp. 19-32. Casti E., L’ordine del mondo e la sua rappresentazione. Semiosi cartografica e autoreferenza, Milan, Unicopli, 1998. Dell’Agnese E., Geografia politica critica, Milan, Guerini, 2005. Dematteis G., Le metafore della Terra, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1985. Farinelli F., I segni del mondo: immagine cartografica e discorso geografico in età moderna, Scandicci, La Nuova Italia, 1992. Jacob C., L’Empire des cartes. Approche théorique de la cartographie à travers l’histoire, Paris, Albin Michel, 1992. Minca C. and Białasiewicz L., Spazio e Politica. Riflessioni di geografia critica, Padua, Cedam, 2004. Ó’Tuathail G., Critical Geopolitics: the Politics of Writing Global Space, London, Routledge, 1996. Wood D., “How Maps Work”, Cartographica, 29, 3 and 4, 1992, pp. 66-74.

While accounting for the material and immaterial factors of international relations, at the same time geopolitical maps powerfully stimulate the senses and emotions, ending up creating narrations of international politics that affect its understanding and in the long run can have repercussions on concrete reality.

References 1. Alpers S., “The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art”, in Alpers S., The Art of Describing. Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp. 119-168. 2. Besse J.M., “Cartographie et pensée visuelle. Réflexions sur la schématisation graphique”, 5

For example Svetlana Alpers (“Maps enable us to see things that are otherwise invisible”; 1983, p. 195) and Christian Jacob (“Maps invite us to see and think about what cannot be seen or thought when observing the real space”; 1992, p. 50; both translated from the Italian editions). Copyright© Nuova Cultura

Italian Association of Geography Teachers

GEOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND (PRACTICAL) CONSIDERATIONS

Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography (J-READING), 1, 5, June, 2016, pp. 105-112 DOI: 10.4458/6964-10

Geography in Italian Licei Gino De Vecchisa a

Dipartimento di Scienze documentarie, linguistico-filologiche e geografiche, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy Email: gino.devecchis@uniroma1.it Received: February 2016 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Accepted: March 2016

Abstract Following a rapid description of the evolution of the teaching of geography in Italian secondary schools from the Unification of Italy to the end of the nineteenth century, the article focusses on the latest change, brought about with the Gelmini reform, which entered into force with the 2010 -2011 school year. In particular, the relationships between history and geography are analysed (two subjects penalised by the new structure and which cannot express all their potential to their best) and some possible solutions are envisaged. Keywords: Curriculum, History and Geography, Italy, Liceo

1. The Premises The unification of the Kingdom of Italy (1859-1861), which came about in an atmosphere influenced by positivist philosophical thought, finds its first concrete expression with regard to education in 1859 with the Casati Act (from the name of the Education Minister Gabrio Casati). This law mandated the first directives of Italian school policy, including the introduction of a Liceo course in secondary schools: the Ginnasio-Liceo lasting 8 years in all, made up of a Ginnasio course of 5 years and a Liceo one of 3. In this study cycle the humanistic subjects drawing from the classical tradition of the schools of grammar, rhetoric and philosophy prevail over the others (De Vecchis, 1999, pp. 171-173). The structure of this course was a foundation for the following big reform that took place in CopyrightÂŠ Nuova Cultura

1923, immediately after the advent of the Fascist regime and which was known as the Gentile reform (from the name of the Education Minister Giovanni Gentile, a philosopher from the idealist school of thought). The reform, which was the outcome of a coherent cultural and political design regarding the whole school, from junior school to university1, left significant changes which are still in part to be found in the upper secondary school even now, although in very different economic-political and socio-cultural frameworks. At the cultural level the Gentile reform made an attempt to affirm the unity of knowledge, with the prerequisite that knowledge par excellence be represented by the classical-humanistic one 1

With the Gentile Reform, other Liceo courses were introduced, like the Scientific and Artistic ones. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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(classical and modern literature, philosophy, history); not by chance was it that the humanistic studies course (based on the classical languages) was given a broad historical-philosophical slant. Giovanni Gentile stated: “My aim is to concentrate the function of the Middle school in the Classical School, which by way of it national and educational value, will have a clear preeminence over the other schools aimed at the education of the spirit of the pupils. Hence the need to give greater importance to the study of classical languages, history and philosophy” (Gentile, 1932, p. 49). The idealist philosophical thought professed by Giovanni Gentile, with the clear distinction between humanistic and scientific culture, has the actual effect of unbalancing the link between the various school subjects; for geography, which is the “linking” subject par excellence, this cultural and didactic choice generated deeply negative consequences. It is either absorbed (but in a completely marginal position) into the humanistic sector, or it is “relegated” among the technical-scientific subjects (even here collocated to a secondary position with respect to the sciences). There is the clear intention to give a minor role to a subject that is considered little relevant in the education of the pupils’ spirit in the Licei. It must be highlighted how this consideration goes against what the influential American philosopher and pedagogue John Dewey declared in the same years, when he saw the strength of geography in its very capacity to investigate natural facts and social events in an integrated manner, thus generating educational values and concrete skills applicable to social and political issues (Dewey, 1916, 1927). In this way the subject is doubly penalised and this state of affairs is never completely overcome by successive reforms, which until today have continued to penalise geography in the Italian school system: the lack of recognition of its educational potential and the fact that it was taught by teachers who as a result of their training, did not truly realise its pedagogical value and often did not even know its theoretical-methodological bases. During the X Italian Geographical Congress held in Milan in 1927, Carlo Errera wrote: “In the high schools the teaching of geography is entrusted to the teacher of natural sciences and Copyright© Nuova Cultura

chemistry following the innovations of the Gentile reform, who often coming from the university science faculty has an all but virtually nil preparation in geography […]. Therefore, very often it happens that the natural sciences teacher considers geography as a bothersome burden that they had better try to lighten as much as possible, to such an extent that in certain cases it is reduced to nothing. It should come as no surprise therefore that one quite often comes across young people leaving the Italian Licei with such an ignorance of the simplest features of Italy and the world that would not be found in children just leaving junior school” (Errera, 1927, p. 214).

2. A long period of stagnation and experimentation After the reform introduced by the Minister Gentile, the structure of the Liceo courses incredibly remained almost unchanged until the 2010-2011 academic year; incredibly because this extremely long period was marked – as mentioned before – by radical changes. The numerous innovations introduced at various stages in the first segments of education and above all the establishment of the compulsory single Middle school (in 1962) should have led to a considerable change in the upper one that was necessary to avoid the break in didactic continuity between the two school cycles, with its negative effects on teaching. In particular the arrival of the single Middle school took away the first three years of its specific syllabus from the Ginnasio course, substituted by the Middle school triennial. The five-year Liceo course (Ginnasio-Liceo) was thus composed of the two remaining classes (IV and V) of the Ginnasio (with the subjects already taught of Italian, Latin, Greek, foreign language, history, geography and mathematics) and by the three-year Liceo course (with the “all-time” subjects of Italian literature, Latin and Greek, history, philosophy, history of art, as well as natural sciences, mathematics and physics). However for geography this change was not limited just to the form but directly affected the contents, which lost the linearity which they had in the five-year Ginnasio syllabus, following a Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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geographical teaching trend of a mainly regional type:    

I Ginnasio: general geography; II Ginnasio: Italy; III Ginnasio: Europe; IV Ginnasio: Asia and Africa;



