Landscape and territorial planning

Landscape planning models have always been inspired by ancient concepts of land management; these principles have as their objective the survival of the territory and the improvement of the quality of life of the people who live there.

The main purposes are:

• divide the territory in order to protect natural, aesthetic-cultural productive resources and rationalize its use;
• mimprove the quality of life of the inhabitants, through opportunities for social, economic and cultural promotion;
• crear development through the interoperability of economic and productive activities;
• sto guard Traditional characters respect the past to pass it on to future generations.

Planning scope

Depending on the type of intervention we want to carry out, the planning and control of the territory must be carried out at an appropriate design scale. Currently, there are several regulatory tools for territorial planning (PRG, Building Plans) that favor poorly coordinated management and that provide planning action that takes place within administrative boundaries that do not fully reflect the physical-cultural realities of the territory. They rarely take into account the aggregations and characteristics of the landscape.

Italy is a vast geographical area that includes numerous types of landscape that mostly derive from the interaction of different natural and anthropogenic peculiarities.

The definitions of homogeneous territorial units must derive both by taking into account the aspect linked to the characteristics of the territory, and the cultural aspect that varies according to the community that inhabits it and the use of the territory that it needs for growth and development.

K. Sale proposes, according to Gilberto Oneto, to divide the territory according to advanced studies of Landscape ecology and bioregionalism, defining the "georegions" which can be defined as organic landscape units.

The proposed subdivisions take into account the specific floral and animal characteristics identifiable on the basis of physical characteristics such as the course of rivers, valleys, mountains.

Homogeneous areas define an area of ​​intervention with specific characteristics, the reference to the human community that composes it and that lives in a certain territory, the study of the culture, the economic structure, the needs and the ways of life, condition the use and the form of the resulting territory.

It follows that each landscape is a complex organism with its own biological rhythms and relationships. Each landscape is the physical and cultural result of the overlapping over time of countless components that through different actions and origins produce situations that are always original, making the landscape unique and irreproducible (genis loci).

In order to understand these overlaps we can distinguish different objective needs linked to human physical interactions with the territory itself in relation to the resident population:

• physical (spatial relationships of the individual and the community);
• ideological (i.e. the right - duty to live in the spaces of property, constitutes the symbolic and physical bond of a community that settles in a territory, making the bonds of connection within the community itself more stable and strong);
• historical (formal languages ​​designed to meet the needs with which a specific community identifies itself);
• technical (these are needs related to groups or individuals arising from new needs that could not be previously hypothesized or that derive from poor planning);
• futures (the needs arising from actions that will have an outcome in the near future, the progress and development of which we can/must predict).

Particular attention must be paid to that portion of citizens who are temporarily in a place for work, study or tourism reasons. The quantification of the space available for the non-resident population is therefore based on the specific characteristics of each portion of territory that will have different characteristics depending on the development of industrial centers, productivity or tourism.

Local environmental and indigenous values

The first sources on the subject date back to the culture of the Western garden in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in relation to the fashion of the impact of exotic essences. Following the great geographical explorations in Europe, large botanical gardens began to be developed to catalogue, study and collect the greatest number of absences.

The first botanical garden was that of Padua in 1545, the spirit of collecting and gathering was subsequently pursued without stopping in 1658, where the Oxford botanical garden counted around 2000 different plants of which only 600 were indigenous to the British Isles.

In this perspective, the construction of gardens is influenced by the exotic vegetation that became a characteristic element of the time. This influence is integrated in the so-called English parks that, by their nature, emphasize the naturalistic characteristics of the local landscape. Only the most sensitive designers propose natural formal solutions with a botanical twist that lay the foundations for a more ecological attitude.

In 1716-1783 the landscape architect Lancelot Brown called Capability for his sense of "understanding" the place on which to intervene, he used plants as a structure composed exclusively of seven essences of which five native and two acclimatized in the English landscape. In this period he began to develop the sensitivity for the "genius of the place", which only decades later thanks to the German From Puckler Muskau  which urges that only native or perfectly acclimatized trees and bushes be planted, avoiding exotic ornamental plants altogether. Von Puckler-Muskau firmly believes that even in an idealized nature (garden project) there is a need to maintain the character of the country and climate in which the park is located.

