The Metabolism of Changes - Urban Landscapes: Environmental Networks and Quality of Life - page 44

Fig. 5.1 Umbria, Italy. A suburban settlement in the peri-urban area of Perugia
recycling or upcycling is being considered, are essential: first, because of the
community's perception , and second because of the production of a quality
territory . Following this phase, however, should come the involvement of the
population that is not the usual laissez-passer stolen at the moment the proj-
ect, prepared elsewhere, is presented to the public, but one that requires a
proactive participatory process. On the other hand, the loss of the inhabitants'
sovereignty over material and symbolic forms reduces the territory to an amor-
phous support of works and functions. Certainly, all of this is very far from
any form of landscape, even a degraded one, as defined by the ELC.
Metabolism, therefore, presupposes knowing how to recognize, interpret, and
cultivate the community on the transformational dynamics under way, and
opening the comparison of interpretation and evaluation parameters through
audits and forums, which involve the local parties in the decision-making
processes.
Much research on park and protected area planning in Europe, and more
recently on landscapes in Umbria, Italy, as mentioned previously, has been
centered precisely on investigating the metabolism level of several new indus-
trial, commercial, and residential expansions in the fragile landscape balance
(and therefore ecological equilibrium) of the Umbrian territory. Certainly in
this, as in other case studies regarding the questions of today, the theme of the
relationship of the growing city (the site of profound transformation) to the
old city, with its great architectural heritage , urban spaces , and meanings
that the past has transmitted, predominates. It is a comparison between
processes of urban growth that are uncontainable and, in certain ways, uncon-
trollable; and fear is growing for the dissolution of the city via means of dis-
perse settlements, for which it can even sometimes be difficult to understand
the role and sense (Fig. 5.1).
In Umbria, consolidated residual landscape themes coexist with new terri-
torial organizations; the prestigious traditional architectural heritage of the