V Ginnasio: America, Oceania, Polar Regions. In fact, with the various reforms in the Middle school, the contents were structured differently (I Middle school: Italy; II Middle School: Europe; III Middle School: Continents outside Europe), while they were the same in the IV and V Ginnasio, resulting in useless repetition, between III Middle School and the two years of Ginnasio. The latter had the following – and certainly unexciting – syllabus to be distributed over two hours weekly: “Pursuing and completing the investigations already carried out in the lower years, the teacher will lead the pupils on new journeys and discoveries in the non-European continents (Asia and Africa in IV Class; America, Oceania, polar regions in V Class), showing by the study of accounts of journeys the physical configuration, the original conditions of life and civilisations, the progressive adaptation and the transformation and the expansion of the European civilisation in new countries, the economic, political, cultural relations, similarities and comparisons”. As far as concerns the Scientific Liceo, the geography situation was even more serious, insofar that the Education ministry syllabuses made a further drastic reduction, simply foreseeing: “For geography the syllabuses of the IV and V classes of the Ginnasio will be condensed into one year” It must be added that in other Licei (the Artistic Liceo for example) geography was completely absent. In order to give a complete picture of the situation it must be stressed that radical changes were greatly needed, so much so that before the 2010-2011 school year there were many attempts to reform the upper secondary school, but they all failed miserably, some even when they had almost reached the final goal 2. As a fall 2

It would be arduous, and all in all of no use for the purposes of this article, to list the causes of the many failures. It is important just to remember the hardship

back to get out of this worrying state of paralysis, a number of experiments were set up, which gradually modified the old courses, even if this phenomenon was more evident in the Technical and Professional Schools than in the Licei. Nevertheless, the results of the experiments, which were made in a disorganised way and without a real structured programme, did not manage to satisfy the needs required by a worthwhile learning-teaching process.

3. The Liceo Reform As mentioned above, the Gelmini reform (from the name of the Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini) entered into force in the 2010-2011 school year, and concerned the whole grade II secondary school (both Licei and Technical and Professional Schools). As a whole this reform (National guidelines for Licei) foresaw such heavy penalisations for geography that it provoked a lively response from the geographers’ community and first and foremost by the Italian Association of Geography Teachers, who in January 2010 made an appeal endorsed by all the Italian geographical associations, in favour of an adequate presence of geography on the timetable. The appeal (entitled “At school without geography”), even though not achieving actual important results, at least with respect to the timetable structure foreseen by the reform, was hugely successful in the number and quality of consensuses. In fact in a very short time it had 30,000 subscriptions, among whom many rectors, headmasters, teachers and journalists. Support also came from abroad from almost 70 foreign countries, distributed equally over all the areas of the world, with the exception of Africa and Central Asia, probably owing to the difficulty of spreading the message (Marta and Morri, 2011, pp. 81-87). With the Gelmini reform, history and geography are incorporated in the first biennium of the Licei in a single number of total hours with only one overall assessment, even though remaining distinct in the wording (history and geography). Nevertheless, they undergo a in breaking acknowledged interests and the instability of a number of governments, whose fall brought about the deterioration of the reform itself. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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considerable reduction from 4 hours (2 for history and 2 for geography) to 3 hours weekly. Six types of Liceo were affected by this (Artistic, Linguistic, Musical and Choral song and dance, Scientific, Human Sciences), all having the same number of hours and the same syllabus. For geography there was no retrieval – which had been hoped for – as the timetable in the triennium remained unchanged and did not foresee the teaching of this subject. The redimensioning in the Licei was felt heavily as it affected a subject that was already reduced to minimum terms (two hours and only in the first biennium). This is also contradictory with respect to what is stated in the PECUP (Educational, cultural and professional profile of Licei), according to which geography should have an important role in the historicalhumanistic area3 for the acquisition of transversal skills. This important reform document in fact states that upon completion of the course of each Liceo pupils must: - Use methods (spatial perspective, manenvironment relations, regional synthesis), concepts (territory, region, localisation, scale, spatial diffusion, mobility, relationship, sense of place…) and instruments (maps, geographical information systems, images, statistical data, subjective sources) of geography for the interpretation of historical processes and the analysis of contemporary society. - Know, with reference to events, geographical contexts and the most important figures, the history of Italy within the European and international context, from ancient times to modern day.

3.1 History and geography in the Liceo reform The institutionalised combination of history and geography in the Licei is something new in the Gelmini reform (even if the connections 3

The Liceo culture makes it possible to make an indepth study of and develop knowledge and skills, gain competences and acquire tools in the methodological, logic-reasoning, linguistic and communication, historical-humanistic, scientific, mathematic and technological areas. Copyright© Nuova Cultura

between the two subjects are well developed in the first school cycle), which should have brought about significant inputs towards a more fruitful integrated course. On the other hand, the need is shared by most of the teachers to include the spatial dimension in the study of historical facts, in the same way as the temporal dimension in dealing with the regions, themes and geographical issues. In the development of spatial and temporal approaches, both subjects represent efficient systems of knowledge layout, in order to arrange and give value to the information reaching us from experience and sensorial perceptions. History is the result of processes that take place in geographical space, having relations with its conditions and resources and modifying it; on the other hand, as a container of memories, the geographical landscape is one of the key concepts that make it possible to pass from one subject to another (De Vecchis, 2011, p. 148). In turn geography includes temporal evolution in its study method, and by means of historical processes identifies the signs and processes that merge together to explain the territorial systems of the contemporary world. Unfortunately the framework of the reform, as well as the overall unjustifiable penalisation of the two subjects, is also lacking with regard to an integration between history and geography on an equal didactic standing and presents a number of failings. Above all it has kept the exclusion of geography from the triennium, still leaving that old remnant left over from the Gelmini reform, whereby history and geography are taught by the same teacher in the triennium, even though at different times (in the classical Liceo for example with three hours weekly for each subject). The differentiation to be found in the five-year Liceo course is rather singular: in the first biennium history is taught, even with some variations, together with literary subjects and geography, while in the following triennium only together with philosophy. Another singular aspect must be highlighted with regard to this, a legacy from the past: geographical contents included in the teaching of natural sciences and also allocated to the teacher of this subject area. In this way geography was taught in the first years of Liceo by a teacher of the humanistic area and in the last year by a teacher from the Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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scientific area. Even though this confusion and mix of contents are less evident in the present reform with respect to the previous situation, they have not disappeared completely4. The interruption of the teaching of geography at the end of the first year damages the image of the subject, and above all pushes the teachers to focus more on one subject (history), the syllabus of which is developed all through the five-year Liceo programme rather than one with a short course and absent in the final three years. The devaluation of the subject, as seen in the structure of the Gelmini reform, was however worsened even more by the reduction of two marks (one for history and one for geography) to one only. It is in fact evident that the teacher will be more concerned – and the mark can play an important role in this – with a subject that will continue its course up to the end of the whole cycle. While the integration between the two subjects is lacking with respect to a mainly quantitative criterion, owing to an imbalance in the number of total hours, it does not find support even with regard to the criteria based on objectives and contents. In the Liceo biennium in fact the history syllabus deals with the ancient world: it is dedicated to the study of ancient civilisations and the Early Middle Age one (essential thematic core subjects: the main civilisations of the Ancient Near East: the Jewish civilisation; the Greek civilisation; the Roman civilisation; the advent of Christianity; Roman-barbarian Europe; society and economy in early medieval Europe; the Church in the Early Middle Ages; the birth and spread of Islam; Empire and kingdoms in the early Middle Ages; stately and feudal particularism. In reality the spatial viewpoint is compared with the issues of the modern and contemporary world, where the mutual connectedness between the two subjects is undoubtedly 4

In the previous system, the last year of Liceo foresaw the following syllabus for sciences: “General Geography; from astronomical geography to terrestrial physics and with phenomena of exogenous and endogenous dynamics and anthropic and economic geography. It will end with considerations on the evolutionary laws of life of the mineral, vegetable and animal world”.

