From ‘redeeming’ to ‘humanising’ the land: utopias in Italy after WWII

The myth of modernization and technical progress, which saw the enemy water finally won by technique in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was fed by the Modern Movement: “Vous n’avez pas de terrain libre au lieu fatal de leur concentration? Prenez la mer, bâtissez sur l’eau: ce n’est rien, c’est facile” exclaims le Corbusier in Buenos Aires, repeating in Montevideo: “votre topographie est antagoniste? Votre ville dègringole a pic sul le port? Il n’y a pas de place? Mais faites donc des terrains artificiels!” This myth can produce territories adequate to establish either a sort of “Society of control” (Deleuze, 1990) or a communitarian new settlement, according to Adriano Olivetti’s “concrete utopia” . The machine, which had marked the territory erasing many of the tracks of nature, produced a change to the original plan: these reclaimed coastal marshes, become “countryside”, no longer inhabited, has become tourist resorts, buenos retiros in which "rurality" is an added value, at one hour by car from the city; or the urbanized countryside has completed its nemesis, depriving inhabitants to historical cores to transfer them in frayed ciudades lineales along the coastal roads, where a thriving fruit cultivation is mixed with industrial and commercial activities. Where the countryside is inhabited, in most cases it takes place for peri-urbanisation phenomena (supported, once again, by the machine and a crowded, undersized farm road network) or for a rich agriculture of local residents. It is a phenomenon almost independent from the quality of the project: a superb urbs, however well designed, will not survive if there are not the conditions for a civitas which, to quote Heidegger, takes care of it; conversely, a civitas "inhabits" a place, "territorializes" it if there is an urbs in which can recognise itself.