In this perspective, we try to rediscover the naturalistic values ​​of the environment and ensure that the garden fits into the local landscape. In the following centuries, with the evolution of the concept, a real discipline linked to three basic principles arose:

1. the so-called “natural” landscape design, linked to the growth of consideration for the beauty of spontaneous landscapes and native plants;
2. the importance for landscape systems, characterised by open spaces including bodies of water;
3. the introduction of systematic analyses for the study of resources in support of responsible landscape design and planning. Responsible means the study of local vegetation series that favor the development of flora to the advantage of the resources used for its construction and maintenance.

One of the first projects to propose the use of native plants is that of the Graceland Cemetery of 1880.
This new discipline finds its maximum development in Chicago thanks to the personality of Henry Chandler Cowles who taught ecology at the University of Chicago.

This period sees the convergence of the professionalism of W.A. Miller, J.Jensen e Frank A. Waugh, co-founder of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Massachusetts, who was the first to deal with communication and landscape arrangements.

Frederick Law Olmsted Instead he remains very interested in the urban landscape systems that started in Chicago, which influenced Horace W. S. Cleveland (Minneapolis) and Charles Eliot (Boston) which gave the utmost importance to ecological parameters. In the years preceding the Second World War, landscape intervention activities developed on an ecological basis and aimed at a more traditional configuration in the creation of parks and gardens.

Frank A. Waugh he was the first professional to act as a consultant to the National Forest Service, regarding road systems and the organization of professional institutional courses in road furniture in the early 30s. He became the precursor of the figure of the landscape architect understood in the modern sense, among the numerous innovations he continuously hypothesizes the exclusive use of indigenous plants in road systems.

Ecology concept

The phenomena of indiscriminate use of the territory, contrary to what one might think, can be found not only in the modern era but also in the past, for example in the deforestation of the Mediterranean basin, rather than episodes of degradation linked above all to the indiscriminate cutting of forests in the Middle Ages. Sensitivity to the theme of ecology began in the 15th and 16th centuries following the devastating floods in the Po Valley, with consequent considerations of a crypto-ecological nature.

In particular, the principles of modern ecological thought with an Arcadian vision of Gilbert White (the peaceful coexistence between man and other living beings) and the imperialist one of Linnaeus (Re-establishing man's dominion over nature through the exercise of reason and hard work).

The principles of modern ecological planning that recall the concept of safeguarding the asset, in the perspective of restoration and conservation proposed by Cesare Brandi, and which we can identify in the principles proposed by Gilberto Oneto:

• Principle of globality or Inter-casualty. That is, the territory (landscape) is conceived as a single large living organism with biological characteristics whose perceptible forms derive from the superposition of multiple natural and cultural components.
  
• Principle of environmental autonomy. It implies the concept of acceptance of the landscape as a subject, where its planning involves the evaluation and verification of the economic benefits of intervention in this perspective the environmental impact assessment represents a targeted version of a precise use of a portion of the territory of the analysis process. 
  
• Principle of minimum sizing and reversibility. It is necessary to carefully evaluate the need to avoid oversizing unjustified spatial needs, furthermore each action must be able to be modified for the benefit of the protection of the asset.
  
• Principle of economy. Ecology economy for the long term is the basis of the concept of intervention on the territory.
  
• Principle of respect for tradition, that is, respect for local languages ​​in relation to the principle of economy.
  
• Principle of transparency and democracy, by performing analysis processes to understand and optimally evaluate planning choices.

References

G. Oneto – Landscape Planning Manual, Milan, il sole 24h, 1997
K. Sale – The Regions of Nature, Milan, Eleuthera, 1991
P. Picarolo – Public and private green spaces, Ulrico Hoelpi Milan, 1999
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Christian GL Hirschfeld – Theorie de l'art des janrdins, Leipzig, 1780
Hermann Furst Von Puckler-Muskau – Garden and Landscape, Milano Rizzoli, 1984
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Cover photo: Tien Vu on Pixabay