Il paesaggio rurale: memoria e sviluppo. Torino, aprile 2004. La multifunzionalità dell’agricoltura

Abstract

The rural landscape is a scenery divided among aesthetic, environmental and functional expectations, and productive needs that are often contrasting. It is also, today, part of a cyclical process of transformation making it a yet more complex space.
The complexity of its nature is ingrained in the thousand faces reflected within the landscapes of modern agriculture through their unification and contrast, through their neglect at once dangerous and promising of their marginal areas and through their traditional agrarian techniques slowly developed by a collective project.
To undertake a dialogue about development and tradition, to trace an ideal line of demarcation between transformation and conservation, between a replanning of the rural landscape and its preservation, is a problem that raises many questions with regard to both the methodologies to be employed and the contents of said methodologies.
In light of the most recent political and cultural tendencies of the national and international community, the answers to such questions must be sought in agriculture’s multifunctionality, as a turning point for the configuration of a new regulatory model for rural landscapes. Such multifunctionality is necessary to put the concept of a sustainable rural development in a concrete form.
Once this concept has been made clear we must remind ourselves of the necessity for a projectual action which is aware of the needs of the rural landscape. Such projectual action should detach itself from a unified distribution of both territorial interventions and financial resources. It should instead create a system connecting the organization of the landscape itself to its needs, incrementing in such way its synergy and potentialities.