Marina Tornatora*
Research Group: “Landscapes in-Progress” - Ottavio Amaro e Marina Tornatora (responsabili scientifici) - Beniamino Fabio Arco, Domenico Fazzari, Antonio Forgione, Giovanna Falzone, Alessandro De Luca, Lucia La Giusa, Lucrezia Marino, Francesca Mazzone, Cristiana Penna
*Università degli Studi Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria, Dipartimento dArTe; mtornatora@unirc.it KEYWORDS: New rurality/ food / tourism / energy / environment
ABSTRACT:
The new multifunctional dimension of agriculture is transforming the rural landscape and the concept of rurality. The SOIL assumes a strategic role in the landscape as an active process.
There are new life cycles for agriculture which increases the possibility of action from the production of material -(goods, timber, fiber, materials for industrial) to ones intangible (landscape, biodiversity, safeguarding hydrogeological, maintenance of territory) and to the creation of services oriented to social welfare. There is the vocation for more traditional production of food and the innovative activities (power generation, natural fibers and polymers, rural and cultural tourism, social potential) that configure polyhedral rurality which still has to be investigated for spatial and formal implications:
Agriculture Food #
Agriculture # rural and cultural tourism Agriculture # environment-energy
These themes define a new project of the landscape, in which the space of the campaign is perceived as a common good; the agricultural field is a space enjoyed by all, it is multifunctional in which the figure of the farmer is to act along with many other actors in a scene that belongs to everyone. In this new dimension, the landscape can become a rewarding factor for agriculture, reversing the dialectical relationship between urban space, suburban and agricultural land.
This multi-functionality opens a new design that can be strategic if developed as spatial practices with alternative usage, characterized by a social mix, functional and formal, and a coexistence temporary / stability, compatible with the tiles of a mosaic and economically sustainable.
This green change perspective offers the opportunity to shape new landscapes through an urban- environmental continuous pattern.
Our team is carrying out research on the resilient regeneration of the old citrus fields and the new possibility of production and landscape of multifunctional agriculture in the Plain of Gioia Tauro in Calabria.
# Green change, big chance: cibo/turismo/energia/ambiente
The idea of the agricultural landscape as a result of those processes that sediment marks and designs on the territory (Sereni, 1991) is not a remote invention. Although the frescoes by Am-
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brogio Lorenzetti, around the middle of the fourteenth century, depict a first scene, anticipating the landscape painting, the acquisition of aesthetic value in the concept of landscape (Rosario Assunto) is a modern achievement that gives the natural place recognition, it makes the figure become symbolic and aesthetic overcoming the idea of a picturesque eighteenth century. Physical transformations determined by evolution of agricultural techniques and crops, oro- graphic mutations, infrastructure reforms, modification of the system properties determine a dynamic landscape constantly changing, which in Italy are unique and specific characters. This singularity comes from the Roman cadastre (Sereni, 1961) that has imprinted the territory with a network of lines “centuratio” which are still visible, orienting fields and rows and ad- justing the relationship between towns and rural areas with a network “limites” as a texture on the constant territory.
Excluding the areas affected by land reclamation or by reform, the Italian agricultural land- scape was fairly stable until the sixties when the unchecked growth of the city towards the countryside and opening of agrarian markets with capitalist logic caused a drastic transforma- tion. Prevailing production decisions oriented monoculture and gradually lead to an alteration of the ecological balance between agriculture and the environment with the loss of biodiver- sity and the cancellation of many elements that characterize the Italian agricultural landscape. The southern latifundia and the cultivations of the Apennine mountain disappeared, it aban- doned the network of paths, the water pipes, the terraces, the temporary shelters, signs and lines on which the design of the territory was based. These elements “ are on track to be- come the remains of a history of human exceeded” (Lanzani, 2003). It opens an “Italian way to the modern city” based primarily on an antithesis between urban and rural landscape, which led to a confirmation of the image of historic town centre and to a reduced importance of the urban periphery and industrial areas. (Lanzani, 2003). Today the agricultural landscape is experiencing a moment of re founding due to the prevalence of environmental and climate is- sues and to the new ecological dimension with an overall rethinking of the agricultural sector. A new life-cycle for agriculture is being profiled which increases the spectrum of action from the production of material goods - food, timber, fibre, materials for industry - intangible goods - the landscape, biodiversity, safeguarding hydro-geological, maintenance of the territory – up to the creation of services oriented to social welfare.
