It is becoming more and more difficult to feel like a citizen of one’s own city: nostalgia for the familiar places of the past develops and one feels the need to remain the cultural owner of one’s own landscape. In order to enhance the urban landscape, it is necessary to enhance those who care for it: the ‘active landscape’.
1. Increasingly difficult to feel like a citizen of one’s own city
Nostalgics of places in every small town have their meeting place on the web. They form dense communities, across the most diverse cultural backgrounds, uninterested in anything other than the fascination of their own town, not today, but ‘as it was’.
Those who put up a postcard from 50 or 100 years ago every day know that they are triggering a kind of collective emotional current, which mixes scraps of personal experiences and urban myths. One comments by thanking the publisher for the spark that animated the memory, like a song of youth, one boasts of locating the place and time of the images from details that are meaningful only to true experts. It is a parlour game, seemingly without rules, but in fact reserved for those who have kept the memory of the places they have lived (or that they have been told and that now belong to their personal myth, like the ancient Lares).
What animates the ‘as it was’ groups is nostalgia, that which Claude Raffestin places at the basis of the sense of landscape: the longing for something that is no longer there. But if one pays attention to that ritual of posts, comments, compliments and laments, one understands that nostalgia is not so much about places as it is about a relationship that traditionally belongs to the inhabitant: a real competence of the city, which was known as a pertinence of one’s own home, in every doorway, every shop, every widening that was walked through, in the midst of others. It was a sense of the urban landscape that was constituted as a common good: its participants were fellow citizens not only because they shared the same space, but above all because they shared the same spatial competence.
Certainly the city of that time was smaller, with a powerful, organic structure of public space, which in those years was qualified by the commitment of the entire society. Citizens were proud of their squares, every anniversary filled the Post Office with ‘picture postcards’, showcasing the beauty of their places. Historic monuments were exhibited, but also new things: new gardens, recent neighbourhoods, even cafes or large shops.
It was the concrete face of the municipality, the heritage that the active citizen considered ‘his’. It is only because of this still-living sense of ‘cultural ownership’ of their territory that the thousands of Italian municipalities are still irreducible today and resist the dysfunctions that their tiny size entails. But of the municipalities, even those of the ‘wrinkled’ Italy dear to Fabrizio Barca, it is certainly the capital, which in Italy is a city, however small it may be, that collects the valuable aspects of identity and the image of deep-rooted attachment to one’s own land. There is no doubt that the sense of citizenship lies in villages and small towns: it is in those that it becomes tangible in the form of a unique sense of security and participation. A landscape that produces citizenship is a city, and those who return to the village know this well, feeling it to be their own and stronger than the cities to which they are consigned by life, where they feel (not surprisingly) ‘lost’ for decades.
But the rhetorical figure of the ‘returnees’ is not enough to explain the power of traditional (large or small) cities: urbanisation until a few years ago was a fundamental resource for everyone, indigenous or not. Newcomers are attracted by the city’s reputation as a place of opportunities, but these are only grasped by those who know how to look for them, not only in social relations but also, physically, in the complex labyrinth of stone and people. Those who come from the countryside know that being a ‘citizen’ entails systematic knowledge of the urban public space. So for the established inhabitant, the relationship with the city is an active identity factor, but for everyone it is a real skill: only for those who know it does it prove to be a fertile habitat, where it is easier to develop one’s own project.
Today, those who participate in the ‘how it was’ Facebook groups perceive a different representative power of the city of their fathers than the city of today. The city back then was familiar, like a big neighbourhood, whereas today one no longer recognises oneself in today’s city, which is becoming a non-place. An inhabitant then could boast of knowing spaces and uses unknown to the tourist, he had a direct and specific experience of the signs of ‘his’ city; today everyone is the subject of the same commercial communication, little dedicated and little different from one capital to another.