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much closer. The main themes outlined for geography in the first two years are: landscape, urbanisation, globalisation and its consequences, cultural diversity (languages, religions), migrations, population and the demographic question, the relationship between economy, environment and society, the imbalances among the regions of the world, sustainable development (energy, water resources, climatic change, nutrition and biodiversity), geopolitics, the European Union, Italy, Europe and its principle states, the continents and their most important states. Aware of this basic incoherence in the last year of Liceo, the ministry Committee stated among the objectives of history of the triennium: “A number of topics of the contemporary world will be examined bearing in mind their geographical nature (for example, the distribution of natural and energy resources, the migration dynamics, the demographic features of the different areas of the planet, the relationships between climate and economy”. It is quite evident however that this addition cannot give significant contributions in didactic practice. 3.2 The practical translation of the Reform The practical translation of the reform is even further penalising for geography than the drafting of the reform itself, as it conveyed a negative message to the teaching community, stressing the subordination of geography to history. It must also be added that during their university courses to qualify to teach literary subjects in Licei5, except for a few with personal syllabuses, the teachers had their study load for geography halved with respect to history and other literary subjects being taught. Since teachers manage to convey their competences and skills best in the subjects in which they are qualified, geography is at a disadvantage also with regard to the initial teacher training with respect to the other subjects of the humanistic area. The problems relative to the training and 5

The literary subjects are: Italian, Latin, Greek, History and civic education, Geography for the Classical Liceo. Italian Latin, Greek, History and civic education, Geography for the Scientific Liceo. Italian, History and civic education, Geography for the other Licei. Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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refresher courses of the teachers of the subject have on numerous occasions been brought to the attention of the Minister by the Italian Association of Geography Teachers. In practice, the most evident aspect of this penalisation has consisted in the very change of the appellation of the two subjects; in fact, despite there being no reference to them in the ministry documents, the history and geography binomial has often been transformed (o rather altered) into Geohistory. This title, rather than for an integration or interdisciplinarity among subjects, was born from a current of historical studies introduced by Fernand Braudel. It is generally used today to describe situations in which the historical evolution is fundamental to explain a process of territorial transformation or the geographical conditions, in particular the physical ones, are used to understand the evolution of historical facts. Unfortunately in schools “these attempts clash with the great complexity of information to manage, risking being translated into simplified didactic courses, which group together the contents without referring to the methods and theories of the different subjects, impoverishing a fundamental component typical of the development of skills” (Giorda, 2013, p. 246). Furthermore, the suggestion passed without trouble – not written in any official document – of adopting the ratio of two hours of teaching for history and one hour for geography. Enrica Bienna and Rita Bortone stress the fact that in all the ministry documents the term Geohistory appears once only, but the hypothesis of a Geohistory syllabus that unites the two subjects can to many seem like a solution to the problems posed by the new timetables and the single mark. And therefore Geohistory immediately came into the lexicon and the didactic perspective of the school (Bienna and Bortone, 2014). The publishers also have a certain responsibility in this further devaluation of the subject, entrusting the drafting of geographical texts or the geographical part for example to history experts when the two subjects are combined in one single book6. It seems truly misleading for

example that a school manual on geography declares – confusing the primary objective of the subject as being aimed at interdisciplinary links, even if justified – that it has been designed “to propose a new course allowing teachers to get pupils to study geography in parallel with history”. Not by chance is the fact underlined in the same manual that the aspects of regional geography are given priority, with particular reference to the areas in which the ancient and early medieval civilisations were born, from the Middle East to Egypt to Italy and continental Europe (Cotroneo, 2011). In another geography manual, it is highlighted that geography in the biennium is “a subject that the new national guidelines and new timetable distribution quantitatively compress and integrate in the coverage of the history programmes”. It is taken for granted that the reduction in hours which treats history and geography in equal measure following the Gelmini reform, in practice must weigh exclusively on geography (Brusa and Impellizzeri, 2012). Geography is generally even more penalised when both subjects are included in a single volume. The aims are immediately clarified in a text when it is written that history is integrated with a geography section. Moreover, the number of pages dedicated to the two subjects bears witness to the existing imbalance: in the first volume 375 pages are dedicated to history and only 60 to geography; in the second volume 300 to history and once again only 60 to geography (Bettalli and Castronovo, 2015). While macroscopic for the disproportion shown, this example does not represent an isolated case in school books. In some cases there are borderline examples as in the text in which it is explicitly stated: “The history course is proposed in a new edition enriched with a geography section, in order to develop the historical-geographical skills and to reach the objectives expected at the end of the first secondary school biennium” (Brancati, Pagliarani and Motta, 2014).

By way of example, see the texts edited by G.B. Palumbo; La Nuova Italia; DeAgostini.

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4. Possible proposals and conceivable solutions The realisation of an overall reform project should represent the best opportunity to streamline all the potentialities existing in the school world and to coordinate the different subjects, directing them towards common objectives by means of interdisciplinary didactic strategies. Single measures, following the reform aimed at eliminating distortions and shortcomings, are harder to implement, also because they could alter the overall balance of the reform structure, above all when it tends to be inflexible. Nonetheless, in some cases – for geography for example – some kind of remedy is both urgent and indispensable. In a move towards an amendment, the first modification would be to bring back the specific mark for geography, also because it is easy to implement. It would be a first step for the rehabilitation of the subject which would somehow involve teachers and students. In the present Liceo framework the quantitative and qualitative aspects would examined also with respect to the different courses, which could see the teaching of geography differrentiated in its total number of hours (quantity) and its contents and objectives (quality). With regard to this, a number of specific situations can be mentioned – like those to be found in the Human Sciences Liceo or in the Artistic Liceo (“Architecture and Environment option”) and Linguistic one – which would deserve an additional geographical study load, explicitly including specific professional geographic knowledge and objectives. In the Human Sciences Liceo the geographical competences are mentioned in the PECUP in quite a detailed manner, where it says that its high school graduate “is able to: use philosophical, historical-geographical and scientific perspectives in the study of interdependences between international, national, local and personal phenomena; knows how to identify the link existing between cultural, economic and social phenomena and the political institutions both in relation to the national and European dimension and the global one”. In the Artistic Liceo, the option “Architecture and Environment” the school leaver should

