Authors:Tonino Perna Abstract: The article reviews the recent history of a family of ideas and practices related to the concept of territorial sovereignty, crucial to the eco-territorialist proposal; and tries to outline, for them, a ‘return route’ apt to retrieve their propulsive potential. PubDate: 2022-12-26 DOI: 10.13128/sdt-14162 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Sergio Malcevschi Abstract: The current model of ecological transition, considered as a reference at the institutional level, has climate change as its central object, and is mainly based on the goals identified by the Paris Agreement (2015) and the European Green Deal (2019). The article discusses the implications of this model for the local eco-territorial level, a combination of bio-physical ecosystems and identity values. It raises the issue of the relationship between planetary common goods and local common goods, in many real cases resulted in conflicts between the various actors involved; and highlights the current condition of a ‘perfect storm’, as several critical factors (macro-trends and the inertia of greenhouse gas concentrations, the closeness of tipping points in critical climatic processes, the consequences of the ongoing war on uses of energy and compliance with international agreements) menace to make the current transition model ineffective. Therefore, it proposes a better balance between mitigation and adaptation strategies, also through win-win actions responding to both needs and also including, for the various actors involved, paths to share the contents of an acceptable evolution of local ecosystems and territories. PubDate: 2022-12-25 DOI: 10.13128/sdt-14161 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Paolo Pileri Abstract: A crux that urban planning has been dragging on for decades is the generalization with which it uses the words of ecology. A generalization that cannot be allowed in the face of a territorial project that is thirsty for truth about the ecosystem. The territorialist proposal, that already embraces the idea of ecological conversion by Langer, may be a possible path for the next changes. But some ghosts need to be defeated: technological blunder, ecological ignorance, administrative fragmentation, etc. Soil is the ecosystem resource denied by the urban project. But it is also the parameter through which we can monitor the effort or failure of urban planning towards the care of the territory. In Italy, land consumption is out of control and continues not to be at the center of any reform. At the same time, urban planning does not care about land consumption and, perhaps, one reason for this distraction is the profound and intimate lack of knowledge of what soil ecologically is. Making room for these words in study paths, in political training, in the updating of public and private technicians is a question that we pose as crucial for moving in the future and addressing what has now become, by dint of neglect, an urgency: the ecological and climatic crisis. More than a new anthropic civilization, an ecologization of civilization is urgent. Working on precise ecological words is a symbolic key issue. PubDate: 2022-12-24 DOI: 10.13128/sdt-14109 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Agnès Sinaï Abstract: Today, urban morphologies respond to the de-contextualized and functional rules of the machines civilization and fossil fuels where the territory is no more than a simple technical support. So far, the dynamic of metropolises has been based on the import of ghost acreage, that is to say of distant energies and materials. In giving the measure of the acceleration of the Earth transformation caused by industrial societies, this unprecedented era suggests a change of temporal and spatial scale, a systemic shift. The need to connect with the local implies contextualizing the urban and the suburban in the living beings and the immediate resources, in particular water and energy. The challenge is to bring out elements of restoration, in the form of bioregional ecological niches, within the global metropolization and its future exoduses. PubDate: 2022-12-24 DOI: 10.13128/sdt-13703 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Fiorenzo Ferlaino, Francesca Silvia Rota Abstract: The article explores the opportunity to apply Alberto Magnaghi’s urban bioregion model to the case of Turin. Much weakened, both in vision andin political leadership, after the 2008 and CoViD-19 crises, Turin can use the urban bioregion paradigm to reorganize its urban and regional planning and pursue new ambitions of sustainable development. Moreover, in the area of “Corona verde” project (for the development of Turin’s periurban green infrastructure) the city already has the ideal context to experiment the integrated territorial vision proposed by Magnaghi. In Corona verde natural, ecosystem and landscape resources, as well as in its production and governance traditions, there are the conditions to overcome the traditional Turin-centric closure and to promote new governance models based on the development of circular supply chains, of the place values and of the local communities leading role. PubDate: 2022-12-24 DOI: 10.13128/sdt-13701 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Patrizia Ferri Abstract: Leonardo’s entire work is triggered by observation of nature read as a model and a guide, a generative and structural principle whose exemplary value relies on inner balances among elements rather than on domination practices; thus assuming natural processes as a methodological paradigm for sciences and the arts. His interdisciplinary attitude, committed to a synthesis of diverse forms of knowledge, identifies him as the first experimenter of mostly unknown and overlapping territories, and requires a fluid critical view, not reducible to monolingual approaches, to be consistently interpreted. His work, which may indeed be regarded as contemporary, is always based on interrelations between subjects and objects, thus anticipating a systemic interpretation of life as a complex dynamic of metabolic processes. His approach, fuelled by a deep awareness and respect for life in all its forms, always honours and combines specificities into holistic visions: in planning, he mingles aesthetics with social and environmental ethics around an idea (revolutionary for his times) of the city as a public space, where built and open areas meet together each with their distinct morphologies and social features. This foreshadows modern urbanism and organic architecture, as well as eco-sustainable urban regeneration, a place-based approach to eco-design based on listening to places and communities. PubDate: 2022-12-23 DOI: 10.13128/sdt-13820 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Giulia Panepinto Abstract: The article evaluates in a qualitative and diachronic key the characteristics of self-sustainability and social innovation of the local development path activated by the Administration lead by Angelo Vassallo, mayor of Pollica from 1995 to 2010. This empirical reflection is read through a located and territorial perspective, and placed within the recent debate on marginal areas. The research topic has public relevance, as a a practice of ‘society