Journal articles on the topic 'Ecologia paesaggio'

The result of the ecological transition process today is nothing more than an intangible landscape. Still utopian, it is thought of as the custodian of our desires, the communitarian expression of a democratic technology, a flexible dimension that will finally welcome a reformed society. As still potential and strictly dependent on our present action, the intangible landscape of ecological transition also has its Yang: the landscape of global warming of 2° C, in the scenario hypothesized by the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In balance between catharsis and catastrophe there is now a need for effective strategies to make the objective of transition concrete and the landscape, more than a mere destination, can today be understood as the main actor on the urban scene. Having cleared the field of misunderstandings and mystifications, the essay explores the potential of the landscape project as a political project of a solidary as well as ecological transition.

The oldest living specimen of Dracaena draco subsp. draco, an endemism of the Canary Island and Madera, whose health had been threatened by the urban development of the neighbouring town of Icod de los Vinos, in the north of Tenerife, at the end of the last century was at the centre of a choral process involving politicians, inhabitants and designers, aimed at restoring, through the design of a park in its surroundings, the thermophilic forest conditions of its original habitat. At a time when attention to environmental issues still constituted a niche research field, the park project aimed to re-establish, in a co-evolutive logic, not only the ecological relations of the tree with its environment, but also the network of myths and legends that link the long-lived Canary Island Dragon specimen to the local population. The study traces and illustrates the reasons of the project through an original photographic apparatus, enriched by drawings and considerations deriving from documentary research supplemented by conversations with the author of the work.

Walking is a purely practical act, an ecological mode of locomotion, it is a way to read and experience the landscape in its spatial and temporal dimensions, one of the simplest and most natural forms to measure our position in it. Walking is a way in which we attribute meanings to our surroundings and it is for this reason that the theme is a sort of common ground of study for geographers, anthropologists, artists, landscape architects. In the dichotomies walk-move, plan-error, logistics-improvisation lies our predisposition to listen to a place. In the gap between a point A and a point B of a movement, lies our ability to make an experience and transform the movement into a useful and founding act for the landscape; the time between A and B is that necessary to build an imaginary of the latter.

The paper refers to research and projects shared between Sardinian and Portuguese agricultural landscapes which, starting from the continuous investigation of this common cultural matrix, try to trace an evolutionary line of the historicized ways of co-evolutionary landscape construction and foreshadow some possible scenarios of continuity.In particular, the paper will focus on two projects by the Global Arquitectura Pajsagista studio in Alentejo, in which the approach to the study of the place can refer to a multi-scale methodology that links the study of the historical uses of agricultural landscapes, with the understanding of physical structures and evolution of vegetation cover foreshadowing a new idea of space starting from the interaction between man and these two dominant ones. With respect to these two topics declined in the “man-soil” and “man-living beings” relationship, it can be said that agricultural projects - and this is historically true, but even more so today - argued exactly the necessary meeting between utilitarian practices and symbolic of the primary productive activities of man with the “self poietic” and “ecological” regenerative dynamics of a specific way of organizing the terrestrial space. The presented cases, in fact, try to show the landscape design ability, into the rural Mediterranean areas, to activate co-evolution processes between the regeneration of agricultural soils and the human needs of inhabiting linked to leisure and refreshment.

La natura della cittŕ e i suoi processi di formazione dalle origini a oggi esprimono una primaria qualitŕ della nostra specie, quella umana, contesa tra l'appartenenza ad una collettivitŕ e l'affermazione del proprio carattere individuale. La bellezza e la bontŕ, la giustizia e la sicurezza, la libertŕ e la concordia vanno di volta in volta patteggiate, per quanto ne concerne il significato, la specifica formalizzazione, l'orizzonte di condivisibilitŕ. Sembra essere chiaro che nulla č frequentabile in campo urbano, in quanto settore principe del campo umano, al di fuori di un principio di relazionalitŕ. In questo orizzonte di senso, l'idea della tradizione come enciclopedia entro cui trovare o riscrivere una grammatica per la traduzione dei nuovi termini della cittŕ ecologica, del paesaggio urbano e della sostenibilitŕ abitativa, č la base del progetto comune, del progetto di un'architettura delle relazioni.