The vocation of the traditional food production is complemented by innovative activities (power generation, natural fibres and polymers, rural and cultural tourism, social potential) that configure polyhedral rurality to investigate the spatial and formal implications.
Agriculture # Food
The traditional production function of agriculture today must respond to recent requests for food security and health imposed by a new awareness and sensitivity. This new require- ment has strong implications on the current structure of the agricultural sector for European regulations. At the base of the new dimension there is the demand for greater transparency
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in the food chain information, methods and origin of the products. It requires clearer and coordinated planning of companies, called to respond to ecological and environmental targets. The interest is on certified quality products in view of the global food challenge, the central theme of expo 2015. It starts a process that reverses the logic of quantitative market at the base of the agricultural sector and shows a value for the growing biological crops niche which is becoming increasingly common and for scientific research in the field of genetic engineering.
Agriculture # rural and cultural tourism
The demand for leisure of new lifestyles increasingly takes space in rural areas. These respond to new and unusual needs as to enjoy the beauty of the landscape, to have an open space where doing natural sports, such as hiking, biking and enjoying healthy foods. The result is a growing success of rural tourism resulting in the increase of agritourism companies, educational farms, all activities re- lated to the recreational enjoyment of the countryside and linked to a market of agricultural prod- ucts. This phenomenon generates special interference and connections between cities, peri-urban areas and the countryside and offers an alternative to the request for public spaces and green and sustainability. This trend is a tangible sign of the landscape implications on the quality of life. The potential system of coexistence between rural area and the city is a testing ground through strategic planning for rationalizing the fragmentation of the spaces between the populated agricultural landscape and the urban space.
Agriculture # environment-energy
Traditionally good agricultural practices allow the maintenance of biodiversity, the protection of the soil from erosive agents and the safeguard the environmental balance but today these are severely threatened.
The agricultural sector is a crucial point for matters of the environmental pollution, and for the concrete actions that should be initiated as the elimination of chemical fertilizers, the specific crops on land at risk for hydro-geological defence.
There are many innovations in environmental and energy such as the phytodepuration, the development of the agricultural and forestry sectors (agriculture non-food) and the sys- tems for renewable energy (biomass co trigenerazione plants, livestock and rural-industrial residues).
This run-up to the production of energy from renewable sources in some cases had a nega- tive impact as the replacement of agricultural fields with expanses of photovoltaic panels that other than building an artificial landscape also raises the problem of the disposal issue of plants at the end of their life cycles and of visual pollution. Contamination between envi- ronmental and climate issues with agricultural production may lead to experimental design on the agricultural landscape as in the case of the Digital Mapping of Benedikt Groß. The
invention ties the traditional tractor with the systems GPS and GIS. This allows control over seeding through a precise design which not only has aesthetic implications but it increases the diversity of crops and the production of biogas. The diversity of the plantations and the draw- ings on the ground are defined according to algorithms that exceed the logic of monoculture and the use of pesticides.
These experiments show the great potential of a multitasking agriculture describing a new schedule of the landscape, in which the space of the countryside is perceived as a common good. The agriculture takes on the meaning of multifunctional space usable by everyone, and the figure of the farmer is to act along with many other actors in a scene that belongs to everyone. Multi-functionality opens new design scenarios that can be strategic if developed as spatial practices, functional and formal. (Gasparrini, 2013).
A change of perspective that should be registered through a project capable of shaping the new dimension of agriculture, as a device to detect the change in the concept of rurality in which the SOIL plays a strategic role in the landscape as an active process.
In this new dimension the landscape project becomes a factor rewarding for agriculture. The process that has seen the city spread to the countryside assaulting her has been reversed and has allowed the overcoming of the historical dialectic relationship between urban space, suburban and agricultural land.
In this re-founding idea, the rural area can be considered as “the green infrastructure of the city” a natural space, inhabited continuously and in which the function-agricultural production is linked to many other functions and where the identity culture of the place can be estab- lished through the project.
Given these different perspectives and potential visions of the agricultural landscape, our team has carried out research on the Plain of Gioia Tauro, in Calabria. Here citrus plantations invade the nearest space to the Port among olive trees that become only protagonists of the landscape from the height of 200 meters.