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moreover be able to: be aware of the relationship existing between the project and the historical, social, environmental context and the specificity of the area in which it is collocated. Lastly, in the Linguistic Liceo it would be useful for the school leavers to have proper knowledge of the area and population of the countries whose language they are studying. As far as concerns the association between history and geography, the joint course formula could be a good solution if there was some sort of continuity to it all during the five-year Liceo course, without asymmetries, and if it were open to a real integration. At present however there seem to be huge obstacles in this sense starting from a degree of resistance on the part of many school and university teachers. With regard to university, the academic scientific-subject sectors must also be considered; for example, all ancient history (including the Greek and Roman one) is included in the archaeological group, clearly differentiated from the historical one (from medieval to contemporary history). In the triennium the hours of geography could carry out an important role of cultural education, with an in-depth study of the economic and political aspects in particular, the knowledge of which is today strategic in facing the challenges of globalisation and international relations, on a European scale for example or with respect to the polycentric framework of the Mediterranean that involves Italy more and more. By way of example some relevant topics can be mentioned in which geographical issues and reasoning could interweave with the historical discourse: climatic changes; landscapes; resources, the economy and the role of technology, the socio-economic, cultural and political impact of the migration phenomenon, cultural diversities and the social and economic inequalities on various scales, globalisation. Instead, in the present situation there is the risk of a real general drift for a badly understood Geohistory which, with its foreseeable failure, could easily lead to the definitive abandoning of a serious project for the integrated teaching of the two subjects. They should be saved from the irrelevance in which they are at present limited with respect to the potential that they could express in the education process of citizens (education to compare and to understand the Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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complexity and interdependence of phenomena), starting from the issues of the world examined from different points of view, with methodological and research diversities. I fully agree with Cristiano Giorda in his article published in the magazine of the Italian Association of Geography Teachers: “The geohistorical approach must therefore be considered as an epistemological and methodological approach of historical research, open to interdisciplinary synthesis but belonging to history, an historical narration that pays great attention to the role of the environment, localisation and regional relations” (Giorda, 2012, pp. 14-15). Should the line of integration between history and geography be pursued it would be necessary to change the specific learning objectives, which in the present National guidelines for history are based on a chronological structure, while for geography they are based on the regional approach, even though with an interesting renewal towards thematic aspects. In fact, on the one hand it is not easy to profitably carry forward a common proposal to integrate knowledge and objectives, and on the other the proposal for a Geohistory is favoured, made up of a non-amalgamated mixture of history filled with references to the environment and an insufficient geography with regional historical summaries, as can be seen in a number of school books, which are included in the “History and Geography” manual sheets, with the clear aim of focussing on the origin of geographical phenomena like ‘The silk road’ and ‘The end of the Sumerian civilisation’ (online presentation of the volume by: Marisaldi, Dinucci, Pellegrini, 2012). Only a complete rethinking of the syllabus around issues and important questions, from the local to the global scale, could allow history and geography to build skills and relevant knowledge, also in the light of the educational goals of the two subjects. As far as concerns geography, there is the example of the education to territory, a theoretical-methodological perspective developed by the Italian Association of Geography Teachers with the aim of reappraising the dimension of places and the features of the territory within education, particularly towards the topics of sustainability, interculture and citizenship. Copyright© Nuova Cultura

References 1. Bettalli M. and Castronovo V., Atlantide. Corso di storia e geografia per il primo biennio, Milan, La Nuova Italia, RCS, 2015. 2. Bienna E. and Bortone R., “La Geostoria nel biennio dei licei”, Scuola e Amministrazione, 5, 2014, http://www.scuolaeamministrazione.it/it/la-geostoria-nel-biennio-dei-licei/. 3. Brancati A., Pagliarani T. and Motta P., Dialogo con la storia e la geografia, Milan, La Nuova Italia, RCS, 2014. 4. Brusa A. and Impellizzeri F., Terra e tempo. Manuale di geografia interdisciplinare, Palermo-Florence, G.B. Palumbo, 2012. 5. Cotroneo D., Territori e radici. Atlante corso di geografia per il biennio, Milan, Sansoni per la Scuola, 2011. 6. De Vecchis G., Imparando a comprendere il mondo. Ragionamenti per una storia dell’educazione geografica, Rome, Kappa, 1999. 7. De Vecchis G., Didattica della geografia. Teoria e prassi, Turin, Utet Università, 2011. 8. Dewey J., Democracy and Education, New York, Macmilian, 1916. 9. Dewey J., The public and it’s problems, New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1927. 10. Errera C., “La geografia nella scuola italiana” Proceedings of the X Congresso Geografico Italiano (Milan, 6-15 September 1927), Milan, Capriolo e Massimino, 1927. 11. Gentile G., La riforma della scuola in Italia, Milan-Rome, Treves-Treccani-Tumminelli, 1932. 12. Giorda C., “Così vicine, così lontane, storia e geografia di fronte a un percorso comune nei curricoli scolastici”, Ambiente Società Territorio, 2, 2012, pp. 12-18. 13. Giorda C., “Geostoria, big history, big geography. Prospettive della geografia tra ricerca e didattica”, Rivista Geografica Italiana, 3, 2013, pp. 241-254. 14. Marisaldi L., Dinucci M. and Pellegrini C., Storia e Geografia, Bologna, Zanichelli, 2012. 15. Marta M. and Morri R., “Chi difende la geografia? I sottoscrittori dell’appello” in De Vecchis G. (Ed.), A scuola senza geografia, Rome, Carocci, 2011, pp. 67-91.

Italian Association of Geography Teachers

TEACHINGS FROM THE PAST Edited by Dino Gavinelli and Davide Papotti

Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography (J-READING), 1, 5, June, 2016, pp. 115-125

Re-reading The Teaching of Geography by A. Geikie Davide Papottia a

University of Parma, Parma, Italy

The pages that follow are taken from a textbook of geography published in London by MacMillan in 1887. The Author of the book, whose full title is The Teaching of Geography. Suggestions regarding principles and methods for the use of teachers, was Sir Archibald Geikie (28 December 1835 – 10 November 1924), a Scottish geologist. Geikie, who was appointed an assistant on the British Geological Survey in 1855 and a fellow on the Royal Society in 1865, has been an important scholar in the fields of geology and physical geography; he received, among other honors, the Murchison Medal in 1881, the Wollaston Medal in 1895 and the Royal Medal in 1896. He was appointed professor of geology and mineralogy at the University of Edinburgh in 1871, the first person to occupy the Murchison chair. Besides being recognized as one of the leading scholars of his time, he was a prolific writer, and published several works, aimed at both the scientific community and a larger audience of readers. Among his many works, one can mention Scenery of Scotland (1865), The Ancient Volcanoes of Great Britain (1897), The Geology of Central and Western Fife and Kinross (1900), The Geology of Eastern Fife (1902). Geikie was also a passionate scholar in the history of scientific Copyright© Nuova Cultura

research in Great Britain; an interest that brought him to the publication of the book Founders of Geology (1897). His scientific interest also went beyond the field of geology, to touch the field of physical geography and history of landscapes. For this reason, it is interesting to read a few pages from his successful book The Teaching of Geography, which received a large attention and became a widely distributed textbook. We present here the first two chapters of the book: Chapter I, which is an introduction to the text, and Chapter II, dedicated to the General Principles of the discipline. In the first chapter, the captions at the top of the pages that illustrate the content explain that the Author’s goal is to sketch the “aims of geography”, together with the “aims of the teacher”, in teaching this discipline. In the second chapter, the Author speaks of the “use of class-books”, the importance of “teaching from home examples” and “personal observations of pupils”, the necessity of the “avoidance of mere task-work”, the importance of the “lessons out of doors” and of the “first lessons on maps”. The choice of presenting here only the first two chapters aims at providing just a sample of Geikie’s thought, and at offering a taste of what the discussion about teaching geography looked like in its times. Even though Geikie was a supporter of the centrality of geology, and saw physical geography as a secondary field emanating from the main geological field, his scientific thoughts do pay large attention to the role of human actions and to the role of history in shaping the landscape. This inclination to emphasize the Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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strong ties between physical geography and human geography is one of the most interesting aspects of Geikie’s work, as it is perceivable since the very incipit of his work, when he suggests that geography “seeks to present a distinct and luminous picture of man’s surroundings – the earth he walks upon, the air he breathes, the waters that fertilise his fields, the oceans that bear him from continent to continent, the living things that minister to his existence and enjoyment alike on land and sea” (p. 1)1. Geikie openly speaks of the necessity to investigate the “well-being of man”: “[Geography] accepts from these various sciences the facts which they determine and the conclusions which they establish, but selects, in preference, those facts and conclusions which bear most closely upon the well-being of man […]” (p. 1). This reference to human well-being opens interesting links with contemporary geographical studies, which concentrate in the role of landscape appreciation as an important identity component for local societies, as the European Landscape Convention states in its preamble, using the very word “well-being”: “Aware that the landscape contributes to the formation of local cultures and that it is a basic component of the European natural and cultural heritage, contributing to human well-being and consolidation of the European identity”. Sometimes there are hints of determinism, such as the passage in which Geikie states that by “connecting this local detail with human history, Geography notes how largely it has influenced the progress of political events, how, for example, it has directed the migration of peoples, guided or arrested the tide of conquest, moulded national character, or given its own colouring to national mythology and literature” (p. 2). We have to contextualize, of course, the historical and cultural atmosphere of the Author’s times, when a scientific determinist approach was widely adopted.