Certainly this loss of complexity and specificity becomes jarring in territories where the inhabitants are heirs to gigantic cultural (and often economic) investments that entire communities have made for generations on their city. Especially in Italy, where the millenary sense of the ‘commune’ underlies our cities, the choral sense of local histories is striking.
The epochal effort made for centuries by thousands of citizens to qualify their space seems incongruous with the way we inhabit it today. Today, we no longer feel that we are the rightful owners of our cities, the right of those who feel they have participated in their production, but we feel like city-users, guests of cities made by others, progenitors so distant that we no longer feel their fatigue or legacy.
We are not yet fully aware that we have lost our sense of the urban landscape, but we continually have an unpleasant feeling: that we no longer feel like citizens, that we are losing the living, daily verified contact with the values of the community that has hitherto been identified with the physical spaces and relationships of our city. This explains that sort of saudade of the landscape that is spreading in the contemporary area, of which nostalgic groups on Facebook are one of the visible outcomes: the tip of an iceberg of old people’s grief and young people’s bewilderment.
On the other hand, this is an ongoing process in all Italian landscapes: even in that ‘countryside’ that was once the fruit of the expertise of those who cultivated it (as well as inhabited it) and that today is now submerged by layers of non-rural things and signs and by modes of cultivation that are the same everywhere, like a sort of invasive and useless cultural weed, which makes even the children of those who still do farming for a living, and thus physically produce that landscape, lose their sense of ‘ownership’ of places.
By now the games are played: the semiology of the landscape, urban and otherwise, is being simplified and above all homogenised: we are missing the significant centres of attention of our history and our project and end up being camped in a gigantic periphery where substantial and shared differences are no longer generated. And this is serious not only for a generic defence of landscape diversity (to be respected in any case, even without really understanding what it means, as is done for biodiversity), but rather for a structural aspect of ‘political culture’.
For if every place, in its complexity and co-presence of so many elements, but also in the concreteness of its everyday experience, no longer generates cultural value, if we lose the localised criteria of reference, which we had constructed on the basis of our own direct experiences or those of the people we know, to what do we entrust our choices, our judgement on the world?
If we lose the taste for the spaces and behaviours we are fond of, which we share with a heterogeneous and dense community, as has been the case in Italian cities so far, we lose the experiential foundation of collective sentimental knowledge, that which is the basis of democratic political judgement. The knowledge of the recent city is boring and defatiguing, if only because it lacks encounters and possible belonging to a common sense; and on the other hand, how can one do this if one does not meet anyone who walks and does not look at his or her mobile phone?
The non-places of our supermarkets and suburban streets are now only a small part of the territory in which we behave as in a non-place: it is no longer the context that prevents us from any meaningful relationship, it is our behavioural tics that make us blind and deaf to the specific signs of our surroundings.
Our best tool of political culture, the one that ensured us an intrinsic democratic essence, has jammed. In fact, if we are no longer citizens of a specific city that gives us political competence starting from our experience, which we care about in its complexity and contradictions, without ideologies, then we are becoming generic, abstract citizens, who are left with only indirect emotions, generated by the media, by ‘hearsay’, which we no longer verify in our daily contacts and in our sedimented affections: we no longer have living and personal matter to form an opinion and decide what to do. This disintegrates the sense of cultural ownership of the territory that has been the fundamental common good in Italian history since the Middle Ages, when the term ‘commune’ was invented to identify the territory made their own by men freed from feudal constraints.
2. The need to remain cultural owners of one’s landscape
But if the sense of the common good is structurally on the scale of the bell tower and the civic tower, it was a romantic cultural and political feat to make it part of the ‘sense of the nation’, when each person brought as a dowry to an ideal homeland the sense of concrete and factual participation in the life of their own city. The entire Risorgimento is made up of these poignant local gifts to other territories, to which one binds oneself on the basis of overwhelming emotional drives: the Emilians and Tuscans, each starting from their own city, ‘give themselves away’ to the Savoy to become Italy; the Bergamasks and Brescians converge on Genoa to get on two ships with Garibaldi and go to do the deed in Sicily, rushing into a world different from their own, united only by the language spoken by the cultured and the exaggerated speeches of a small group of exalted intellectuals.
