AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

The landscape architects must know how to contribute to spatial planning processes.

The aim of the module is to verify and consolidate their knowledge of planning, to train them to interact with urban planners and other experts in the design and management of sector plans and projects of territorial value.

At the end of the laboratory, the student will have acquired the ability to:

• autonomously set up and carry out a landscape analysis program,

• identify and represent criticalities and values of the analyzed landscape,

• produce a proposal of redevelopment consistent with the characteristics identified, the surrounding conditions, the existing planning framework;

• represent and describe the expected results of the project.

TEACHING METHODS

The module includes thematic lessons held by the teacher, inspections carried out collectively and individually, work in the atelier during which the students, organized in groups of 2-4 people, will apply to different projects, discuss with colleagues and the teachers, in the framework of a constant integration between the disciplines and the modules of the laboratory.

There will be interventions by specialists on topics of relevance for the purposes of the laboratory and interaction with local administrators and actors, in order to gain greater awareness of the problems present in the area studied and to bring the school experience closer to the dynamics of the profession.

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

The skills already acquired as part of the course of study will be exercised and refined to carry out analysis of a case study, represent critical issues and values, verify and consolidate ability in designing.

The student will be guided to interpret and evaluate the landscape in order to identify its values ​​and propose redevelopment in a perspective of sustainability of the interventions.

Lessons

Ways of understanding the landscape.

• Urban planning and agronomy facing the landscape: the soil in its various meanings. Agricultural and urban uses and values. The sustainability of the territories, settlements and production activities.

• The development of the aesthetic appreciation of the landscape and integration with the economic, historical, social components.

• Natural landscapes, human landscapes, rural landscapes: relationships between the morphology of the territory, production systems, settlements. Economic transformations, crisis of historical rural landscapes and the formation of new landscapes in contemporary Italy.

• The Mediterranean landscapes and the specificities of Liguria. The case study.

Landscape and protected areas regulation and management.

• The landscape in the legislation and management practice of the subjects who implement its protection.

• From the European Landscape Convention (2000) to the Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape (Legislative Decree 42/2004), to the new generation of landscape plans.

• Landscape and planning in the study area (the Ligurian case): municipal plans, landscape plan, basin plans and other plans with an effect on environmental aspects, policies of territorial value.

Case study. Water landscapes in the metropolitan city.

Exercise carried out for groups, with the assistance of teachers.

Theme

Metropolitan cities, in Italy, are territories on one side characterized by high densities and strong anthropogenic pressures, on the other side subject to depopulation and abandonment, phenomena that trigger degradation processes.

In the background, the problem of obviating growing imbalances emerges- above all environmental ones but also gaps between people who live in central urban areas or in disadvantaged peripheral areas; in regulatory terms, it is a question of setting the foundations for a new pact between cities and non-cities.

This pact cannot but completely reform the relationship of interdependence that Italian cities developed in past centuries with their countryside, sometimes coinciding with pleasant rural landscapes, sometimes with inaccessible mountain areas but equally marked by the human presence; the deposits of history, expressed by heritage and culture, must be reinterpreted in the context of a new economic vision and a new relationship between the environment and settled communities.

The case study is a portion of the Apennine ridge between Valbisagno and Valle Scrivia, included in the Metropolitan City of Genoa, where there are rural landscapes, architectural emergencies, mountain environments marked by human action and in particular by systems for capturing, collecting and conveying waters to the city.

The project may concern a park proposal where agricultural, forestry and pastoral activities are seen as an instrument of territorial protection; the passage of the Alta Via dei Monti Liguri and the presence of a network of paths and ancient paths are an opportunity for a program of interventions aimed at the protection and greater usability for recreational purposes of the mountain portion; the management of water resources and the way in which it has produced landscape are the object of specific attention and stimulus to new projects.

Work method:

• Construction of the data framework (Morphology; Land uses, Environmental and naturalistic resources; Historical and landscape resources; Territorial endowments - infrastructures, services, plants).

• Operational framework (projects in progress, plans and policies in place; any expectations of the community).

• Construction of new landscape development and reproduction scenarios.

• Elaboration of a strategic project for the enhancement of assets and territorial redevelopment.

Final product (to be presented for the exam, in groups or individually):

• PPoint presentation specifying:

I. Territorial framework of the case study and relations with the context

II. Intrinsic characteristics of the case study, values, problems

III. Evolutionary scenarios: presumable spontaneous trends and possible directions for development

IV. Project proposal, including a form illustrating the phases and methods of implementation.

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

AA.VV, “Paesaggi rurali in trasformazione: nuovi modelli, linee di ricerca, politiche d’intervento” in: Franco Salvatori,  a cura di, L’apporto della Geografia tra rivoluzioni e riforme, XXXII Congresso Geografico Italiano, Roma, 2017

Gabriella Bonini e Chiara Visentin, a cura di, Paesaggi in trasformazione, Istituto Alcide Cervi – Editrice Compositori, Gattico-Bologna, 2014

Alberto Magnaghi, Il progetto locale, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2000

Alberto Magnaghi, a cura di, La rappresentazione identitaria del territorio, Alinea, Firenze, 2005

Jan McHarg, Progettare con la Natura, Franco Muzzio, Padova, 2007 (1969)

Emilio Sereni, Storia del paesaggio agrario italiano, Laterza, Roma-Bari, 1974 (1961)

Aldo Sestini, Conosci l’Italia. Volume VII. Il Paesaggio, Touring Club Italiano, Milano, 1963

Frederick Steiner, Costruire il paesaggio, McGraw Hill, Milano, 2004

Eugenio Turri, Il paesaggio degli uomini, Zanichelli, Bologna, 2003