A real geographical room that takes shape from the natural elements of watercourses - Mesina and Pretrace - from walls Tyrrhenian Aspromonte and, as in a great theatre scene, it faces the sea through the port. Natural landscape and infrastructure are not drawn as shapes of a complex territory but they are presented as two closed worlds, near and distant at the same time. The Plain of Gioia Tauro is taken as the potential place of research in which the generalizing vacuum created around the port, becomes the founding of an urban space and infrastructure that requires content and forms to become the point of interference between the activities of the port and the hinterland.
The research is based on the increase in value of the existing, conceived as a resource avail- able, unexpressed by the re-found through the project and the idea of landscape restoration, restoration not the conservative but as a work of reconstruction and regeneration of the narrative of places.
The first project works on the rural landscape, characterized by groves of olive trees and plantations of citrus fruits: oranges, lemons, mandarins and “clementine “, a particular species that the EU has recognized as the IGP, - protected geographical indication.
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Although the citrus is the economic pivot of the Plain of Gioia Tauro, the Calabria region is the first national producer of mandarins; there is a chain link between small producers and the network of mobility of the Port.
Operators do not have access to commercial channels of mass distribution while being close to an international freight centre. Added to this is an increasingly scarce productivity of his- torical, old and not very fruitful plantations, for which no specific actions have been initiated. The study presented here addresses both aspects of innovation of those of citrus production processing and marketing. The first involves the regeneration with the introduction of new species and planting techniques. Thanks to the scientific support of the Department of Agri- culture, Mediterranean University, which for several years has been developing research on citrus, it has been hypothesized that the design would take agricultural land by planting new species. The work foreshadows the scene of the agricultural landscape of the Plain in 2020 after the regular progressive insertion of grafts that would ensure a higher quality product, which is distributed over longer periods of the year and with a more efficient method of harvesting the fruit.
Furthermore a logistics platform conceived as a large infrastructure that emerges from the field and directs the activities of small producers into a single large system has been proposed. An object that receives highly technological activities related to the manufacture, marketing and protection of citrus production that overcomes the vision of containers standardized of a globalized world and opens to the field of physical differences and anthropological territory. (Profiles, local peculiarities, forms of land, etc.) .
The logistics platform is designed as a large infrastructure for the export of the product in national and international channels, by sea, rail and road, building interference with the port and also with the national railway line and motorway Salerno -Reggio C.
These assumptions emphasize that the port is a crucial territorial development not only for the transport network, or for the long-awaited industrial expansion in southern Italy that has never been developed.
But this presence can be, as to the historic ports, a source of wealth and development only if actions are triggered for integration with the territory from a thorough knowledge of the places, their specificity, their quality and nature, that is, of that ‘ idea of existing, previously mentioned.
And it is in that interface of port spaces to the territory, in that disarming vacuum that has been created around it, that it is necessary to define new content and forms, that void that can be conceived as a qualitative difference if rethought in view of the restoration of the experimental landscape.
The second work addresses the relationship between the agriculture and the renewable en- ergy and it consists in the creation of a energy park, designed as a landmark catalyst between the road system at its different scales, the natural elements and the harbour port. The issues of climate change is taken as a connector to technical, social, and landscape.
The project is the formalization of the embodied energy in a place as a result of the sun, wind, water, and biomass. The park is designed by energy production systems (Greenhouses with
PV roofs, wind turbines, carbon poles, hydraulic cylinders, thermal ponds, micro- algae) using an approach that goes beyond the technical dimension and is measured with the design of landscape with the form and land use.
Natural elements, technologies, infrastructure merge into a single narrative that highlights the values and physical and anthropological differences of the “Piana di Gioia Tauro.”
Fig. 1: Between port and city. Experimental pole project in Gioia Tauro [thesis] ,Addesi R., Battaglia M.
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References
Assunto R., 2006, “Il paesaggio e l’estetica, Novecento
AA.VV, 1991, “Il disegno del paesaggio italiano,” in Casabella, 575-576.
Clementi A., De Matteis G., Palermo P.C.,1996, “Le forme del territorio italiano,” Laterza, Roma- Bari. Donadieu P., 1999, “Può l’agricoltura diventare paesistica?”, in Lotus n.101.
Donadieu P., 2007, “Dall’utopia alla realtà delle campagne urbane”, in Urbanistica n. 132. Lanzani A.,2003, “I paesaggi italiani”, Meltemi, Milano.
Sereni E. 1969, “Storia del paesaggio agrario italiano,” Biblioteca Universale Laterza. Fig. . 3: The green corridor: the infrastructure of metropolitan city of Reggio Calabria.
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