Ecology vs Aesthetics - Urban Landscapes: Environmental Networks and Quality of Life - page 6

2.2 New Contacts Through the Landscape

The landscape is probably the right approach to re-establish vital contact
between aesthetics and ecology. Managing the landscape requires, on the one
hand, cooperation with energies put into play by nature [7, 8], which we are
not used to manage, and which are the results of plant and animals, as well as
solar, wind, and water sources; on the other hand, it requires attention to the
“soul of places,” that extraordinary heritage of urban and rural culture that
sometimes risks being swallowed up by individualistic visions contingent on
the use of the territory [9].
The notion of landscape , polysemous and complex by definition, express-
es the sense of inclusiveness. It directs courses of different proximities, mak-
ing explicit the relationship between object (i.e. the environment) and repre-
sentation (i.e. its artistic, emotional, and intuitive perception), between natu-
ralness and artificiality, between historicity and modernity, between reality
and interpretation. Attention is directed both at the territorial characteristics
(morphological, environmental, socio-economic) of a region, as a scientific
concept originally developed in the discipline of geography in the 1800s, and
in the way in which those same characteristics are perceived through individ-
ual senses and emotions, capable of being artistically communicated through
figurative and verbal language, already present in the painting and literature of
the Late Middle Ages. Unfortunately, up to the present time, the landscape
reading has been based on two notably separate approaches:

1. The point of view of architects , who are dedicated to the formal search for

compositional balances, looking at single building relationships and delud-
ing themselves that an overall vision can be found a posteriori .

2. The point of view of ecologists , who are exclusively concentrated on the

mitigation of impacts provoked by human activities to the detriment of
essential resources, biocenoses, and natural bioconnectivity.

In the author's opinion, we are now reaping the bad fruits of a sterile separa-
tion between two schools that, in any case, represent two important ways of
approaching the landscape:

1. From the art of gardens , which has opened the architectural path of the

landscape, but which does not have the necessary background to manage
the complexity of territorial transformations and therefore the planning of
the landscape required by the European Landscape Convention (ELC) 1 .

1 The ELC is a treaty adopted by the Committee of Ministers of Culture and Environment of the
Council of Europe on 19 July 2000, officially signed on 20 October 2000 in Florence. It was
signed by 27member states of the European Community and ratified by 10, including Italy, in
2006.