Issues, Resources and Strategies. The Landscape of the Central Bari Area

Among the long sequence of the Adriatic cities, the metropolitan area of Bari is certainly custodian of some specificities – but only partially different from the others. Being the largest and the most southern on the coastal line, in fact, it summarizes all the problematic nature of Adriatic cities: infrastructural crushing, coastal artificialization, vulnerability in case of natural disasters, loss of its historical links with the backland, abandonment of the soils inside and around the urban borders. These issues are distinctive features of this area as of many others, but they appear here emphasized due to the city’s metropolitan dimension. A dimension, by the way, that was never managed as a whole, and therefore representing the result of disordered and overlapping policies and transformations which only recently have begun to compose a consistent framework.This contribution aims at analyzing the environmental, landscape and settlement specificities of this metropolitan area, which now constitute at the same time its criticalities and a possible instrument of regeneration: the water system, which invisibly shaped the territory; random dynamics of the settlements, as well as the size and potential of the wrecks they produced: demise, abandonment.These are the three elements which will be discussed, aiming at assessing each one’s size and challenges, the state of the art of innovative researches, in order to finally understand to what extent current policies (concerning the urban area, urban planning and the rural territory) are aware of the centrality of these themes. These reflections are placed today in a new scenario – the one of the recent Piano Paesaggistico, the first in Italy applying the European Landscape Convention and the Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape. A plan with an entirely new concept, projected into the social construction of the landscape and characterized by a series of widespread and innovative projects.Combining dynamically the challenges of the metropolitan area of Bari with this planning, and especially with the attempt to build new landscapes and new “identity landscape” represents today a challenge and an unknown territory.