The territory is the place where the man lives his intermediary state between being a material creature, through his primary needs (nutrition, shelter, etc.), and a spiritual creature, through his need of cultural, relational and social growth.

Human demands and territorial demands, in the future social model, must be made compatible through a system of management of environmental resources which follows their rules.  

TOWARDS WHICH URBAN SYSTEM?

The result of the research developed by the National council of Doctors of Agronomy and Doctors of Forestry on the urban instruments in force in our Country

1. PREMISE

The evolution of science, of thought and of society is a process that does not know pauses.

It is a law of life that involves everything: men, history, social rights.

We can define this process as the idealization, or better, the purification of the waste produced by anthropomorphism that, from the birth of the first logical thought on earth, has produced history, today’s civilization and the systems that gravitate around man the creature.

In this way the evolution of rights and social sense could not avoid involving the whole conceptual and cognitive system of the sense of management of the territory and, above all, of man’s position within it.

Such a premise would seem almost out of place for someone who wants to deal with the complex problem of governing and planning the Earth System.

There is no doubt that those who operate in Urban matters and in the management of territorial resources, either in a Political role or a Scientific or Technical one, have had to witness the system becoming increasingly complex, especially in recent years, so much so as to recognize the need of a substantial and, above all, conceptual reorganization of the topic.

2. THE ISSUE

Without getting to the heart of the matter of the socioeconomic evolution of the last fifty years, it is opportune to underline how the energy crisis and the necessity to change (evolve) the direction of industrial civilization’s first energy model (petrochemical model and extraction), has induced world opinion to seek new paradigms and principles for the development of the future generations.

The contextual environmental emergency is born from the axiom that, up till now, sees the energy/social model produce low outputs from available energy (under any form) and therefore high quantities of waste products (pollution).

Such a social model, which we can define first generational, is an antithesis to the thermodynamic model of the ecosystem (and of the environment in general) of which man, who is part of the whole, is a variable of notable incidence.

The existing distance between the two systems (the natural one and the socioeconomic one we have today) represents the energy differential (in the most complete sense of the term) that draws attention to a more complex sense of Being inside the World System.

It is a System that necessarily witnesses an evolution, with geometric progression, in the model for the management of the resources. Such resources, in the future, will be increasingly free of the petrochemical-extractive oligopoly that, as observed, pollutes too much, has low energy outputs and is not viable in the long term. Moreover, the dematerialization of some human activities will mean a substantial redistribution (both in qualitative terms and in quantitative ones) of the material exchanges among populations.

The scientific and sociological projections see man, and his social system, more and more integrated with the same principles on which this complex motor is based (which we could define as renewable energy) constituted by the concentric and equal trinomial territory-ecosystem-environment.

3. THE INTERNATIONAL SCENARIO

As with all historical changes, it is not possible to define exactly when a period begins or ends; we often rely upon events that characterize a limit or a chronology of it.

Thus we can affirm that the 1972 Stockholm Conference has begun a new era (what a researcher has already rechristened with the name Anthropocene); an era where man and the environment will increasingly have the tendency to unite and to reciprocally affect each other to create a new form of equilibrium (just as in the law of the action of mass).

We have to wait until 1987 (with the famous  Brundtland Report by the UNEP) to see the principle of  "Sustainable Development" first enacted, and then, with the Declaration of Rio on the environment  in 1992 and with the following Intergovernmental Conferences (up to Johannesburg, 2002) the axis of the socioeconomic model was substantially shifted, from one based exclusively on the Gross Domestic Product as an indicator of a country’s efficiency to one of Net Ecological Domestic Product (PINE).

In this context it becomes evident that in the calculation of the efficiencies of the future economic policies  there need to be introduced some algorithms that, or through using the method of  indicators or through that of national environmental accounting, correct the equations of the GDP, giving its true dimension, or at least a valuation which is closer to reality. If this is done, then the impoverishment of environmental capital is valued in monetary terms, and these values can be detracted from the national income and the growth of this new aggregate calculated (PINE).

A similar correction will have, in the moment in which it is methodologically defined, the certain advantage of leading the Politics and the Management of Resources towards a notably different conceptual horizon (more global) in comparison to the superficial systems of the capitalistic model.

The shift of the Policy axis from pure Capitalism to Sustainable Development is the nominal terminal from which will evolve a new form and new substance for the management of the future world, and in it the Urban System; a system of planning based on the ability of every region to "produce" within its own territory while respecting the Net Ecological Domestic Product (PINE).

The ability to implement processes which are in harmony with this new aggregate will have to measure itself with how compatible this new socioeconomic system is with the environment and with territorial variables.

Furthermore, urbanism, seen almost exclusively as a science of human settlement and use of the territory, will always be increasingly relegated to being a museum exhibit, with all due respect for the role it has played in determinate historical epochs.

EUROPEAN INCIDENCE ON URBANISM

The advent of a United Europe has also complicated local sovereignty on the planning of the territory. If it is conceptually easy to hypothesize a system of urban coherence between town, provincial and regional levels, the issue becomes far more complex and substantially impracticable when at a local level there persist to be a series of norms and directives that transform and radically modify whole territories.

