Environmental Networks for Smart Territories - Urban Landscapes: Environmental Networks and Quality of Life - page 78

Fig. 7.7 Umbria, Italy. Environmental networks of connection between town centers and shopping
malls
gathering different resources and values, losing the sense of limits and object
confines. Their fluidity evokes the experience of the “song routes” of the
Australian aborigines [27]. This fluidity is not only present when leaving the
city, i.e., toward territories of settlement dispersion and urban expansion, but
also when entering the city, i.e., in the fabric of the city.
In the territorial city-context relationship, environmental networks could
also be of help in finding relationships between cities and “non-places” [28]
dispersed throughout the territory, often considered to be ungovernable “else-
wheres” (Fig. 7.7). These autonomous, independent fragments are not different
worlds separated by the generative city. If appropriately intersected and con-
taminated by the landscape/environmental network, they can contribute to:
designing modern landscapes; re-reading territorial centralities, whose defini-
tion has been ever less so entrusted to strictly economic and functional relation-
ships and more entrusted to symbolic relationships, identifying images, and
“intangible” dynamics; again raising for discussion the idea of public space,
which cannot be limited to the location of convergence and physical aggrega-
tion—the square—but is extended to open spaces, the country, and spaces of
urban scattering. Therefore, environmental networks enter the landscape com-
pletely, from the society of places to the society of fluxes [29]. The disciplines
of urban planning and architecture should study the contributions they have to
offer, aware of the new mission they have before them, and give answers for
governing these new identifying nodes as the sites of contact between the local
communities, territorial contexts, and/or virtual and global networks.