- One first consideration is to insist on the centrality of a political commitment to the redevelopment of residual open spaces for the development of the densely congested conurbation of the Alpine foothills. Residual open spaces can be reconsidered through a profound action to renew them as nuclei and corridors with a high degree of reconstructed naturalness: like islands of urban countryside; like spaces for collective enjoyment and meeting places for populations that are ever more different; like places of quiet and slowness in noisy and fast communities. Open spaces which when transformed into green infrastructures and parks (agricultural, leisure and nature areas) can restore ecological balance and spread elements of ‘urbanity' to an urbanisation which seems to present elements of crisis today because of its low level of liveability, its environmental unsustainability, its perennial congestion, its absence of any type of care for unbuilt on land, the poverty of urban places and the more general crisis of liveability (the cause of which today is now the quantity of urbanised land). A second consideration examines the process of the reciprocal adjustment of two tendentially conflicting policies: to construct a motorway and to identify a green corridor. This reciprocal adjustment occurs both through the strategic and planning interpretation of the environmental compensations of a motorway and through a rethinking of the ‘North green Dorsal' project as an active policy and not just as a constraint.

The paper examines La Foresta-Radice-Labirinto (1981), a fairy tale which is one of Italo Calvino’s latest and lesser known works. In what can be regarded as his testament, Calvino looks back on and revives the ecological commitment of his literary production and his attention to the complex relationship between nature and culture, which has been a prominent leitmotif of his writings (from The Baron in the Trees to The Cloud of Smog, and from the adventures of Marcovaldo to the Invisible Cities). The paper offers a detailed symbological and eco-critical analysis of the text, in order to examine an ‘ecology of mind’ as developed by Calvino, invariably sensitive to hybridisation and to the ongoing and often difficult relation between historical and environmental mutations. In doing so, the paper lists and explores the construction of images-icons and figures-types that make up what Calvino calls ‘a pedagogy of imagination’. The paper focuses on Calvino’s dedication to education through fairy tales as a primary form of experience, capable of conveying universal messages to a young readership, and on his longing for an authentic exposure to the environment, where getting lost means finding oneself and where chaos leads to a new order, founded on an ethical search for a more harmonious union of city, human beings and nature.

L’articolo recensisce e discute le ragioni, i contenuti e le prospettive storiografiche di tre volumi recentemente pubblicati su piante, boschi e paesaggi agrari e forestali della Penisola italiana nel basso Medioevo e nella prima età moderna. Con approcci diversi, i tre volumi propongono con consapevolezza il problema del rapporto fra l’uomo e l’ambiente, fra economia ed ecologia, fra risorse e produzione come chiave interpretativa unitaria della storia delle campagne italiane e delle società che le abitarono.The article analyses the motivations, the contents and the historiographical perspectives of three recently published volumes about trees, woods and rural landscape in the late medieval and early modern Italy. Each volume intentionally places at the centre of its analysis the relation between man and environment, economy and ecology, resources and production: throughout different approach this relation is suggested as the key factor to re-interpret the rural history of preindustrial Italy.

Il cambiamento climatico č anche una sfida alla protezione dei valori estetici che attribuiamo ai patrimoni naturali dell'umanitŕ. In questo articolo si indaga l'evoluzione recente del concetto di estetica ambientale e il suo legame con l'etica ambientale. La tesi che si sostiene č che ci troviamo di fronte ad un bivio. Se affermiamo l'esistenza di patrimoni naturali dell'umanitŕ basati su un'idea di natura come entitŕ separata e separabile dall'uomo, i criteri estetici si indeboliscono e finiscono per combaciare con una visione ecologica e fisica dell'ambiente. Due le conseguenze: difendere la bellezza della natura diventa un imperativo etico; ci scontriamo con la difficoltŕ di riuscire a trovare oggi, anche di fronte ai cambiamenti ambientali in atto, qualcosa che si possa definire solo natura. L'alternativa č parlare di patrimoni culturali riconoscendo il ruolo fondamentale delle proiezioni culturali nella percezione che abbiamo della natura. Ne deriva la possibilitŕ per l'estetica di tornare ad avere un ruolo importante nella scelta di quali paesaggi, e non piů quale natura, siano belli.