to compare different situations and contexts, by starting from the familiar elements to understand more and more distant and abstract situations. Another aspect that strictly connects Geikie’s perspectives on the teaching of geography with current contemporary practices in the field is linked to the deep interdisciplinary nature of the discipline, that Geikie sees as the ideal link between science and history. The necessity to link a sound scientific knowledge of physical geography with the multifaceted analysis of the temporal evolution of the territories marks, in the Author’s perspective, the specificity of the geographical approach. In Chapter II Geikie gives some practical suggestions in teaching geography, emphasizing the importance of drawing from the students’ personal experiences, starting from the surrounding environment, using the textbook as a flexible tool and not as a rigid scheme of learning, stimulating the direct observation of the environment, using maps and not being afraid to “dirty one’s shoes” in exploring the territory. These invitations remain strikingly valid in our times. Reading these pages, which were written one hundred and thirty years ago, helps us in facing the continuous challenges of teaching geography today, relying on the experiences and suggestions coming from the illustrious tradition of the discipline. ---------------------------------------------------------

The Author suggests to use a comparative method in teaching geography, inviting the students 1 Gender correctness was, of course, still to come in Geikie’s times; all the references to human beings are still rigorously declinated as masculine.

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The Teaching of Geography2 Archibald Geikie Chapter I - Introductory Geography is commonly defined as a description of the earth. But it deals more specially with the earth as the dwelling-place of Man. It seeks to present a distinct and luminous picture of man's surroundings — the earth he walks upon, the air he breathes, the waters that fertilise his fields, the oceans that bear him from continent to continent, the living things that minister to his existence and enjoyment alike on land and sea. Every department of Nature has its own particular science, in which the minutest intricacies of structure and of process are patiently unravelled, and the facts are classified and arranged in their relations to each other and to the general system of the world. But Geography does not attempt such detailed investigation. It accepts from these various sciences the facts which they determine and the conclusions which they establish, but selects, in preference, those facts and conclusions which bear most closely upon the well-being of man, or which enable us most clearly to comprehend the general plan of the marvellous creation wherein we form a part. Thus, the aspects of the globe, as they present themselves to ordinary human intelligence, and the ever-changing phenomena that surround us and influence our daily life, are the peculiar domain of Geography. Except the history and experience of man himself, there is no subject of inquiry that yields so profound and perennial a human interest as the story of the globe on which we dwell. We are surrounded with phenomena that ceaselessly press themselves upon our notice. Our existence 2

The present text is taken from the 1887 MacMillan edition. After the name of the Author, the following information was provided in the original text: “Director-general of the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom: Formerly Murchison Professor of Geology in the University of Edinburgh”. The version presented here keeps the original format of the text (for instance in the use of Italics and brackets, and in the words spelling, as in the case of “to-day”). Copyright© Nuova Cultura

and enjoyment rest upon the continuance of the favourable conditions in which we live. As even a slight variation in these conditions may powerfully affect us for good or evil, they are a subject of momentous importance to us. We know that they differ greatly in different quarters of the globe, and we can hardly avoid some curiosity to learn on what circumstances such varying environment depends. It is the special function of Geography to direct our attention to these matters, to increase our knowledge of the country we live in, and thence to trace analogies and contrasts among the aspects of Nature in other regions of the globe. Geography compares the topography of one continent with that of another, dwelling upon the fundamental elements of each, and showing how they have affected the distribution and development of the human population. Mountains and valleys, hills and plains, rivers and lakes appear in region after region with ever the same essential features, but with endless diversity of local detail. Connecting this local detail with human history. Geography notes how largely it has influenced the progress of political events, how, for example, it has directed the migration of peoples, guided or arrested the tide of conquest, moulded national character, or given its own colouring to national mythology and literature. Geography further contrasts the climates of the globe, calls attention to the varying phases of plant and animal life by which they are accompanied, and traces their influence upon the march of discovery and the spread of civilisation and commerce. In gathering the materials for this comprehensive picture of the earth as the dwelling-place of man, Geography culls freely from almost every branch of natural science. The facts and inferences which are in this way gathered from all corners of the globe demand for their adequate comprehension something more than mere book learning. The geographer should himself be an observer of Nature, He may know only a very limited space in the wide domains of scientific acquirement; but his knowledge of that space should be thorough enough to enable him duly to appreciate habits of observation, methods of research, and processes of reasoning in other departments of inquiry. His sympathies should be wide and Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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deep, embracing all parts of Nature, even those with which he has been able to make no personal acquaintance. This breadth of vision keeps him in touch with the progress of discovery. He is ever ready to detect the geographical significance of new observations, and to appropriate for his own subject the results obtained in the most widely-separated fields of scientific research. What is true of the professed geographer holds also, in large measure, for those who teach geography. The teacher who would gain the greatest amount of personal enjoyment from the cultivation of this subject, and who would most successfully use it as a discipline in the education of others, should, as far as he can, make himself acquainted with the practical pursuit of at least one department of natural knowledge. The man who has once dissected a plant and practically studied the mutual relations and functions of its several parts, or who has himself traced the connection between the topography of a district and the nature of its underlying rocks, has acquired an experience which gives to his teaching of these subjects a precision and vividness that could never be gained from books. And in proportion as he cultivates the spirit and habit of personal observation and inquiry will his labours among the young be fruitful to them and satisfactory to himself. I do not, of course, mean to imply that good geographical instruction is impossible without scientific acquirement on the part of the instructor. But I would insist that as geography, though it may not claim to be itself a distinct science, is based upon the work of many sciences, its full value as an instrument of education cannot be obtained except by those who are imbued with the scientific spirit. But Geography rests not only upon the facts and deductions of natural science. Its obligations are hardly less extensive to the department of history. In many systems of education, indeed, it ranks merely as a branch of history. It is not content with tracing the present distribution of the races and nations of mankind. It seeks to picture older groupings out of which those of today have been developed, and to follow backward the successive stages of progress to the times of earliest history or tradition. All that may be gathered from written chronicle, or that CopyrightÂŠ Nuova Cultura

