By C. Agnoletti and V. Patacchini
The research was conducted by Chiara Agnoletti and Valentina Patacchini, coordinated by Patrizia Lattarulo, director of the Public Economy and Territory Department at IRPET.
The Region of Tuscany has chosen to develop the Regional Landscape Plan as an addition to the current Territorial Plan, in order not to separate the issue of landscape from structural and strategic issues, also in view of the new role that landscape planning has taken on in relation to the application of the Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape (Legislative Decree 42/2004), the provisions of the European Landscape Convention (signed in Florence in 2000 and ratified by Italy in 2006) and the methods for drawing up landscape plans within the framework of regional territorial planning (Regional Law 65/2014).
The European Convention, in particular, has contributed to changing the concept of landscape as the subject of public policy, shifting the focus from landscapes of outstanding beauty already protected by law to the ordinary landscapes of communities, i.e., the places where people live and dwell and which they recognize as such. The implication underlying the convention to deal with the regional territory in its entirety and complexity is similarly supported by the Code, which also focuses, for example, on the landscapes of suburbs, urbanized countryside, and degraded industrial areas.
The planning of the Landscape Plan does not start at the local level, but is a tool whose contents are drawn up in co-planning between the Region and the competent Ministry, and is a superordinate plan to which other plans and programs, at any level, are required to conform. The restrictions in force, those imposed by decree (Article 136 of the Code) and those provided for by law (Article 142 of the Code), are contextualized and ‘clothed’ in accordance with the structured disciplines of the Plan.
As stated in the General Report, the Plan ‘is called upon to integrate the notion of landscape according to three competing approaches: (i) the aesthetic-perceptual approach (the concept of ‘perception’ renewed by the European Landscape Convention, from ‘beautiful view’ to the perception of inhabitants of their living environments), (ii) the ecological approach (which identifies and addresses the environmental values of the landscape and its ecosystem organization), (iii) the structural approach (which identifies the identities of places formed over time through the development of relationships between human settlement and the environment, and interprets the relationships between ‘ecological landscape’ and ‘cultural landscape’ in procedural forms). (…)