It is enough to consider the incidence of PAC on the rural geography of whole territories to understand how vast areas, in a few short years, have been transformed, both in terms of the use of their soil and in light of the consequent new urban, infrastructural and socioeconomic systems.

If to this we add the various levels and competences of planning and socioeconomic promotion on the territory, we realize how complex it has become if we want to give the matter a serious value and plan.

The necessity of a political sovereignty on local planning cannot evidently contrast with the "European demands", nor can these ignore the "need" of local organization (planning bottom up) also in urban terms.

It is an opinion that is permeating through the Political and Scientific world but, as the process is still underway, a superior level that resolves the matter has not yet been modelled.

THE NATIONAL NORMATIVES

Unfortunately the complications of the sector do not stop at this level; the national Urban structure, substantially has its origin in the basic laws that have been produced from 1939 onwards, even if in recent years the sector has seen a proliferation of laws and decrees.

The reference model is by now obsolete and regards the use of the territory, not its management according to its function, with parameters and norms structured for a population and an economy which are substantially different from today's.

To this we have to add how the Urban Delegation of the Regions has produced varied legislative outlines for the sector, so much so that in some cases they seem to be norms belonging to states with different constitutional structures.

Above all, in the sector involved in regulating the suburban territory (which, as must be remembered, constitutes almost 90% of the country) we can find a normative structure which is almost surreal.

The National Council of Doctors of Agronomy and Doctors of Forestry has developed, in the past months, through a commission constituted  purposefully for this aim, a study on the regulation of the sector, also to establish within the single regions the level to which the issue is probed and the involvement of our profession in the sector.

The following is a synthesis of the results:

I. The normative structure of the single regions has evolved under various political logics and pressures. Especially in recent years there has been, in many cases, a proliferation of norms and decrees that has complicated the normative structure.

II. From the Valle d’Aosta to Sicily, the suburban territory is regulated with great disparity. We go from norms in which the census of every single species that constitute the woods (or the natural formations) is obligatory and where there is discrimination against the use of the land as a unit of landscape, to those in which the suburban areas are not generically described as such, without any differentiation. Furthermore, the suburban territory often has exclusively the role of being "reserve areas suitable for building on", with the simple problem of having to establish the indexes of cubature, without worrying, among other things, of the intended use of this area. In addition, some legislative provisions have often been left incomplete, failing, in fact, to enforce the norms of three planning levels (Regional, Provincial and Town) in a combined way.

III. The figure of the Doctor of Agronomy and Forestry is involved in different ways, going from those few cases in which his presence is obligatory in the elaboration of the Plan, to others in which there is no trace in the normative system, not only in reference to our sector, but also to the basic technical and juridical parameters which give a sense to the natural ecological, structural and morphological variability of the suburban landscape.

IV. The application of norms is perhaps one of the most homogeneous variables, but unfortunately in a negative sense, having met with an almost diffused tendency to be "inattentive", especially in the field of agriculture and/or forest.  The essential normative role of the General Regulatory Plans is that to plan and to organize the whole territory for a certain number of years (but even these are variable or, in some cases, indefinite).

V. In quite a lot of regions urban reform plans are being studied, or are in their final phase. These often have a low level of “discriminative ability” towards the suburban landscape. Furthermore, this is happening while nationwide there has been underway for years a restructuring of the present urban normative structure. All of this occurs with the absolute lack of institutional dialogue between the National level and the Regional one.

VI. University education must better address this subject in a world, the one which already surrounds us, where the ability to manage resources, in a society based on the “renewable energy motor” will be require increasingly closer examination and specialization.

6. URBANISM AND ENVIRONMENT

From this picture of the national situation, even though it is very concise, we can realize that  scarce attention is given to the value “territory" and therefore to the value “environment". Moreover, the sudden change of the socioeconomic system, from the Capitalistic model to one of Sustainable Development, finds few points of contact in the national urban normative structure.

The need to know, also in terms of the Net Domestic Ecological Product, one’s own territory can no longer be separated from a suitable model of planning as a base for the organization of the future system of management of the resources and the environment.

Moreover, we remember that the Conference of Cork, in Ireland, on Rural Development, decreed in 1996 the need for the presence of man, as guardian of the ecological and environmental good, giving him the role of "Sentry" of the territory.

The territory will have more and more to be the place where man the "Sentinel" and the system of “Renewable Energy Sources” will constitute the base of planning within the natural evolutionary tendency of the territory.

The same urban equilibriums, between city and country, will have the tendency to settle on these very parameters, within a civilization which has an increasingly less centralised supply of resources (as in the case of the petrochemical resource) which instead will be more diffused.

It goes without saying that it is necessary to report the real ability of producing energy and agro-environmental goods which the single territorial units, which in a traditional way we can call businesses, have, and the real capacity to settle and redistribute population in second generation urban systems.

The system of planning Public Works must also be linked to the model which is taking shape, even if in a way which is still not very decipherable. .

Guido Bissanti