Questo servizio propone una riflessione sul possibile ruolo di una disciplina, lao ecologia del paesaggio all'interno della complessa macchina che regola oggi la programmazione e la pianificazione territoriale. A tal fine si sono richiesti contributi e saggi a importanti esponenti del settore disciplinare, chiarendo loro di approfondire il rapporto tra i contributi di merito che regolano la necessitŕ di mantenere la biodiversitŕ e lo spazio ecologico che la preserva e le ricadute sugli strumenti di pianificazione alle diverse scale di intervento. Sia i contributi di esperti, istituzioni e organismi internazionali (Canada, Olanda, Brasile) che quelli nazionali (Universitŕ dell'Aquila, di Pavia, di Urbino, di Genova, Politecnico di Milano e Regione Lombardia) evidenziano la possibilitŕ di utilizzo della rete ecologica come paradigma di sviluppo sostenibile dal punto di vista ambientale, ma anche insediativo e sociale.

<p>Nell'attuale periodo di programmazione della PAC la protezione e il miglioramento delle infrastrutture gestite dalle aziende agricole e che contribuiscono grandemente alla determinazione della qualità del paesaggio rurale, compreso quelle ad alta valenza ecologica, sono state rese possibili rispettivamente dall'applicazione dello Standard di Condizionalità 4.4 : “Mantenimento degli elementi caratteristici del paesaggio” e dall’adesione alla Misura agroambientale 323: “Tutela e riqualificazione del patrimonio rurale” implementata dai PSR.In questo studio, che ha riguardato la valutazione paesaggistica di un’area del Comune di Conegliano, si è inteso fornire uno strumento su base geografica che, insieme ad altri strumenti di valutazione, consenta la redazione di carte tematiche di “monitoraggio quantitativo” della valenza degli elementi caratteristici del paesaggio e dell’impatto dei livellamenti, consentendo anche di rappresentarne la percezione dinamica. Il monitoraggio quantitativo può consentire alle Amministrazioni locali di trarre elementi di giudizio e di scelta idonei a tutelare gli aspetti paesistici dei distretti rurali ove l’attività vitivinicola gioca un ruolo fondamentale fra le attività economiche. Sulla base di tali elementi di giudizio e di scelta sarà possibile predisporre i regolamenti di governo del territorio, efficaci nella tutela del paesaggio, da far rispettare per l’ottenimento della concessione dell’autorizzazione, cui lo standard di Condizionalità 1.1.b fa riferimento. Le metodologie proposta non sono alternative all’Approccio di Valutazione Storico Culturale (AVASC) proposto da Agnoletti (2010) che valuta la dinamica dell’uso del suolo e i cambiamenti avvenuti in un ampio arco temporale al fine di definire come “caratteristico” un elemento del paesaggio. </p>

