The inevitable conflict, in landscaping, between conservation and development

Abstract

The landscape is charged with time, reflecting political , economic and cultural events related to its development.

The man-made landscape is like a palimpsest in which writing placed one upon another document, different modes of thinking and acting.

The individualism of the masses and globalism, have changed even with regard to space the key role of politics, emphasizing, with the market, the ideology of material consumption. The negation of the culture of planning has consequently favored intervening in urban fragments: favoring building to making a city. “New is better”, is the winning formula everywhere and no matter how it is used, it becomes decisive in the involuted way of thinking which has replaced the “rules of the game” with the “game of rules” functioning with ambiguity and uncertainty and whose basic corollary is the “Code of Cultural Assets and Services and of the Landscape” which unites two subjects, which indeed, the general law of 1939 had kept separate since a cultural asset objectively identifiable and a persistent element in our memory “free” from change, and the landscape which is a good charged in time with a mutable historicity.

Our age seems to be, with regard to the formula, saturated with “simultaneousness”, without a past and without a future, crushed by the present, antithetical to the affirmed values of the past which our cultural assets and landscape attest to.