may have been preserved in the names of places, or that may be inferred from the language and lineaments of a people, comes within the scope of the geographer's inquiry. And it is by availing himself of these manifold sources of information that he completes the political side of the picture which he draws of the geography of a country. If this sketch of the scope and aim of Geography be accepted, it is evident that the study of the subject may be made a discipline of a high order in education. Instead of being a mere exercise of the memory, as it has so often been treated, geography steps at once into a foremost place among school subjects as an instrument for training various mental qualities that are hardly reached at all by the other branches of an ordinary curriculum. In the first place, and above all, it calls out into active exercise the observing faculty which is otherwise left wellnigh dormant in the ordinary tasks of school. It stimulates the reasoning powers, by teaching the value of the classification and co-ordination of facts and the methods of scientific induction. It affords ample exercise of the memory, but not in the mere mechanical way implied in the learning by rote of tables of figures and pages of statistics. It supplies invaluable information about innumerable familiar objects and aspects of Nature, and excites an interest in these that gives a new charm to every country walk. It furnishes a just conception of the fatherland in all its aspects, and passes thence to broad and intelligent views of the world at large. By thus widening the youthful experience of men and things it helps to stimulate habits of reflection and self-reliance, and strengthens the character for the future affairs of life. To keep Geography on this high platform in the education of the country obviously requires a race of specially trained teachers. But there does not yet exist among us any provision for the acquisition of this special training. The teachers must in the meanwhile train themselves. In this self-imposed task their chief difficulty lies in the vastness of the field of inquiry, and the vagueness of its boundaries. They can hardly discover where to begin, or having begun, how to choose out of the overwhelming multiplicity of detail those parts which are really of service for geographical purposes. And even where Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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they have made some progress in self-instruction the momentous problem still confronts them how to make the subject genuinely interesting and useful to their pupils. Now it must be honestly admitted at the outset that there is no short cut or royal road to success in the teaching of Geography. No cramming or "getting up" the lesson can lead to any satisfactory result. The teacher must be content patiently and thoroughly to master his subject and to watch and measure the progress of his scholars by his own solid advancement. He should begin by divesting himself of the common notion that the teaching of geography can be taken up by anybody. When he has realised what geography in the true sense is, he will recognise that to make satisfactory use of it for purposes of instruction demands qualifications of no mean or ordinary kind. He will see that a wide range of reading is absolutely necessary to him, and that he must equip himself with such a store of illustrations gathered from all departments of knowledge as will enable him to elucidate each subject as it arises in the course of his tuition. He will perceive also how needful it is that he should himself possess such a practical acquaintance with his subject as mere reading will not give unless confirmed by observation and reflection. Thus furnished, he will find himself in large measure independent of class-books. Instead of contenting himself with hearing his pupils repeat a lesson which they have got by heart, he will make the lesson a text from which, out of his own stores of knowledge, he will lighten up the subject till even the dullest boy can hardly fail to understand and take interest in it. This is the ideal of geographical teaching at which, in my opinion, we should aim. And until some approach to it is reached I cannot believe that geography will take the place which it is entitled to hold in our educational system. Already there are among us not a few admirable teachers imbued with the true geographical spirit, but whose efforts are hampered by the use-and-wont bondage under which the teaching of geography has so long lain. Their number will doubtless steadily increase, for the day can hardly now be far distant when adequate provision will be made for the systematic

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training of teachers in geographical instruction.

the

methods

In the meanwhile I offer these chapters, not as a formal treatise on the teaching of geography, but rather as a series of hints and suggestions with reference mainly to the elementary stage of the subject. These might be almost indefinitely extended and varied. But they will, I trust, suffice to make clear the spirit and method which, in my belief, ought to be maintained in this department of education. One distinguishing feature of this method is the wide scope which it affords for the manifestation of the individual character and special qualifications of the teacher himself. Another is the infinite variety which arises from differences in the local topography, natural history, historical associations, industries, and other circumstances of the environment. But amid all these diversities the same principles of treatment may be followed and the same ultimate educational results may be obtained. How this end is to be gained will, I hope, be gathered from the following pages.

Chapter II - General principles In the teaching of geography, as in instruction of every kind, the fundamental condition for success is that the teacher has so thoroughly mastered the subject himself, and takes so much real interest in it, that he can speak to his pupils about it, not in the set phrases of a class-book, but out of the fulness of his own knowledge, being quick to draw his most effective illustrations from the daily experience of those to whom he addresses himself. If the aim of geography should be what is sketched in the fore- going chapter, it will be evident that a groundwork of preparation for the study of this branch of knowledge should be laid at an early age and in subjects that are not generally regarded as part of geography. The lessons may be begun almost with the very commencement of school-life. The attention of the children should be directed to what lies around them. The commonest facts of everyday experience supply endless material for profitable instruction, and the proper use of them furnishes a kind of

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mental discipline which is hardly otherwise obtainable. In dealing with the young we should try to feel ourselves young again, to see things as they are seen by young eyes, to realise the difficulties that lie in the way of children's appreciation of the world around them, to be filled with an abounding sympathy which subdues all impatience on our side, and calls out on the side of the children their confidence and affection. Mutual sympathy and esteem are a pledge of enduring success. To cement this bond of union between teacher and taught there should be no set tasks for some considerable time. The lessons ought rather to be pleasant conversations about familiar things. The pupils should be asked questions such as they can readily answer, and the answering of which causes them to reflect and gives them confidence in themselves and freedom with their teacher. The objects in the schoolroom, in the playground, on the road to school, should be made use of as subjects for such questionings, with the aim of drawing out the knowledge acquired by the pupils from their own observation. Every question should be one which requires for its answer that the children have actually seen something with their own eyes and have taken mental note of it. The putting of such questions stimulates the observing faculty, and not infrequently gives a chance of distinction to boys and girls whose capabilities are not well tested by the ordinary lessons of school. No teacher who has not tried this method of instruction can realise how much pleasure it gives to the pupils, and how greatly it tends to stimulate their mental progress. A fact discovered by the child for himself through his own direct observation becomes a part of his being, and is infinitely more to him than the same fact learnt from hearsay or acquired from a lesson-book. The idea of discovery should be encouraged in every way among children. We should remember that to them the whole of Nature is an unknown world into which their young souls, timidly or adventurously as may be, must advance. If we can help them to push forward boldly and see things for themselves we do them an inestimable service, not only adding to the joy of their childhood but kindling for them a light that will illumine all their future life. I hope to be able to show that this principle CopyrightÂŠ Nuova Cultura

of discovery may be carried into departments of geographical teaching which might be supposed to offer but little scope for its exercise. To begin the teaching of geography with formal lessons on the shape of the earth, parallels, meridians, equator, poles, and the rest, is to start at the wrong end. To the average boy or girl of six or seven years these details have no meaning and no interest. Their introduction on the very threshold of geographical instruction is a characteristic feature of our system or rather want of system in this department of education. They are very generally placed at the beginning of our class-books, and being there they form, as a matter of course, the subjects of the first lessons usually given in geography. An altogether inordinate value is set by us upon class-books. Instead of serving as they ought, merely to furnish the text for the fuller and more interesting exposition of the teacher, these books are for the most part slavishly followed. The lesson of the day too often consists in the repetition by rote of so many sentences or paragraphs from the class-book, which are seldom expanded or made more attractive and intelligible by elucidation on the part of the teacher. Such instruction, if it may be so called, is bad for the teacher and worse for the taught. It is especially pernicious to the children in the earlier stages of their geographical studies, for it tortures their memories and brings no compensating advantage. It fosters idleness and listlessness on the part of the teacher, who instead of exerting his faculties to invest the subject with a living interest becomes for the time a mere machine, mechanically acting within the limits prescribed in the class-book. This kind of teaching only by rote ought to be strenuously abolished. What is imperatively needed is that geography should become a thoroughly effective and valuable educational discipline. For this end, children should, as early as possible, be taught to use their own eyes in observing what lies around them, and their own judgment in drawing conclusions from what they see. Only after they have made some progress in this direction should they be called upon to begin the formal lessons of class-books. And as far as possible the facts stated in the class-books should be verified or illustrated by others that lie within the personal experience of Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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the pupils. To read Nature only through what Dryden called "the spectacles of books" is a hurtful habit, which is only too apt to weaken our mental vision and to prevent us from seeing clearly and intelligently what passes before our eyes. To enforce this habit upon the young by making them gather their ideas of geography from the sentences of a class-book rather than from the face of Nature is a serious injury to them. I would therefore advocate that all the preliminary notions of geography should be acquired without the use of any class-book by the young pupils. These elementary conceptions can be gained more intelligently and thoroughly by a system of oral instruction, in which actual observation by the pupil plays a main part. The subjects of the earliest lessons should be taken from the familiar things of everyday experience. Remote though these may at first seem from the limits of what is commonly recognised as geography, they may be made to train the eye and the mind, so as to prepare the way for thoroughly satisfactory progress in geographical acquirement. It is obvious that an intelligent acquaintance with what immediately surrounds us ought to underlie any knowledge of things and places at a distance from us. The study of geography ought to begin at home, and from a basis of actual personal experience should advance to the consideration of other countries and of the earth as a whole. But while laying his foundations broadly in this way, and widening the knowledge of his pupils, the teacher will do well to keep clearly before him some definite goal towards which the discipline of the elementary stage is to lead up. Probably no object can be suggested more fitting for this purpose than the thorough comprehension of a map. The power of understanding a map and getting from it all the information it can afford, is an acquisition which lies at the base of all sound geographical progress. Yet how large a proportion, even of the educated part of the community, have only a limited and imperfect conception of the full meaning and uses of a map. It should be, in my opinion, the teacher's main aim in the first or elementary stage of instruction to make the understanding of a map, and the capability of adequately using it, the great end to be kept in CopyrightÂŠ Nuova Cultura