self-defence’ where the commons represent the privileged lever of local government. Indeed, it is possible to discern, in it, attempts to reconnect the economy to the territory through slow tourism and the rediscovery of local stone, and a political planning that follows a ‘grassroots globalisation’ logic. This government experience, which ended with the murder of the ‘Fisherman Mayor’, concerns areas further marginalised by the pervasiveness of criminal economies. The cognitive objective of the research is to analyze how the territory is transformed when a public actor changes the way of conceiving local development. The research design is inspired by the territorialist analytical scheme, which observe the territory along four forms of space: political, relational, economic, ecological. The empirical research (carried out between December 2021 and January 2022) uses institutional sources (secondary quantitative data, municipal council deliberations) and interviews with privileged witnesses. PubDate: 2022-12-14 DOI: 10.13128/sdt-13780 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Carlo Valorani, Marco Vigliotti Abstract: The worldwide dynamics of the last thirty years are outlining opaque scenarios and forcing contemporaries to search for a catharsis whose urgency can no longer be postponed: cultures, economies and ecological balances in their current state are in danger of collapsing at an unprecedented rate. Nevertheless, it is possible to draw from the past references capable of updating consolidated paradigms, rediscovering approaches oriented towards the long term aimed at maintaining the conditions that have allowed progress and well-being for a large part of our species. The millenary practice of transhumance, today relegated to marginal contexts, is one of these: the extensive breeding of livestock, conducted on foot over long distances in search of pastures, is an exemplary adaptation to the scarcity of resources provided by the natural succession of seasons. In contrast, the problems arising from industrialised forms of animal husbandry are highlighted by numerous studies. The regeneration of the vast material and immaterial heritage inherited from transhumance, on the other hand, can provide answers to environmental, ethical and social issues that afflict every continent today: an ante litteram model of sustainability that finds in bioregional planning a concrete prospect of re-actualisation. PubDate: 2022-12-14 DOI: 10.13128/sdt-13793 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Fabrizio Ferreri Abstract: In the transition from sustainability to self-sustainability, which corresponds to the revision of the notion of environment in the direction of the concept of territory, it is possible to highlight the epistemological turning point of eco-territorial proposal. The environmental and ecological issue requires a holistic consideration, in the synthesis between theory and practice, capable of reaffirming a new subjectivity of the territory within the framework of an 'other' development compared to the dominant neoliberal model. 'Return to the territory' and 'place awareness' are welded together for a territorial ecology, not simply defensive, which questions in depth the generative rules of the relationship between man and territory in order to restore place-based social, cultural and economic forms of life. PubDate: 2022-12-13 DOI: 10.13128/sdt-13698 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Paolo Baldeschi Abstract: Climate change brings periods of severe drought and catastrophic floods, events that are happening all over the world right now. This article evaluates the possibility that disastrous flood events, such as that of 1966, still occur in Valdarno and Florentine area, the latter taken as a sample case. A holistic approach such as the territorialist one allows going beyond customary end-of-pipe solutions, converting emergencies into opportunities to strengthen territorial systems as a whole. ‘River contracts’ extended to the entire Valdarno area, in particular, can be an important tool to increase the resilience of the whole basin, but only in the framework of a strategy considering environmental protection as the central goal of territorial policies. PubDate: 2022-12-13 DOI: 10.13128/sdt-13773 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Giampiero Lombardini Abstract: The Polcevera Valley historically represents a fundamental link between the central Ligurian Sea and the Po Valley. In the short century of the economic-industrial transition, this area experienced one of the most intense industrialization and urbanization processes at the national level, becoming the site of wide productive compounds linked to newly formed workers’ quarters. After the tragic collapse of the Morandi Bridge (2018), and as a consequence of a de-industrialisation process underway for at least three decades, the unsustainability of the industrial and urban-centric settlement model and the need to rethink its urban structure according to new resilient approaches became evident. The paper explores the potential deriving from a reconsideration of the Valley settlement model based on bioregional principles. Rethinking the valley territory, starting from its historically resilient and metabolic connotation, allows us to build an interpretation of the urban area focused on the common governance of resources, where hilly areas, green/blue networks and brownfield spaces could acquire a key role in supplying ecosystem services and urban welfare and foster a new urban economy. Bioregional transformation scenarios could at the same time be the basis for reformulating hypotheses of reuse and regeneration of long-term territorial heritage which tend to be ignored today. PubDate: 2022-12-13 DOI: 10.13128/sdt-13799 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Stella Agostini Abstract: Hydro-geological and climatic emergencies highlight the crisis of the environmental system by marking reactions so deferred in time that the man in the street cannot perceive their social convenience. Starting from an ecological interpretation of history, the paper addresses the problem of redefining ethical content of environmental conservation and development strategies following each other in response to emergencies, suggesting a reflection on which utopian visions and real territories are those where the preconditions of environmental balance could still be re-established. If spatial policies affect the environment and the quality of life, as well as land use conditions are crucial in reducing or accentuating intensity, frequency and duration of extreme events, it is equally important to develop a land ethic of the earth making everyone capable to perceive themselves as part of the biota, the ensemble of organisms that occupy a given area in an ecosystem. Rediscovering the importance of roots and cooperating with our biotic community is the crucial step to transform a merely utopian planning into a new eco-territorialist vision, starting at the local scale what is so hard to achieve at the global one. PubDate: 2022-12-13 DOI: 10.13128/sdt-13915 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 2 (2022)
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