85157 - Geography of the Historic Towns and Landscapes

Learning outcomes

The course provides theoretical-methodological tools essential for the identification and enhancement of cultural heritage, in particular the urban and landscape heritage. The localized, territorial nature of these resources requires, in fact, an approach capable of combining their historical, spatial, and technological aspects in a unitary and coherent perspective. At the end of the course, the student has a basic knowledge of the main geographical models of representation regarding the relationship between environment, landscape, and urban civilization, critically framed within their historical evolution.

Course contents

The emergence of a cultural geography:
The course explores the systems of the cultural heritage that stratify over the centuries upon the natural platform incorporating a decisive spatial dimension. The system of the historic city and the traditional urban space, as well as the landscape system of the anthropic territory, can therefore be described as geographies. The activity of human communities on earth has over time produced a hybrid spatial and metabolic apparatus, in which natural geography is manipulated and converted into a cultural geography. The course analyzes circumstances and ways of the simultaneous emergence of an urban culture and an agro-forestry-pastoral landscape in the Italian area, and more generally in the Mediterranean area, with the concatenation of spatial apparatuses that support social dynamics and material and intangible productions. The course provides tools to read urban systems and traditional landscapes as functional and semantic apparatuses, the material elements that make up the city and rural structures, as the immaterial regimes that have ordered them.

A new sense in contemporary space:
The course then compares the condition of the historic city and the traditional landscape with the context of contemporary space production on a global scale. The demographic explosion of the human species; the expansion of a landscape broken up between city and countryside; megapolitical and megaregional agglomerations; the appearance of huge hinterlands, not contiguous to the managerial centers, occupied with intense mechanical, animal and human infrastructures, enslaved to resource extraction, primary production, distribution logistics, and waste absorption. Faced with these global apparatuses that harness the vital force of the planet for the exclusive sustenance of the human race, bringing the planetary ecosystem towards an impending collapse, the course explores the possibility of a new sense for the traditional space systems, urban and rural, able to project them beyond testimonial conservation and tourism production.

Approach
The course maintains an operational perspective, providing and experimenting methods of analysis to elaborate interpretative frameworks of the historical city and the traditional landscape, reconstruct its evolution over time, assess its testimonial and identity value and orient for the future the transformative or conservative action on of them.

Readings/Bibliography

Bibliography for attending students:

• F. Braudel (2010) [1949] 'Le penisole: montagne, altipiani, pianure', in: Civiltà e imperi del Mediterraneo nell'età di Filippo II, Einaudi, pp. 9-93
• L. Gambi (1972) 'I valori storici dei quadri ambientali', in: Storia d'Italia, Einaudi, pp. 3-57
• L. Gambi (2008) [1977] ‘Lo spazio ambientale del mondo contadino’, in La cognizione del paesaggio. Scritti di Lucio Gambi sull'Emilia Romagna e dintorni, a cura di M.P. Guermandi, G. Tonet, Bononia University Press, pp. 95-118 (disponibile online, sito IBC-ER)
  
• G. Dematteis, C. Lanza (2014) 'Il caleidoscopio urbano’ + 'Dalla campagna alla città: l'urbanizzazione del mondo’ + 'Sistemi territoriali urbani e reti di città', in: Le città del mondo. Una Geografia urbana, UTET, pp. 3-32, 33-56, 231-274
• R. Sennet (2020) [2018] 'Prima Parte. Le due città' + 'Cap.7 Cinque forme aperte’ + 'Cap.8 Il vincolo del fare', in: Costruire e abitare. Etica per la città, Feltrinelli, pp. 31-107, 230-267, 268-290

Additional bibliography for non-attending students:

• L. Febvre (1998) [1935] Il Reno. Storia, miti, realtà, Donzelli

Teaching methods

The typical class session is divided into two lectures supported by projections, each followed by class discussion/debate. Some sessions in seminar format will be dedicated to the analysis of case studies. Some sessions will be dedicated to the visit of urban and natural sites of outstanding interest (in the absence of circumstantial impediments) to favour critical interaction in class. A detailed calendar will be delivered at the beginning of the course.

Assessment methods

Attending students:
Oral exam: individual interviews test the acquaintance with and capacity of critical elaboration on the topics addressed in the course and in the general and preparatory readings. Weighed factors contributing to the final evaluation of each student: proactive and collaborative participation in class sessions, including lessons, discussions/debates, activities (30% = 9 points out of 30); assimilation of notions and topics (25% = 7.5 points out of 30); ability to critically process such notions and topics (ability: 25% = 7.5 points out of 30); terminological appropriateness of argumentative and dialectic expression (20% = 6 points out of 30). Outstanding performances will be awarded ‘cum laude’.

Non-attending students:
Oral exam: individual interviews of about 30’ test the acquaintance with and capacity of critical elaboration on the topics addressed in the general, preparatory, and additional readings. Weighed factors contributing to the final evaluation of each student: assimilation of notions and topics (40% = 12 points out of 30); ability to critically process such notions and topics (40% = 12 points out of 30); terminological appropriateness in argumentative and dialectic expression (20% = 6 points out of 30). Outstanding performances will be awarded ‘cum laude’.

Teaching tools

Projections illustrating written, cartographic, photographic sources, general, additional, and specific bibliographies, digital and printed didactic material.

Office hours

See the website of Roberto Pasini