Every crisis at the same time reveals, forewarns and implies changes with cyclical trends that can be analyzed from different disciplinary perspectives, building scenarios to anticipate the future, despite uncertainties and risks. And the current crisis certainly appears as one of the most problematic of the modern era: recently, Luigi Ferrara, Director of the School of Design at the George Brown College in Toronto and of the connected Institute without Boundaries, highlighted how the pandemic has simply accelerated undergoing dynamics, exacerbating other crises – climatic, environmental, social, economic – which had already been going on for a long time both locally and globally. In the most economically developed contexts, from North America to Europe, the Covid emergency has led, for example, to the closure of almost 30% of the retail trade, as well as to the disposal and sale of many churches. Places of care and assistance, such as hospitals and elderly houses, have become places of death and isolation for over a year, or have been closed. At the same time, the pandemic has imposed the revolution of the remote working and education, which was heralded – without much success – more than twenty years ago. In these even contradictory dynamics, Ferrara sees many possibilities: new roles for stronger and more capable public institutions as well as the opportunity to rethink and redesign the built environment and the landscape. Last but not least, against a future that could be configured as dystopian, a unique chance to enable forms of citizenship and communities capable of inhabiting more sustainable, intelligent and ethical cities and territories; and architects capable of designing them. This multifactorial and pervasive crisis seems therefore to impose a deep review of the current unequal development models, in the perspective of that “creative destruction” that Schumpeter placed at the basis of the dynamic entrepreneurial push: «To produce means to combine materials and forces within our reach. To produce other things, or the same things by a different method, means to combine these materials and forces differently» (Schumpeter, 1912). A concept well suiting to the design practice as a response to social needs and improving the living conditions. This is the perspective of Architectural Technology, in its various forms, which has always placed the experimental method at the center of its action. As Eduardo Vittoria already pointed out: «The specific contribution of the technological project to the development of an industrial culture is aimed at balancing the emotional-aesthetic data of the design with the technical-productive data of the industry. Design becomes a place of convergence of ideas and skills related to factuality, based on a multidisciplinary intelligence» (Vittoria, 1999). A lucid and appropriate critique of the many formalistic emphases that have invested contemporary architecture. In the most acute phases of the pandemic, the radical nature of this polycrisis has been repeatedly invoked as a lever for an equally radical modification of the development models, for the definitive defeat of conjunctural and emergency modes of action. With particular reference to the Italian context, however, it seems improper to talk about a “change of models” – whether economic, social, productive or programming, rather than technological innovation – since in the national reality the models and reference systems prove to not to be actually structured. The current socio-economic and productive framework, and the political and planning actions themselves, are rather a variegated and disordered set of consolidated practices, habits often distorted when not deleterious, that correspond to stratified regulatory apparatuses, which are inconsistent and often ineffective. It is even more difficult to talk about programmatic rationality models in the specific sector of construction and built environment transformation, where the enunciation of objectives and the prospection of planning actions rarely achieve adequate projects and certain implementation processes, verified for the consistency of the results obtained and monitored for the ability in maintaining the required performance over time. Rather than “changing the model”, in the Italian case, we should therefore talk about giving shape and implementation to an organic and rational system of multilevel and inter-sectorial governance models, which assumes the principles of subsidiarity, administrative decentralization, inter-institutional and public-private cooperation. But, even in the current situation, with the pandemic not yet over, we are already experiencing a sort of “return to order”: after having envisaged radical changes – new urban models environmentally and climatically more sustainable, residential systems and public spaces more responsive to the pressing needs of social demand, priority actions to redevelop the suburbs and to strength infrastructures and ecosystem services, new advanced forms of decision-making decentralization for the co-planning of urban and territorial transformations, and so on – everything seems to has been reset to zero. This is evident from the list of actions and projects proposed by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), where no clear national strategy for green transition emerges, even though it is repeatedly mentioned. As highlighted by the Coordination of Technical-Scientific Associations for the Environment and Landscape1, and as required by EU guidelines2, this transition requires a paradigm shift that assumes eco-sustainability as a transversal guideline for all actions. With the primary objective of protecting ecosystem balances, improving and enhancing the natural and landscape capital, as well as protecting citizen health and well-being from environmental risks and from those generated by improper anthropization phenomena. The contents of the Plan explicitly emphases the need to «repair the economic and social damage of the pandemic crisis» and to «contribute to addressing the structural weaknesses of the Italian economy», two certainly relevant objectives, the pursuit of which, however, could