Università Iuav di Venezia. Vilniaus Gedimino Technikos Universitetas. University Of Sheffield School of Architecture

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1 D E L T A L A N D S C A P E

2 Lifelong Learning Programme Erasmus IP Summer School on the Po river Delta. Building scenarios in fragile territories. Taglio di Po/Venice 4-18 September 2011 Università Iuav di Venezia Vilniaus Gedimino Technikos Universitetas University Of Sheffield School of Architecture Universitatea Ion Mincu Bucuresti head coordinator Maria Chiara Tosi professors Enrico 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 tutors Francesco Belloli Marco Corona Marta De Marchi collaborators Unita di Crisi Anrdea Masciantonio lecturers Sara Ariano Giancarlo Mantovani Sara Milani Francesco Musco Lino Tosini Lianne Verstrate Sandro Vidal

3 students People and Identity Francesca Bellemo Rossella Fabbri Jessica Gubitta Damiano Gui Roberta Marcolongo Elena Rizzato Alessandra Zampieri Accommodating Griselda 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 Counteracting Ioana-Iulia Aflorei Sogand Babolhavaeji Alex Berciu Vladaia James John Clifford Rogers Marius Costache Ilona Dvareckaité Tautvilé Džiugyté Octavian Eremia Ligia Gorovei Edimtas Simeliunas James Starky Sincere thanks and gratitude go to Marco Ferro Maria Gatto Geremia Gennari Stefania Schenato Lino 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 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 2100 ISBN Design concept and layout by Ey Studio published under CreativeCommons licence 3.0 by professionaldreamers,

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5 Po Delta 2100 People and Identity The perception of territory Identity Scenarios Accommodating environmental pressures Adapting boundaries Adapting the cultural landscape Counteracting environmental pressures Counteracting through defensive systems Counteracting to support settlements What's next?

6 PO DELTA 2100 Maria Chiara Tosi 8 Po Delta 2100 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 territory, 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, transforming 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 constellation of local actors. We need to focus on what we perceive as innovative, but also on what we consider simple adaptation, expanding the notion of new to include what is often dismissed as a mere accident, alteration, accumulation and variation. Amongst the changes that, in particular, contribute to reconfigure the space of everyday life, those concerning climate including the predictions 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 appears 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 everyday 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 territory always proves ineffective. Instead, it is necessary to experiment with thick descriptions and ways of investigating that resist attributing to objects, spaces and behaviors exogenous meaning based on taxonomy. 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,

7 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 considering 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 effective 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 sometimes fragile but important connections between different processes and phenomena. For this reason in our research we adopted techniques and methods from different disciplines: anthropology, 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 allow 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 proposals. 9 Po Delta 2100