The territory of the Sardinian Province of Olbia-Tempio on the post-metroplitan horizon: from edge area to node of a new city-world

The paper refers to a territory that presents extremely unusual features: the province of Olbia-Tempio. An area situated in the north of Sardinia which in recent decades, compared with the other urban contexts of the island, has taken on highly dynamic traits. In this part of the region, where no classically outlined urban reality was present up until the Sixties, but which today, on the contrary, shows the emerging features of an authentic post-metropolitan territory, the invention of a particular simulacrum city – the holiday city – together with the effects produced by the introduction of the television medium, multiplied by the effects of IT communication and globalization generated this profound transformation. Because of this variety of factors, this corner of the world, which had remained for centuries in basic isolation – thanks indeed to its unusual environmental-historic character being reinterpreted and used within a nascent consumer economy – entered into a network of flows and a mediatised aesthetic space, becoming with every right an integral part of that city-world and world-city that now embraces the entire universe without end (Lefebvre, 1970; Choay, 1994; Amin and Thrift, 2002; Soja, 2007; Brenner, 2014). The section entirely frames the area of the province that is an environmental-historic and geographical unit particularly involved in this powerful transformation. It contains the whole of the old region of Gallura, dominated by the presence of Mount Limbara, which acts as a watershed with the old region of Mount Acuto, a portion of which - the part on the other side of the mountain - is situated within the said provincial confines and hence within the section. It is in fact the Oschiri-Monti environmental corridor, separating the Gallura mountains from the highlands of the central-north sector that identifies the border to the south. The choice of this portion of territory enabled us to analyse the interaction between: on one side, the phenomena that took place in developing the coastal city, which has its driving force in the towns of Olbia and Arzachena; on the other, the effects this development has produced on the settlement framework of the internal areas, which up until the Fifties were the centre of gravity of this territory. To account for the effects produced and provide interpretative keys with which to read the data that have arisen from the Atlante , the essay uses a narrative perspective. Starting with a general background and summarised reading of the environmental features characterising this territory, the Regional portrait attempts to outline those processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation by means of which this unprecedented urban reality is emerging. A reality that is taking on decidedly unusual features, which make it perhaps unique in the panorama of Italian urban regions. Rather than being characterised by extension and density of built-up territories, it stands out for the vastness of its “empty”, silent lands. In these areas, where, as some suggestions present in the data supplied by the Atlante show, the contemporary period is rediscovering - in innovative forms - archaic elements, evidence of possible futures appears to be underway, highlighting how these areas “discarded by modernity”, if reinterpreted in a project-oriented form, could turn into “cornerstones” for the construction of a new idea of city.