Habitar en Territorios de Terrazas y Bancales

A terraced landscape is a living cultural heritage. This kind of heritage can survive only if people continue to walk, cultivate, harvest, eat and live in these mountainous rural areas. Since many years, in Italy, people move from the countryside to the cities, searching for a better quality of life while leaving an empty rural space in which we find now old cultures, histories, identities. To invert this process of countryside abandonment, we need to make people come back to live in these rural spaces. An economic and social development need to be accompanied and reinforced by a conscientious transformation of the territory, to add social activities, infrastructures, new opportunities of work to the rural space. Architecture has a significant role to safeguard the landscape, because it has to accompany the necessary evolution of a territory, trying to keep the local identity. To do this, the project has to start from a real knowledge of the local territory, land uses, landscape laws, agrarian fields, water channels, traditional techniques, local materials and the, particular way of life. This contribution deals with the diverse possibilities for the architectural project to tell the story of terraced landscapes in the Mediterranean area, using some examples of restoration or new buildings, in which the design becomes an opportunity to narrate the specific features of the landscape, its forms and traditional cultivations.