paradoxically contrast precisely with the transition to a more sustainable development. In the Plan, the green revolution and the ecological transition are resolved in a dedicated axis (waste management, hydrogen, energy efficiency of buildings, without however specific reform guidelines of the broader “energy” sector), while «only one of the projects of the Plan regards directly the theme Biodiversity / Ecosystem / Landscape, and in a completely marginal way» (CATAP, 2021). Actions are also limited for assessing the environmental sustainability of the interventions, except the provision of an ad hoc Commission for the streamlining of some procedural steps and a generic indication of compliance with the DNSH-Do not significant Harm criterion (do not cause any significant damage), without specific guidelines on the evaluation methods. Moreover, little or nothing in the Plan refers on actions and investments in urban renewal, abandoned heritage recovery3, of in protecting and enhancing areas characterized by environmental sensitivity/fragility; situations widely present on the national territory, which are instead the first resource for a structural environmental transition. Finally yet importantly, the well-known inability to manage expenditure and the public administration inefficiencies must be considered: a limit not only to the effective implementation of projects, but also to the control of the relationship between time, costs and quality (also environmental) of the interventions. In many places, the Plan has been talked about as an opportunity for a real “reconstruction”, similar to that of post-war Italy; forgetting that the socio-economic renaissance was driven by the INA-Casa Plan4, but also by a considerable robustness of the cultural approach in the research and experimentation of new housing models (Schiaffonati, 2014)5. A possible “model”, which – appropriately updated in socio-technical and environmental terms – could be a reference for an incisive governmental action aiming at answering to a question – the one of the housing – far from being resolved and still a priority, if not an emergency. The crisis also implies the deployment of new skills, with a review of outdated disciplinary approaches, abandoning all corporate resistances and subcultures that have long prevented the change. A particularly deep fracture in our country, which has implications in research, education and professions, dramatically evident in the disciplines of architectural and urban design. Coherently with the EU Strategic Agenda 2019-2024 and the European Pillar of Social Rights, the action plan presented by the Commission in March 2021, with the commitment of the Declaration of Porto on May 7, sets three main objectives for 2030: an employment rate higher than 78%, the participation of more than 60% of adults in training courses every year and at least 15 million fewer people at risk of social exclusion or poverty6. Education, training and retraining, lifelong learning and employment-oriented skills, placed at the center of EU policy action, now require large investments, to stimulate employment transitions towards the emerging sectors of green, circular and digital economies (environmental design and assessment, risk assessment & management, safety, durability and maintainability, design and management of the life cycle of plans, projects, building systems and components: contents that are completely marginal or absent in the current training offer of Architecture). Departments and PhDs in the Technological Area have actively worked with considerable effectiveness in this field. In these regards, we have to recall the role played by Romano Del Nord «protagonist for commitment and clarity in identifying fundamental strategic lines for the cultural and professional training of architects, in the face of unprecedented changes of the environmental and production context» (Schiaffonati, 2021). Today, on the other hand, the axis of permanent and technical training is almost forgotten by ministerial and university policies for the reorganization of teaching systems, with a lack of strategic visions for bridging the deficit of skills that characterizes the area of architecture on the facing environmental and socio-economic challenges. Also and precisely in the dual perspective of greater interaction with the research systems and with the world of companies and institutions, and of that trans- and multi-disciplinary dimension of knowledge, methods and techniques necessary for the ecological transition of settlement systems and construction sector. Due to the high awareness of the Technological Area about the multifactorial and multi-scale dimension of the crises that recurrently affect our territories, SITdA has been configured since its foundation as a place for scientific and cultural debate on the research and training themes. With a critical approach to the consoling academic attitude looking for a “specific disciplinary” external and extraneous to the social production of goods and services. Finalizing the action of our community to «activate relationships between universities, professions, institutions through the promotion of the technological culture of architecture [...], to offer scientific-cultural resources for the training and qualification of young researchers [...], in collaboration with the national education system in order to advance training in the areas of technology and innovation in architecture» (SITdA Statute, 2007). Goals and topics which seem to be current, which Techne intends to resume and develop in the next issues, and already widely present in this n. 22 dedicated to the Circular Economy. A theme that, as emerges from the contributions, permeates the entire field of action of the project: housing, services, public space, suburbs, infrastructures, production, buildings. All contexts in which technological innovation invests both processes and products: artificial intelligence, robotics and automation, internet of things, 3D printing, sensors, nano and biotechnology, biomaterials, biogenetics and neuroscience feed advanced experiments that cross-fertilize different contributions towards common objectives