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Lifelong Learning Programme Erasmus IP 2011 - Summer School on the Po river Delta.Building scenarios in fragile territories. Taglio di Po/Venice 4-18 September 2011

head coordinatorMaria Chiara Tosi

professorsEnrico Anguillari Emanuela Bonini Lessing Cristina Cerulli Anna Holder Paul Muresan-Iuga Gabriel Pascariu Gintaras Stauskis Inga Urbonaitè Fabio Vanin

with

external professors Valentina Bonifacio Tullia Lombardo Marco Ranzato

tutorsFrancesco BelloliMarco CoronaMarta De Marchi

collaboratorsUnita di CrisiAnrdea Masciantonio

lecturersSara Ariano Giancarlo Mantovani Sara Milani Francesco Musco Lino TosiniLianne Verstrate Sandro Vidal

Università Iuav di Venezia

Vilniaus Gedimino TechnikosUniversitetas

University Of SheffieldSchool of Architecture

Universitatea “Ion Mincu” Bucuresti

studentsPeople and IdentityFrancesca BellemoRossella Fabbri Jessica GubittaDamiano GuiRoberta Marcolongo Elena Rizzato Alessandra Zampieri

AccommodatingGriselda Arteaga Trejo Povilas Daugis Marella Diamantini Laura Georgiana Belmega Michael Horswill Heather Jacqueline Oakley Roma Olišauskaité Elisa Padovan Raluca-Mihaela Serdaru Tomas Skripkiûnas Cristina Stefan Marija Vaitkuté

CounteractingIoana-Iulia Aflorei Sogand Babolhavaeji Alex Berciu Vladaia James John Clifford Rogers Marius Costache Ilona DvareckaitéTautvilé Džiugyté Octavian Eremia Ligia Gorovei Edimtas Simeliunas James Starky

Sincere thanks and gratitude go toMarco FerroMaria Gatto Geremia Gennari Stefania SchenatoLino Tosini

This book is the result of an intensive project of collaboration and exchange with all participants at the Summer School on the Po river Delta 2011. The chapter ‘Po Delta 2100’ is by Maria Chiara Tosi; the chapter ‘People and identity’ is by Valentina Bonifacio and Emanuela Bonini Lessing; the section ‘The perception of territory’ is by Valentina Bonifacio and Lianne Verstrate; the section ‘Identity’ is by Emanuela Bonini Lessing; the chapter ‘Scenarios’ is by Tullia Lombardo and Fabio Vanin; the section ‘Accommodating environmental pressures’ is edited by Enrico Anguillari; the section ‘Counteracting environmental pressures’ is edited by Marco Ranzato; the chapter ‘What's next?’ is by Enrico Anguillari, Marco Ranzato and Fabio Vanin.

Delta Landscape 2100ISBN 978-88-904295-7-6

Design concept and layout byEy Studio www.weareey.com

published under CreativeCommons licence 3.0by professionaldreamers, 2012www.professionaldreamers.net

Po Delta 2100

People and Identity

The perception of territory

Identity

Scenarios

Accommodating environmental pressuresAdapting boundariesAdapting the cultural landscape

Counteracting environmental pressures Counteracting through defensive systemsCounteracting to support settlements

What's next?

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The continual and recurrent process of change that the contemporary territory is undergoing is increasingly appearing as an inalienable feature, a specific connotation of a society that counts the notion of “crisis” amongst its paradigms.Very often change has been characterized as a manifest alteration of the conditions of a terri-tory, as a radical transformation.However, what is new and different can also manifest itself through a progression of minute changes through giant leaps following a slow crescendo of efforts to which the systems resists until it reaches the breaking point. This different notion of transformation suggests considering different “geographies of change”: whilst, on one hand, it is vital to understand what creates a rupture with the past and the spaces and practices that reveal the fragility of tradition and radically transform it, on the other hand, it is also necessary to focus on the everyday process of change that is as minute as continuous, pervasive and incremental, trans-forming the character, role and meaning of its space.In other words our attention needs to be steered towards that “articulated, multidimensional and dispersed” process, whose intensity is difficult to measure but that concerns a multitude of forms and modalities, intersecting in different ways with the specificity of places and the constella-tion of local actors. We need to focus on what we perceive as “in-novative”, but also on what we consider simple “adaptation”, expanding the notion of new to in-clude what is often dismissed as a mere accident, alteration, accumulation and variation.Amongst the changes that, in particular, con-tribute to reconfigure the space of everyday life, those concerning climate – including the predic-

tions of future climate change – have an impact not only on the material aspect of territory, modifying it strongly, but also on the ability of society to imagine its future, a future that ap-pears increasingly remote, uncertain and hard to decode.Failure to imagine a future in relation to climate change often derives from the assumption that everything will change suddenly at some point, a point which is as uncertain as it is hard to position it on a timeline. Such a view neglects that our present is already completely immersed in this process of change and that small every-day transformations have already shaped the territories we inhabit.Constructing scenarios that reveal small and large transformations and exploring their material consequences is a way to reduce the uncertainty about the future and helps to enable society to make informed decisions around the potential opportunities that specific actions and strategies for intervention might present.In such circumstances a specialist approach to understanding what is happening in our terri-tory always proves ineffective.Instead, it is necessary to experiment with “thick” descriptions and ways of investigating that resist attributing to objects, spaces andbehaviors exogenous meaning based on tax-onomy. These ways of investigating acknowledge the multiple roots of the changes in progress and try to simultaneously consider the economic subjects, the interactions at a micro territorial level, the spaces of local economic activities, the environmental characteristics that influence the organizational models of both local economy and local settlements. This approach leads us to consider the territory of our everyday life as a temporal stratification,

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sediment and outcome, rather than effect, of policies, techniques, cultures, symbologies and representations, behaviors and social norms, cooperations and conflicts. At the same time, territory is also the outcome of administrative and design practices, with their multiplicity of morphogenetic elements that interact with each other as well as with the physical territory. This way of studying territory is enriched by consid-ering a multiplicity of vocabularies, taxonomies, ways of observing and listening to the territory.Looking at the river Po delta in a way that is plural and multiple seems to be the most ef-fective way to spare this territory from a way of knowing it that is as precise and deep as it is specialised and yet unable to reveal the some-times fragile but important connections between different processes and phenomena. For this reason in our research we adopted techniques and methods from different disciplines: anthro-pology, visual communication, planning, urban design and landscape architecture. Observing the delta of the river Po from this multiplicity of perspectives was the starting point and the grounding for arguments strong enough to al-low the exploration of different scenarios. The investigations and scenarios collected in this book aim to add a fragment of knowledge of the territory of the river Po delta that tries to put informations in relationship and in context, avoiding the segmentation and self-referentiality that often characterizes specialist design propos-als.

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