The Pontine plain is an 800 kmq former marshland in the central Italy, which could exemplify the contemporary status of landscape design culture. Its environmental, economic, social and aesthetic content, speak about creative adaptability, where actions, ideas, imaginary, once impervious layers, now merge and call us to update our vocabulary about the couples culture-nature, formal-informal, artificial-wild. It has always been disputed between opposite rationalities: swamp, ponds, rivers that cannot get the sea, wet forests, opposed the need of land and health. The battle of the swamps, the 1922-1939 reclamation, is considered the final redemption, which removed any ambiguity. Recently, projects and policy propose to restore the original wetland and override the artificial geography of fascist government, by emulating natural forms. While the thirties' remediation deleted the ecological thickness of the stigmatized swamp, today no less doctrinal positions propose the expiation of an ancient ecocide. Places like Pontine plain need urgently a different gaze, far from any ideology, to testify current exciting negotiations. The cliché of figures mutually resistant gives way to a new geography of accomplice parts. Also for disuse, marshes emerge among channels and miliary roads, interacting with the exact fields’ layout; wild vegetation mark drainage pattern, binding to trees windbreak. Canals, seasonal river beds, floodable areas are inhabited in the spare time. The constant shift between urban, rural and wild areas reveals a contradictory elegy, where new generations of inhabitants suggest a joyful empathy with apparently inhospitable new kinds of public space. All this makes a powerful, dynamic, fertile landscape, to be told by entries such indeterminacy, overlapping, interruption, simultaneity, contingency, association, collision. We propose an illustrated chronicle of the present, by photographs, transcripts, dynamic maps, which should help to avoid opting whether for the improbable survival of nostalgic approaches or for comforting solutions derived from bare ecology.
Metta, A., Onorati, D. (2016). The Pontine Plain: chronicle of an actual landscape. In Landscape architecture as Necessity Conference Proceedings (pp.369-379). Los Angeles (CA) : Univerisity of Southern California.
The Pontine Plain: chronicle of an actual landscape
annalisa metta;
2016-01-01
Abstract
The Pontine plain is an 800 kmq former marshland in the central Italy, which could exemplify the contemporary status of landscape design culture. Its environmental, economic, social and aesthetic content, speak about creative adaptability, where actions, ideas, imaginary, once impervious layers, now merge and call us to update our vocabulary about the couples culture-nature, formal-informal, artificial-wild. It has always been disputed between opposite rationalities: swamp, ponds, rivers that cannot get the sea, wet forests, opposed the need of land and health. The battle of the swamps, the 1922-1939 reclamation, is considered the final redemption, which removed any ambiguity. Recently, projects and policy propose to restore the original wetland and override the artificial geography of fascist government, by emulating natural forms. While the thirties' remediation deleted the ecological thickness of the stigmatized swamp, today no less doctrinal positions propose the expiation of an ancient ecocide. Places like Pontine plain need urgently a different gaze, far from any ideology, to testify current exciting negotiations. The cliché of figures mutually resistant gives way to a new geography of accomplice parts. Also for disuse, marshes emerge among channels and miliary roads, interacting with the exact fields’ layout; wild vegetation mark drainage pattern, binding to trees windbreak. Canals, seasonal river beds, floodable areas are inhabited in the spare time. The constant shift between urban, rural and wild areas reveals a contradictory elegy, where new generations of inhabitants suggest a joyful empathy with apparently inhospitable new kinds of public space. All this makes a powerful, dynamic, fertile landscape, to be told by entries such indeterminacy, overlapping, interruption, simultaneity, contingency, association, collision. We propose an illustrated chronicle of the present, by photographs, transcripts, dynamic maps, which should help to avoid opting whether for the improbable survival of nostalgic approaches or for comforting solutions derived from bare ecology.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
