Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
8.4.2
Sense of Place and Collective Identification
Paolo Castelnovi
Until its definition by the European Landscape Convention (ELC) (“ a land-
scape means an area, as perceived by people … ”), “landscape” was
expressed as a basic contradiction. It was assumed that the perception and
the consequent sense of the landscape , deriving naturally from a complete-
ly personal and subjective process, was instead a collective attribute of the
entire population.
This is an ambiguity that runs through all political strategies underlying
the ELC: in it, the landscape is proposed as a “ foundational factor in the
identity of populations ,” i.e., a common good that develops a sense of com-
munity and local differences. But we know that this common good rests on
a thousand interpretations generated by subjective perceptions. These inter-
pretations are naturally homogenized in the society of a country , whose
members live in places that change slowly over a lifetime, but they are
highly differentiated where the society or the places have recently been
reorganized or have experienced upheaval. Youth, natives, or immigrants in
a metropolitan hinterland have a very different sense of landscape 4 .
Metropolitan hinterlands are territories where the melting pot of the
population or the standardization of built spaces is found, and where the
loss of local differences does not establish a deep-seated relationship
between the places and those who frequent them. Cultural differences and
the banality of new places make the landscape regress away from living
matter within our collective dwelling, on which we found values and con-
duct common battles with purely ideological aims and which returns to old
meanings in the nostalgic framework of an idealized relationship with
nature [1], which is solipsistic and impotent. It sterilizes the vital potential
of the relationship between people and territory, removing an essential
resource from the strategy at which the ELC should be directed, precisely
to give hope to those banal places and to uprooted generations.
Therefore, a “common” sense of the landscape would be a resource for
the value of identity of our living, but only if it derives from political and
planning works. One maintains that where the landscape is little integrated
with the living community (or where the living community has disintegrat-
ed), processes should be triggered to render collective a sense that would
otherwise remain entirely subjective, and generate radically different and
contrasting outcomes [2, 3]. It is believed that involvement in a common
enterprise activates a process that changes our personal sense of identity as
4 See: De Nardi A (2010) Il paesaggio nella costruzione dell'identità e del senso di appartenenza
al luogo: indagini e confronti tra adolescenti italiani e di origine straniera. Doctoral thesis,
Padova. Many other contributions reflect on this theme in the online collection by Castiglioni B,
De Marchi M (eds) (2009) Di chi è il paesaggio.
 
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