Urban landscapes and nature in planning and spatial strategies

Abstract

Monitoring the effects that programmes for sustainability, or plans for the landscape and large parks, have had on the design of the city, on both city-wide and large-area scales, should be discouraging. Principles and new paradigms raised by the environmental question that lack the necessary practical and operational implications regarding design and management, and which are postponed to another time, have little impact on the relatively rapid changes caused by diffuse urbanization and become simply a refrain of good intentions. Elsewhere, this great responsibility regarding the landscape is deliberately and specifically entrusted to urban planning by the European Landscape Convention. The true revolution introduced by this directive is to invite the landscape to square with the matters of the territory and the city in all of its many facets. At the same time, “protected areas”, which directly or indirectly touch more than a third of Italian territory, could become (together with the environmental infrastructure network and the system of residual and decommissioned areas) new spatial anchors in urban and territorial reorganization, provided that these elements become components of the ecosystem of the city and not just cosmetic dressing. The pervasiveness of these themes should cause those interested in territorial government to reflect, going so far as to consider parks and landscape planning as the foundation of urban planning in this special historical moment, particularly if we are able to manage to detach it from the sectoral vision to which it is so attached.