Environmental Networks for Smart Territories - Urban Landscapes: Environmental Networks and Quality of Life - page 71

considered that changes in the habits and behaviors of insiders and outsiders
have now caused urban spaces [4]—which are an active part of the multiple
flux networks—to change, linked together by “ swaths of infrastructure con-
nections ” [5]. Thus, environmental networks, while establishing ecological
and anthropological relationships on different scales through natural and
urbanized spaces with reciprocal contamination—such as interstitial areas in
the built-up fabric, places of collective identification, places of local memory,
still-cultivated pieces of the countryside, areas of waste or reuse, new large
technical parks—still trigger contact with the global network . On the other
hand, the relationship with cultural networks does not exhaust contact with
the system of objects deposited in the territory, but is extended to the develop-
ment of dynamic and coevolutionary relationships between the cultural and
territorial heritage. The introduction of the concept of “ territorial heritage ”
[6] by Alberto Magnaghi points to this direction.

7.2 Landscape and Quality of Life

It is really true that the landscape, with its constant changes [7], tends to
become enriched, or grow heavier, ever more. It is becoming a type of “ omni-
landscape ” [8], an “ undifferentiated and all-inclusive ” container [9]. It is
not only the ELC that has opened the way to broadened horizons, but also the
high expectations of resident populations, eager for an important push in the
requalification of living from the landscape. Moreover, reflections on the “new
urban question” 3 are strongly connected to resignifying some landscape con-
texts, which allows for the coexistence between natural and artificial objects,
and the contextual innovation of some settlement forms as an essential lever
for the city project and the qualification of its renewed livability.
Different movements and currents of thought 4 concentrate on the role that
the landscape can have on improving the quality of living; attention that, espe-
cially in the Mediterranean area —where it perhaps first emerged—seems to
have been dulled for many years. As Paolo Castelnovi reminds us, the sense of
the landscape is present in our culture. It is identified in the common value
given to the social and cultural relationships of the territory as they pair in
their perceptual form. In this society, ever more liquid and little interested in
history and common good, the landscape, from the places to the network

3 On the new urban question, see the 4th Conference of the International Forum on Urbanism
(IFoU), jointly held at Zuiderkerk (Amsterdam) and at the Delft University of Technology (TU
Delft), The Netherlands, in 2009, titled “The New Urban Question- Urbanism beyond Neo-
Liberalism.
4 The “For Landscape/Landscape For (http://www.landscapefor.eu/)” website gathers observations
to contribute to making social energy and business intelligence productive when directed at objec-
tives of quality of living, organizing innovative selection, and looking to bring to light a diffuse
question that already deals with quality of living.