It is striking to note that the Thousand moved largely from free cities, those that made Italian Art History, to go and stir up the idea of the Risorgimento in sleepy regions without widespread planning.
To make the Italians, what is needed once Italy is made (as Massimo d’Azeglio muttered), the immense cultural heritage and the thousand landscapes are also brought into play.
At a time of strong concentration in the central government of command and resources (a dangerous model that engaged everyone from liberals to fascists), the Italian Touring Club set to work on a titanic task: the photographic documentation of each region and city, in the declared conviction that the unity of the nation was only solid if each community felt itself to be a participant, witnessed in its treasures of squares and landscapes.
The Touring Club had already committed itself, in the first decades of the 20th century, to describing our territory with maps and written guides (which remain among the best internationally), but nothing equalled the charm and communicative power of the new tool: photography. In every living room of the young Italian bourgeoisie, blue volumes of the regions were on display, where everyone could find a chosen image of their country. Everyone, in his or her own parlour, got the idea that beauty was present in every corner of Italy, even in those many unknown regions, and told themselves that they couldn’t be that bad anyway if there were beautiful churches, rich countryside and castles like at home!
The operation of the Touring Club, tenaciously pursued in the middle decades of the 20th century, through fascism, war and reconstruction, certainly influenced the ‘construction of the nation’ not with the Savoyard and Fascist method of homologating the institutional system, but with an Enlightenment mode, that of the Encyclopédie: a fresco of the territory as a choral product of thousands of stories, knowledge, commitments of art and good practices.
It was a message that in those years stimulated, beyond all expectations, a sense of belonging to an idea of a country made up as a gigantic patchwork of countries, including one’s own, drastically reducing the feeling of colonisation that the accelerated process of national unification had nevertheless entailed in many regions.
This change in the scale of collective identity was only possible thanks to a strong and shared identity of each city and territory, self-confident, proactive, not jealous, capable of giving itself, on which (and not ‘against which’) the cultural project of united Italy was founded.
The unbelievable backtracking that is going on today, of regions and cities ‘wanting back’ their dedication to the nation 150 years ago, is now the blatant manifestation of the malaise involved in the local identity crisis. It is one of the self-deceptions staged to portray the identity crisis as a misdeed whose blame is placed on others, as if identity were a commodity stealable by newcomers.
On the contrary, it would help to be aware that the crisis is generated by an endogenous process, which is triggered when the collective cultural investments of many generations are reduced to zero and the pulverisation of investments (cultural, economic and institutional) is preferred to individual welfare.
Unfortunately, it ends up that it is precisely the sense of lack of collective identity that becomes one of the few still recognisable traits of that idem sentire on which the current political proposals are based, which are also weak because they only start from a (primarily cultural) malaise and do not recognise the generative causes and the (primarily cultural) resources needed to overcome it.
For the most part, they are weak proposals because they are autistic and closed, paradoxically committed to paying lip service to defending a culture that was born and developed in integration and welcome, that has openness to others and to other experiences in its DNA, which is why it is unique and valued.
Until now, attempts have been made to address this malaise with centralist policies, aimed at safeguarding the bulk of the heritage, not trusting the thousand cities’ capacity for positive action, and without devoting energy and planning to involving human resources to activate all the territories together, and with a call for co-responsibility on the part of the local authorities. This is a fatal limitation of institutional programmes for our culture and our land. This is shown by the resounding failures, on a political level, of strategic programmes for our cultural heritage, always orphaned by the landscape, such as that of launching large museums to the detriment of the territories, or of emergency interventions, as shouted from the earthquake crater by thousands of inhabitants forced into inaction, prisoners of a decision-making centre that after three years still does not act.
