Mediterranean Landscapes: Between Cultural Development and Sustainable Design

Today agriculture and gardens are regaining a new significant role in defining urban and territorial sustainability. Nevertheless, contemporary design for historic cities and landscapes is poorly integrated with the real environmental vocations of sites, and with the site-specific characteristics. This is particularly marked in southern Mediterranean regions, where rapid and globalized urbanization is undermining the close relationship that has always existed between territorial forms and local culture, between a sound knowledge of places and the use of local resources and settlement principles. This is a real challenge for the future of these fragile territories, for the control of their environmental resources, as well as for the conservation of their inherited cultural heritage. Against this framework, landscape architecture can play a key role in urban and territorial regeneration, by providing actions for recovering the identity of places. Therefore, in order to preserve and redefine the local identity of small towns and villages around the Mediterranean basin, it is necessary to re-root their design in the consistent relationship, which has been lost, between gardens and urban and territorial structure, as in the example of the Itria Valley in Southern Italy. To this end, it is necessary to develop specific studies on the form of productive gardens as new landscape hubs, where settlement and territory, architecture and nature merge; places whose spatiality derives from a measured relationship between “forms” (of shade, of ground and of water), which are appropriate to the local climatic, cultural and territorial characteristics. Accordingly, landscape design will refer to the legacy of the places, by translating symbolic forms of traditional agriculture and constituting the fil rouge connecting urban and rural spaces.