view, and no pupil who has not mastered this acquirement should be allowed to pass into a higher grade. How this task may be attempted I shall try to sketch in succeeding chapters. There is happily now a growing recognition of the principle that adequate geographical conceptions are best gained by observations made at the home locality. The school and its surroundings form the natural basis from which all subsequent geographical acquirement proceeds. Upon a groundwork of actual observation and measurement the young mind is led forward in a firm and steady progress. The schoolroom and playground serve as units from which an estimate is gradually formed of the relative proportions of more distant objects and places. Such elementary notions as those of relative size and distance can be effectively taught and impressed upon the imagination and the memory by causing the pupils to make actual measurements, which may be done at first by pacing, and afterwards with a yard-measure or tape-line. The dimensions of the class-room being ascertained, they may then be compared with those of the school buildings and next with the playground, and by degrees a just conception of the proportions between the home locality and the rest of the country is built up. One of the collateral advantages of this practical method of learning the subject lies in the bodily exercise which it involves. A child likes to be actively doing something, and is delighted to exchange a lesson in spelling or arithmetic for a measured march along the schoolroom floor or across the playground. It is easy to take care that while the amusement afforded by such exercises is not unsympathetically repressed, it shall not in any way interfere with the practical good to be derived from them. In taking the school surroundings as the basis of instruction, the teacher will readily recognise that while the principle of his method remains the same, its details must necessarily vary according to the circumstances of the locality. The two most obvious distinctions are those of town and country. In a town, illustrations of the political side of geography are most prominent; in the country, it is the physical side that especially invites attention. As the facts of Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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physical geography are simpler and more obvious than those of political geography, they offer greater facilities for elementary instruction. Hence a country schoolmaster is placed in the best conditions for effective geographical teaching. The face of Nature lies uncovered before him and affords him endless illustrations of his subject. A teacher in a large city stands in a less favourable position. The original aspect of the ground is concealed under streets and houses, and he may have to go far afield for examples of some of the most familiar physical features. On the other hand, as regards the political aspect of geography his position gives him many peculiar advantages. But, sustained by a living interest in his subject, a teacher will discover much even in the most unpromising circumstances which may be turned to account in laying the foundation of a thorough geographical training, as I shall endeavour to illustrate in later pages. Not only should no class-books be assigned to the pupils in the elementary stage. The lessons should be as informal as possible. Anything approaching to a style of lecturing should be carefully avoided. Instead of appearing to discourse himself, the teacher should aim at obtaining clear articulate expression of the knowledge and experience of the children. The more homely and conversational he can make himself, consistent with their retention of due respect for him, the more will he win their confidence, the greater will be his hold upon them, and the more readily will they understand and remember the subjects which he brings before them. He will do well in the early stage to make no attempt at being strictly systematic in his choice and treatment of the topics of the lessons. It is often of advantage to let the lesson be suggested by some incident of the day, or something that has arrested notice since the previous lesson. The attention of the children is thereby riveted to the subject. They are ready to say all that they know about it, and eager to hear anything more which the teacher may tell them. New ideas communicated to them in this way take hold of their imagination and sink into their memory. A large amount of useful information may thus be given, while at the same time the young minds are being gradually prepared for

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entering upon the proper field of geographical instruction. In all these lessons, the system of question and answer must be scrupulously followed. The teacher should so frame his questions as to draw out what the children have actually seen and thought out for themselves, and he should at once stop and call attention to any statement evidently based, not on personal observation or reflection, but on hearsay. If, for instance, a boy in the elementary stage were to describe coal as the remains of plants turned into stone, or to speak of air as a mixture of two gases, or to allude to the earth revolving round the sun, he should be immediately checked and allowed only to say on each of these subjects what he might himself have seen or thought. Considerable reflection and experience are needed so to frame the question as to avoid extracting mere secondhand knowledge. The great object of the master should be to make the scholars observe and reflect, and he can best attain this end by throwing himself into the mood of the young mind, and by asking nothing which would involve knowledge beyond the attainments of the pupils, until he has satisfied himself as to the limits of these attainments. He may then judiciously sum up what has been gained during the lesson from the united experience of the whole class, and supplement it by filling in some of the more notable gaps. But the additions thus made by him to the common stock of acquirement should never be too preponderating a feature in the earlier lessons, and should come as naturally suggested by what has been obtained from the class. Of the method here recommended one or two illustrations may be given. A wet morning will profitably suggest a lesson on rain. Of the younger children only the most elementary and obvious facts should be asked, such, for instance, as that rain is water; that it comes from the skies, that it descends in drops which unite into pools or trickle on the ground, that it sinks into the soil and flows away, that it wets, that it refreshes the grass and the flowers, that it comes on dull, cloudy days, rather than on sunny days; and so on until the juvenile experience has been exhausted. Then the teacher will put together into one connected narrative all that he has drawn from the class, together with such Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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additional facts by way of connecting links, as he thinks their intelligence will easily follow. But afterwards, as the children gain knowledge, he may return to the subject, and suggest observations and reflections arising out of the facts already gathered, for instance, that wet things dry again, and what becomes of the water they contained; that rain comes from the clouds, and how clouds are formed; that rain fills wells, springs, and rivers; and so by degrees to the general system of circulation of water over the surface of the earth. The replenishing of the schoolroom fire with coal will furnish materials for another lesson of a more advanced kind. First, all that the children may be expected to know from their own observation or reflection is extracted by question and answer, and then the teacher proceeds to tell about the nature and origin of coal, and the work of coal-miners. The flitting of a butterfly through the open window of the schoolroom will suggest a lesson on insect life, and give the teacher an opportunity of unfolding some of the wonders of the animal world and enforcing a reverence and sympathy for all living things. In short, his eye should be ever on the watch for materials on which he can train the observing and reflecting faculties of his scholars. If an incident likely to be of this useful kind should occur even in the midst of a lesson on another subject, he may profitably interrupt the work to direct attention to it that it may be distinctly seen, and he can afterwards at the proper time return to the elucidation of it. Lessons after this method ought to be removed as far as possible from any look of task-work. They should be bright, lively, and genuinely interesting even to the dullest boy or girl. By avoiding anything in the nature of a task to be committed to memory at home, and by making the pupils themselves in great measure the sources of the information elicited by the questioning, the master keeps up the attention of the class from beginning to end. The geography lesson thus comes to be longed for as the most enjoyable of all in the routine of school-life. And its effects are soon appreciable, not only in school, but at home and by the wayside. As the questionings of the teacher embrace all the familiar objects of everyday life, the eyes of the pupils are quickened to take notice of what would otherwise have escaped them. A new CopyrightÂŠ Nuova Cultura