On the other hand, no attempt has even been made, outside centralised institutions, to activate sustainable management strategies. Everyone agrees on the principles: any initiative for the conservation or enhancement of cultural assets, especially diffuse ones (such as the landscape), only lasts if there is a management capacity. But in practice, no significant experiences of sustainable management have been promoted, plans are entrusted to rules and not to projects, and the budgets of local authorities in the red are every year tempted to write off the management costs of little-used activities, mostly related to cultural heritage.
It is now clear that, in fact, economically sustainable management of diffuse heritage, outside technicalities, can only be achieved if an active and lasting group of operators succeeds in maintaining in the local community a sense of shared responsibility for recognised values. The postulate, that diffuse cultural heritage can only be safeguarded by society, that which uses it and that which will use it, is verified for certain for the intangible heritage, and is also affirming itself for the tangible heritage, as it has always been so. But if the dedication of some (few) operators is no longer matched by a recognised and shared role of heritage in the social project, neither local nor national, there is no management strategy that is realistic and successful.
The lack of operational answers and the failure of the most demanding trials are advancing a radical question in the qualunquist political opinion that is also making inroads among the sector’s technicians: but is it really necessary to aim for a deep, culturally participatory sharing of strategies for urban and diffuse cultural heritage?
I believe that one can still respond, in the crisis of these days, that for some time (not so long: months, not years) there are still conditions to say: yes, we need strategies that involve deep, culturally participatory sharing. This is the response given the certainty of the disaster to be faced in practising, today, strategies that do not involve the population. The risk is that the territory’s cultural heritage will cease to be ‘landscape’, produced by interaction with those who live it, and will become an archaeological relic, reduced to the inert and fragmentary testimony of a knowledge now detached from the operational culture of the new generations.
But the real risk is that we become accustomed to political and technical masochism, because we abandon the main instrument available to us, in Italy, to react to the collective identity crisis.
Little use is served by a city and a territory loaded with cultural resources but unable to convey their content, not understood in the integration between past and future that they suggest, no longer perceived as a landscape, in which we are reduced to spectators and are no longer actors.
We cannot waste this last call of our identity, for which for a few more years Italy offers us a cultural habitat to play at home, to attempt synergies and ‘equal’ relations between the local dimension, known or at least knowable, and the global one, unknowable despite the seductions of the web, but certainly overbearing and lacking those specificities we love.
3. Valuing the urban landscape, i.e. valuing those who care for it: the ‘active landscape’.
In this historical framework of difficulties and resilience, it seems to us that a strategic potential related to the landscape, i.e. the cultural interaction between inhabitants and territories, can still emerge, particularly in Italy. It seems to us that it is precisely this symbiotic relationship in each city, large or small, that has nurtured a widespread flow of innovative commitment that for centuries has generated new interpretations and new reference models of culture, useful for social welfare, the economy, and above all public ethics. These are those phases of urban culture that later took on a familiar name in history books, starting from the Good Government of the centuries of the Communes, to the thousands of versions of enlightened Seigniory of the Renaissance, to the fragmented and complex local drives at the basis of the epics of defence and valorisation of their territories of the Risorgimento and the Resistance.
For at least a thousand years in Italy, culture has produced wonders because it is the fruit of a climate of knowledge and local ecosystems that are generative of thought and practices that are spread throughout the country and that have constituted, a century here a century there, the ‘topical’ moment of very different centres but all powerful in their ability to radiate their innovations.
For a thousand years, Italy was ‘only’ (!) a network of cities linked together not by political designs or overarching governments but by a unity of language, that spoken but above all that acted in the mastery of art and construction, which always went beyond the borders and egoisms of this or that local nobleman. At the basis of these fruitful seasons have always been the cities, each one capable of kneading and making its stones synergetic with its generations, from lords to artisans, from scholars to merchants, from local artists to those called from outside. In short, cities have for centuries identified themselves with that varied anthology of intelligences, sensibilities and creativity that have worked to maintain and innovate the cultural habitat of their citizens: an army of talents that we can define as the ‘active landscape’ of each city.