of circularity and sustainability. In this context, the issue of waste, the superfluous, abandonment and waste, emerge, raising the question of re-purpose: an action that crosses a large panel of cases, due to the presence of a vast heritage of resources – materials, artefacts, spaces and entire territories – to be recovered and re-functionalized, transforming, adapting, reusing, reconverting, reactivating the existing for new purposes and uses, or adapting it to new and changing needs. Therefore, by adopting strategies and techniques of reconversion and reuse, of re-manufacturing and recycling of construction and demolition waste, of design for disassembly that operate along even unprecedented supply chains and which are accompanied by actions to extend the useful life cycle of materials , components and building systems, as well as product service logic also extended to durable goods such as the housing. These are complex perspectives but considerably interesting, feasible through the activation of adequate and updated skills systems, for a necessary and possible future, precisely starting from the ability – as designers, researchers and teachers in the area of Architectural Technology – to read the space and conceive a project within a system of rationalities, albeit limited, but substantially founded, which qualify the interventions through approaches validated in research and experimental verification. Contrarily to any ineffective academicism, which corresponds in fact to a condition of subordination caused by the hegemonic dynamics at the base of the crisis itself, but also by a loss of authority that derives from the inadequate preparation of the architects. An expropriation that legitimizes the worst ignorance in the government of the territories, cities and artifacts. Education in Architecture, strictly connected to the research from which contents and methods derive, has its central pivot in the project didactic: activity by its nature of a practical and experimental type, applied to specific places and contexts, concrete and material, and characterized by considerable complexity, due to the multiplicity of factors involved. This is what differentiates the construction sector, delegated to territorial and urban transformations, from any other sector. A sector that borrows its knowledge from other production processes, importing technologies and materials. With a complex integration of which the project is charged, for the realization of the buildings, along a succession of phases for corresponding to multiple regulatory and procedural constraints. The knowledge and rationalization of these processes are the basis of the evolution of the design and construction production approaches, as well as merely intuitive logics. These aspects were the subject of in-depth study at the SITdA National Conference on “Producing Project” (Reggio Calabria, 2018), and relaunched in a new perspective by the International Conference “The project in the digital age. Technology, Nature, Culture” scheduled in Naples on the 1st-2nd of July 2021. A reflection that Techne intends to further develop through the sharing of knowledge and scientific debate, selecting topics of great importance, to give voice to a new phase and recalling the practice of design research, in connection with the production context, institutions and social demand. “Inside the Polycrisis. The possible necessary” is the theme of the call we launched for n. 23, to plan the future despite the uncertainties and risks, foreshadowing strategies that support a unavoidable change, also by operating within the dynamics that, for better or for worse, will be triggered by the significant resources committed to the implementation of the Recovery Plan. To envisage systematic actions based on the centrality of a rational programming, of environmentally appropriate design at the architectural, urban and territorial scales, and of a continuous monitoring of the implementation processes. With the commitment also to promote, after each release, a public moment of reflection and critical assessment on the research progresses. NOTES 1 “Osservazioni del Coordinamento delle Associazioni Tecnico-scientifiche per l’Ambiente e il Paesaggio al PNRR”, 2021. 2 EU Guidelines, SWD-2021-12 final, 21.1.2021. 3 For instance, we can consider the 7,000 km of dismissed railways, with related buildings and areas. 4 The two seven-year activities of the Plan (1949-1963) promoted by Amintore Fanfani, Minister of Labor and Social Security at the time, represented both an employment and a social maneuver, which left us the important legacy of neighborhoods that still today they have their own precise identity, testimony of the architectural culture of the Italian twentieth century. But also a «grandiose machine for the housing» (Samonà, 1949), based on a clear institutional and organizational reorganization, with the establishment of a single body (articulated in the plan implementation committee, led by Filiberto Guala, with regulatory functions of disbursement of funds, assignment of tasks and supervision, and in the INA-Casa Management directed by the architect Arnaldo Foschini, then dean of the Faculty of Architecture), which led to the construction of two million rooms for over 350,000 families. See Di Biagi F. (2013), Il Contributo italiano alla storia del Pensiero – Tecnica, Enciclopedia Treccani. 5 From Quaderni of the Centro Studi INA-Casa, to Gescal and in the Eighties to the activity of CER. Complex theme investigated by Fabrizio Schiaffonati in Il progetto della residenza sociale, edited by Raffaella Riva. 6 Ferruccio De Bortoli underlines in Corriere della Sera of 15 May 2021: «The revolution of lifelong learning (which) is no less important for Brussels than the digital or green one. By 2030, at least 60 per cent of the active population will have to participate in training courses every year. It will be said: but 2030 is far away. There’s time. No, because most people have escaped that to achieve this goal, by 2025 – that is, in less than four years – 120 million Europeans will ideally return to school. A kind of great educational vaccination campaign. Day after tomorrow».