interest is given to their surroundings; they are encouraged to reflect and to trace the connection between the facts which come under their observation. And thus their judgment is strengthened, while their powers of perception are developed. A child does not at first perceive the relations of things to each other, and no attempt should be made for some time to point these out. It is enough to induce him to look at the things themselves, and be able to recognise them. He readily enough detects resemblances whether real or fanciful; he should be trained to notice differences. By degrees, as he gains familiarity with things, their connections will be gradually perceived by him, and may then be made the subject of fuller explanation. For example, the connection of the changes in the atmosphere with the influence of the sun upon the surface of our planet cannot be explained or understood until a large array of facts has been mastered. The formation of clouds, the fall of rain, the movements of the winds, may all, however, be observed and elucidated, and may be grasped by the pupils as facts before their marvellous connection and dependence upon solar radiation are touched upon. Deductions and principles to which the pupils have been in this way gradually led up through a series of observed facts are apprehended with a vividness and joy attainable in no other way. Whatever will contribute to the force of the mental impression made by the lessons may be usefully employed by the teacher. Objects of natural history are of the utmost service in this respect. Samples of raw and manufactured articles are likewise of great value. Diagrams, especially views of scenery and drawings of plants and animals, are indispensable as supplying pictorial representations of objects which cannot for the most part be seen by the pupils. Suppose, for instance, that a lesson has been suggested by the wooden benches of the schoolroom. All that the pupils can tell about the material should be drawn from them by judicious questioning â&#x20AC;&#x201D; its origin from pinetrees, the form and scenery of these trees, the characters of the foliage and seed-cones and other facts which may be known. But it will often happen, as for example in large towns, that no specimens of coniferous trees are to be seen, Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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and even in wooded districts it may not be possible to find samples of larch, spruce, or pine. In any case, a keen interest is taken in the exhibition of an actual branch of the tree itself with its spikey leaflets and attached cones, and the mental picture of the object is enlarged and illumined by the presentation of a diagram of a pine-forest with its huge gaunt trunks swinging their shaggy arms toward each other, while perhaps a bear or a reindeer is represented wandering among their shadows, or an eagle soars across the sky above them. Or should the lesson be taken from the dress of the scholars, a silk neck-tie will furnish to those of more advanced years a memorable lesson on the silkworm and the silk industry. In illustration of such a lesson, a specimen or, failing that, a drawing of the moth is regarded with great interest by the young learners, and still more a sample of the cocoon and an explanation of the way in which the fibre is unwound and spun. The neck-tie may not thenceforth be more prized for decoration or warmth, but at all events it possesses a new kind of interest, and it has been the means of opening a new chapter in the youthful experience of the world. In many cases, teacher and pupils may collect the objects for illustrating the lessons. Where possible this ought on every occasion to be done, and the circumstances where the practice can be followed are more frequent than might be supposed. The teacher should from the first realise that some of the most valuable parts of the training his pupils can receive are not attainable within the walls of the class-room. Where practicable he should himself take walks with his pupils and direct their attention to the objects to be seen as they go. There are no doubt practical difficulties in the way of carrying out this method, but these are generally not insurmountable, as I shall endeavour to show in a later chapter. It is hardly possible to overrate the benefit that arises from this co-operation of teacher and taught in the open air. The restraints of the schoolroom are suspended without giving way to the licence of the playground; there is a freer and friendlier intercourse, not only between master and pupil, but among the pupils themselves. The most timid and the most forward are placed on the same footing, the retiring pupils of the ordinary class-work not Copyright© Nuova Cultura

infrequently coming well to the front by their quickness of perception and swiftness of inference. A teacher full of enthusiasm for Nature, and ready to share his love for it with his scholars, is sure to find his way to their hearts, to kindle in all of them a respect and in some of them a love for the objects of his own affection. He may not be in any sense a naturalist, and may not dream of making naturalists of his pupils. But by directing their eyes to the outer world and leading them to take reverent heed to what may there be seen, he fills their minds with a healthy influence, while at the same time he powerfully stimulates their powers of observation and deduction, and thus contributes in a most important degree towards their education. Class excursions are of course most advantageously undertaken in the country, where indeed they ought always to form a prominent and essential part of the work of the school. But they may also be profitably conducted in a large town — even in a wilderness of streets and houses, such as London, the skilful teacher will find topics of interest for every walk. Materials of construction, contrasted styles of architecture, the distribution and uses of public buildings, historical sites and associations, trades and industries — these and many other subjects will suggest themselves for delightful and profitable rambles through even the most crowded thoroughfares. The chief danger in such class excursions is lest the pupils get out of the proper control of the master — a danger more especially liable to arise in towns. To guard against this risk, the number of pupils should never be so large as to be beyond ready and efficient restraint At first it had better be rather smaller than the number which the teacher can easily manage. As he gains experience and confidence in his control and knowledge of the individual characters of the pupils he may increase the attendance. Much assistance may be derived from the employment of older scholars as monitors responsible for four or five of their juniors, and where this method of co-operation is available the number of excursionists may obviously be considerably extended.

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When some progress has been made in elementary geographical conceptions, the blackboard should be brought into increasing use. After the schoolroom, for example, has been paced, and its dimensions and proportions have been thus ascertained, its plan should be drawn on the board by the teacher, with the relative positions of door, windows, and fireplace. From this beginning, gradual steps may be taken until the pupils can themselves draw on the board and on their slates rough plans of the school and of the playground. At first it will be sufficient to aim only at a general resemblance of proportion. The great object is to teach the young minds to realise the relations between the actual boundaries and the artificial representations of them. To succeed in this is by no means so easy as might be thought, but success in it is absolutely necessary and must be attained no matter at what expenditure of time and labour. When it has been achieved efforts should next be made to depict the plan to scale, and with a nearer approach to correctness. These lessons in plan-drawing lead up to the thorough comprehension of a map which, as I have said, ought to be the great goal to be kept in view for the elementary stage of geographical instruction. From the school and its playground, the drawings on the board may proceed to take in some of the school surroundings â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the roads by which the children come from different quarters to school, with some of the more prominent objects by the wayside. Plans

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on different scales should be drawn and repeated in many different ways until the idea of relative proportions has been completely understood. Of course detailed accuracy of surveying is not to be aimed at. This should be reserved for an advanced stage when actual measurements and angles may be taken. Neatness of execution, however, should be insisted upon from an early stage in plan-drawing. What I have said in this chapter refers mainly to the more elementary part of geographical teaching, and I would conclude this introductory chapter by insisting on the need for constant repetition and revision. It is hardly possible to overrate the importance of continuing this practice until the fundamental conceptions in geography are thoroughly mastered. We are too apt to be anxious to show progress and to push the pupils on at a faster rate than they can move. We are tempted to assume a knowledge which they do not possess, and to take for granted that what we have laboured to reduce to its simplest expression has been actually assimilated by them. There is no better way of testing and ensuring progress than by constant repetition. The teacher, however, may make the revision full of interest by letting light from all sides play round the facts already brought to notice until they are entirely grasped. New aspects and presentations of the old facts give them fresh value and help to fix them more firmly in the memory.

Italian Association of Geography Teachers

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Associate Editors: Cristiano Giorda (Italy), Cristiano Pesaresi (Italy), Joseph Stoltman (USA), Sirpa Tani (Finland)

J - READING JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND DIDACTICS IN GEOGRAPHY

Dipartimento di Scienze documentarie, linguistico - filologiche e geografiche

JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND DIDACTICS IN

GEOGRAPHY

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2016

GEOGRAPHY JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND DIDACTICS IN

Vol. 1, Year 5, June 2016

Editor in Chief: Gino De Vecchis (Italy)

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ITALIAN ASSOCIATION OF GEOGRAPHY TEACHERS (ASSOCIAZIONE ITALIANA INSEGNANTI DI GEOGRAFIA)

ISSN online 2281-5694 ISSN print 2281-4310