Time has almost come for making a balance of our sub-project (Landsible; soon informations on www.landsible.eu), but as a matter of fact the questions we tried to deal with are much bigger and are still at the heart of our personal involvement and interests in topics of landscape and territory management.

With our partnership (Provincia di Cuneo – Italy, lead partner –, Parco Marturanum – provincia di Viterbo, Italy –, Provincia Regionale di Agrigento – Italy –, and Municipality of Aetos – Greece) we tried to point out problems and need concerning landscape governance of “marginal” areas. It was at first evident that “marginality” was, of course, a negative fact and trend, but in some way in these last decades was also the reason of the maintenance in our marginal areas of specific landscapes and of specific landscape values. But since globalization – we learn nowadays – arrives also in marginal areas, producing in these areas worse damages than in central and at-hand areas, all partners were aware of the fact that our marginality was to be in some way actively managed and cared.

So we first tried to analyze our landscape and territorial needs and points of strength, trying also to individuate our landmarks, our landscape values and specificities, our local stakeholders, along with the rate of their loss because of construction and landscape impoverishment, or because our loss of perceiving and properly reading landscape and territory. Then we elaborated an overall and flexible methodology which could give us a common framework of landscape interventions, to be set in our different contexts. Then we proceeded by carrying out local applications of the above-mentioned methodology, not applying it as a whole, but by focusing on specific problems and needs and in trying to face them by applying segments of that methodology. This choice was imposed by the little budget. The aim was to invert the loss of landscape specificities by showing how the negative trend could be slowed down and then inverted by individuating an alternative economical relevance of landscape (for tourism, for example).

In facing landscape topics from a double point of view – as the responsible of “Landsible” sub-project and as a common citizen and stakeholder –, I must confess I found out there was a huge work to be done at many levels (political, territorial, cultural, economical, sociological, scientific, etc.) concerning the topic of landscape and territorial management. I mean – as shown in the European Landscape Convention – that landscape and territorial topics involve (and ought to involve) all citizens, and not only experts or politicians. Our landscape and our territory is not only our culture, but also our welfare, our health and our hope for our future generations. Unfortunately, our consciousness as citizens which ought to be responsible for their landscapes is almost nothing in comparison with the duties we have to face in the next years and in comparison with the urgent decisions we’ll have to make individually and politically. This is why European Union insists on the implementation of these topics, which are focused on the culture of landscape and territorial management.

In our intentions “Landsible” sub-project aimed to give a tiny help in focusing the relevance, for landscape preservation and territorial management, of scientific knowledge, of citizens’ awareness about their landscape and their culture, of education to landscape perceiving and reading, of involvement of local stakeholders in the economical management of their landscape, of economical possibilities for cultural landscape and territorial development. I hoped we managed to give our help to these goals.

by Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo
(project manager of “Landsible” sub-project)

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