00455 - Geography

Learning outcomes

The course aims at offering the theoretical and methodological instruments needed to understand and put in value the cultural resources.

The place-based and territorial character of these resources, strategic for the civic and economic local development, needs in fact an approach able to connect together the historical, spacial and technologic components.

The student will acquire through the course a basic knowledge of the main geographical models of representation, analysis and understanding of the deep links acting among environment, landscape and urban civilization, analyzed in a historical, critic perspective.

Course contents

The lessons will take into consideration the scientific methods of the human geography, with particular interest in the “cultural geography” which became more and more important among the geographical disciplines during the last twenty years, according to the so-called “Cultural Turn”.

The anthropologic idea of Culture and the notions of the “Cultural Evolution” developed by Luca Cavalli Sforza will be treated, till the new theory of the local identity, that of the social and cultural capital and their strategic roles as drivers of the local economic development (the so-called culture-driven development) will be represented.

 

The course will describe cultural geography’s styles of thinking like the the geographical determinism, Vidal de la Blache’s possibilism, Berkeley school and Carl O. Sauer’s theory of the “Cultural Landscape” (then developed by Denis Cosgrove), the “Spacial Analysis” of the so-called quantitative geography (spread out in the Seventies of the last century), the “behavioural”, the “humanistic” and the Anglo-Saxon radical geographies.

The structuralist school and the post-structuralist geaographical approaches will be discussed, then the crisis of the “representational” methodology and the “New Cultural Geography” described.

In the end, the Italian “Territorialist School” will be analyzed (by making reference to the works of the Italian geographers Dematteis, Magnaghi, Becattini, Governa) and the links they underlined among culture, heritage, history, social characters and the local with case reports about the Emilia-Romagna Region and Lucio Gambi’s (a geographer from Ravenna) contribution to envisioning the “territorialist” approach of the cultural policies of the Emilia-Romagna Istituto per i beni artistici e storici in the Seventies of the last century.

 

The general topic will be broadened by some historical “case studies” about the cultural, political and religious meanings taken by the landscapes as drivers of the local or national identities, as the myth of Arcadia, the Veneto Palladian landscape, the “garden-city” urban theory, the Fifteeenth-century “Vatican paradises” under pope Nicholas the Fifth, the building of the cultural characters of some regions like the Larius (around Como lake) or Montefeltro (a district near Romagna), the myth of the Pontifical State represented as a new “Holy Hearth” under pope Sixtus the Fifth in the Sixteenth century, the birth of the idea of the Dutch landscape and the political celebration of the Anglo-Saxon garden-park, linked to the Northern identitarian love for the Wilderness.

Readings/Bibliography

A synthesis of the lessons, a copy of the showed pictures and some printed documents will be freely provided to the students as helps for the final exam, which will be based on the following manual: Tiziana Banini, Geografie culturali, Milano FrancoAngeli 2019, euros 32,50 (not available as ebook).

Some copies of the book will be available in the Central library of Unibo Ravenna Campus.

Teaching methods

Frontal lessons, seminaries, wokshops and conferences.

The lessons will be enriched by seminaries, collective lectures with the collaboration of the students (possibly used as preliminary evaluations of the available students) about topics as “the local knowledges and the local development” or the “geography of the knowing”.

Assessment methods

Final oral exam.

Possibly preliminary partial evaluation of papers presented by the students during the workshops.

Teaching tools

Manual:

Tiziana Banini, Geografie culturali, Milano FrancoAngeli 2019, euros 32,50 (not available as ebook).

Documents and pictures proposed during the lessons will be freely provided to the students on Virtuale site where they  will find the following works to study (considering only the quoted pages):

Giorgio Mangani, La bellezza del numero. Angelo Colocci e le origini dello stato nazione, Ancona, 2021, Il Lavoro Editoriale, II edizione, cap. 3, Roma Quadrata, pp. 135-180; cap. 4, Horti Colotiani, pp. 181-213.

Giorgio Mangani, Geopolitica del paesaggio. Storie e geografie dell’identità marchigiana, Ancona, Il Lavoro Editoriale, 2012, cap. 3, Le Marche-giardino, pp. 31-59; cap. 4, Lo stato paesaggio, pp. 60-116; cap. 6, La “vita sobria”, pp. 134-155; cap. 7, Larius/Lauretum, pp. 156-179.

Giorgio Mangani, Città per pensare, in A. Marchi, M.R. Valazzi, a cura, La città ideale. L’utopia del Rinascimento a Urbino tra Piero della Francesca e Raffaello, catalogo della mostra, Milano, Electa, 2012, pp. 299-303.

Alexandra Onuf, Envisioning Netherlandish Unity: Claes Visscher’s 1612 Copies of the ‘Small Landscape’ Prints, in “Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art”, Winter 2011 (on line) see link:

https://jhna.org/articles/envisioning-netherlandish-unity-claes-visscher-1612-copies-small-landscape-prints/

Office hours

See the website of Giorgio Mangani