Abstract
Rural landscapes all over the world are subject to great transformations, first being the continuous and slow depopulation of towns and villages. It is a dramatic phenomenon that causes devastating consequences for environmental systems and for the tangible and intangible heritage of entire territories. The situation becomes more ambiguous when it comes to cultural landscapes, especially those internationally recognized as exceptional (i.e., inscribed on the UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Heritage List). In this case, the risk is to abandon agricultural production in favor of consumerist tourist economies, which can damage the territorial authenticity. In this paper, we question the role of the landscape design in strengthening territorial resilience. In particular, a composite and interdependent action has been proposed between landscape design and implementation of a multifunctional agriculture model, oriented towards tourism. To undertake this investigation, a master’s thesis work on Landscape Architecture has been examined as an opportunity to test the research-by-design method through the didactic process. The application case is the Italian UNESCO site of Vignale Monferrato, a depopulated rural village, characterized by abandoned land and buildings. The paper concludes by outlining replicability application scenarios for the proposed model.
Highlights
Published: 22 November 2021In 1992, the World Heritage Committee decided to define a separate category in theWorld Heritage List that recognizes cultural landscapes [1]
We know that a cultural rural landscape is resilient as long as the community persists in traditionally cultivating it
The approach adopted in this work draws on the school of research-by-design, a type of academic investigation of the architecture field, through which design is explored as a method of inquiry [21,22]
Summary
Published: 22 November 2021In 1992, the World Heritage Committee decided to define a separate category in theWorld Heritage List that recognizes cultural landscapes [1]. The definition of cultural landscape was born much earlier, when, during the twentieth century, various landscape scholars (geographers, urban planners, sociologists) recognized, in some rural territories, a harmonious balance in the relationship between environmental systems and the anthropogenic components, thanks to which the territories remain as such, while adapting to the transformations [2,3,4,5,6,7,8] It is for this characteristic of adaptation to the events that they are often taken into consideration as resilient systems [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15].
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