From a conservative to a projectual approach to the contemporary landscape

The city, its landscape and the external territory show themselves as a set of fragments. Between the interstices and gaps spaces crop up in which the environmental crisis is revealed and refers to the social one, the no man’s land where discarded places are reworked by the environment characterising their shape. Indistinct areas are formed in which there is a co-presence and correlation of various dimensions that cannot be univocally characterised and where one or more of these may prove dominant over the others, which are thus marginal. The space of co-presence is an in-between space, intermediate, which is also defined as a “third space” or “third landscape” and indicates residual, indefinite spaces, not bound but neither used following traditional rules. Third space is also the edge territory between city and country, a territory that is more than the sum of its parts. This is a different form of landscape, the dynamic nature of which is much clearer compared with the “quality landscapes”, for it is subjected to continuous pressures exerted by rural and urban activities and trapped between the need for growth and transformation and the desire for protection. The in-between landscape is actually much more genuine than the simulacrum or thematised one; it offers different viewpoints from which to contemplate our life space with a new spirit, and represents the opportunity to find its meaning and role within contemporary landscapes, as it is the space of becoming, of flows, of ecological dynamics and biological and cultural contamination. It is by beginning with this type of landscape that it is possible to recompose that fragmented, standardised one we find in many territorial contexts. The attention shifts to the uninvestigated potential that a local glance may reveal, abandoning prescriptive, state-controlled forms of management and protection of the landscape which recall a principle of responsibility for the entire local society.