Among these, called upon to be the actors of the landscape, aided by what had been achieved before, unusual networks of ambitions, skills, capacity for lasting investment and continuity of knowledge were formed, all converging on the most powerful and shared political instrument of the time: cultural production that gave lustre to the common good. In Italy, culture produced far greater fame and power than money or weapons.
The local cultural machine of the ‘active landscape’ remained politically productive until recently: in the first generations of the Nation, everyone, from Sicily to Trentino, was in a frenzy above all for the epoch-making opportunity to qualify their city. It is enough to read the speeches of the Mayors of the United Italy, or those of the newly-established Republic, to find ample pages dedicated to local culture, to the intention to enhance its history, to implement its assets, to make public space beautiful and more attractive.
Over the past few decades, this optimistic rhetoric of civic commitment assigned to culture has waned, and conversely, a guilt-ridden rhetoric has developed, which makes the weight of the heritage of cultural assets, with its burden of responsibility on heirs, seem unbearable, and the conviction of the new generations that they are not up to such a legacy. It is a psycho-social context that has obscured a fundamental awareness: that the heritage in Italy is not so much the products as the cultural productions, the centuries-old capacities of city dwellers to form the right habitat to generate art and culture. And that we are still in a position to continue this unique competence.
Now, following this version of events, we could describe the current situation of the Italian landscape as a scene from ‘Sleeping Beauty’, where all the ingredients are there to raise the curtain and act, but everything is lifeless, under enchantment.
There is the heritage, undervalued but still in a fairly good state, there are the institutional machines that are now centuries old and ankylosed but nevertheless settled, there is a great availability of the ‘active landscape’ in terms of widespread human resources, whose preparation and capacity for dedication are totally neglected but present. Today, in the pandemic that has shaken all institutional organisations, it is not only health workers who show a vital operational capacity far beyond the machine, indeed saving the machine with all its shortcomings and inadequacies. It is the school teachers who improvise e-learning that Italy had never even wanted to approach, it is the museums that send images and videos of rooms and treasures kept secret around the web, it is the popularizers who go around empty cities and show us the details like the nakedness of a beloved.
It is on the human resources of the ‘active landscape’ that hope is founded: these are the skills acquired by choice, by a passion that almost always lasts a lifetime, even though their professional figures are often transparent to most people, who do not see them in the same way as beggars or those who perform the most humble but essential services. They are the thousands of peripheral cultural heritage officials, frustrated by the constant changes in strategy and management; they are the tens of thousands of teachers from whom schools demand a tenth of their cultural sensitivity and power and infinite bureaucratic patience; they are the hundreds of thousands of young people who have chosen to study architecture, conservation of the cultural and environmental heritage, literature and art, and whom universities have churned out over the last 50 years in a job market with no outlets; but above all they are the millions of people engaged in voluntary work who manage, mostly autonomously and neglected by the institutions, the study centres, small museums, private foundations and the infinity of minor assets that swarm, deo gratias, in our country.
Even today, the ‘active landscape’ is a huge reservoir of intellectual raw material in which all the fundamentals to serve in a sustainable strategic project are well in place: it is intergenerational, made up of people sensitive to and devoted to culture, starting with the local culture they have often studied and loved, with a relationship with money that is entirely instrumental to the personal project, long frustrated by the underutilisation and socio-political marginality of the cultural quadrant.
It is true that in every city this set of subjects appears as a disorganised swarm full of niches of intense but autistic activity, but the fundamentals are there, certainly more so than they were for workers at the beginning of the industrial revolution or for computer scientists at the beginning of the digital revolution. If anything, we need effective tools to make people perceive the implicit network, the relationships that are already there even if they are not exploited: to paraphrase a now-forgotten bearded sage, there is the active landscape ‘in itself’, now we need to work on the active landscape ‘for itself’.
