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

A cultural geography:
The activity of human communities through history has converted natural geographies into cultural geographies. The course explores the system of the spatialized cultural heritage, result of the century-long stratification of anthropic regimes upon the physical geographic platform, emerging as urban and rural space. Circumstances and ways of the evolution of historical urban cultures and agro-silo-pastoral landscapes are analyzed in a moment prior to the explosion of the contemporary sprawled urbanization and the consequent blurring of the city/country divide. We can conventionally identify this temporal limit with the Great Acceleration, demographic and productive, of the 1950s and 1960s.

A Route through Europe:
Based on foundational sources of the Historical Geography school by Braudel and Febvre and early post-war-period popularisations on the national beauties by the Touring Club Italiano, the course draws a route though Europe from the North Sea to the Adriatic. The route moves up the Rhine corridor from its Zealandic delta: Brabant, Ruhr, the romanized Rhine of the limes from Cologne to Mainz, Frankfurt on Main, Palatinate and Alsace down to Basel, the hub to the Danubian ways to the east and Lake Constance, then the northern face of the Alpine arc up to the central massifs, to cross the 'carrable' passes and descend south lapping the great pre-alpine lakes and then follow the Po River across the Lombard, Aemilian, and Venetian alluvial plains, in sight of the Lessini, Berici, and Euganean formations, until reaching the Adriatic lagoons. Since the most remote times of the prehistoric traffics of peoples and matters, ambers, corals and metals, until the present Trans-European Transport Network, the historical geographies of cities and landscapes have formed and dissolved through the centuries along this continental route. The course provides tools to read urban systems and traditional landscapes as functional and cultural, thus, semantic, apparatuses, and recognize the material elements that make up the city and landscape in association with the socioeconomic and cultural regimes that produce them.

A new sense in contemporary space:
The course eventually confronts the historic city and the traditional landscape with the context of the contemporary sprawled urbanization: the demographic explosion of the human species, the expansion of a disjointed landscape, megaregional agglomerations, the appearance of huge operational hinterlands, occupied by intense infrastructuration, enslaved to resource extraction, production, logistics, and waste absorption. Faced with such apparatuses of global urbanization, the course explores the possibility of a new sense for the traditional space systems, urban and rural, capable 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

Bibliografia per gli studenti frequentanti:

• 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 (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)
  
• 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

Bibliografia integrativa per gli studenti non frequentanti:

• L. Febvre (1998) [1935] Il Reno. Storia, miti, realtà, Donzelli
• L. Gambi (1972) 'I valori storici dei quadri ambientali', in: Storia d'Italia, Einaudi, pp. 3-57
• 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

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.

Students who for reasons related to different abilities or specific learning disorders (DSA) require compensatory tools may communicate their needs to the teaching staff in order to be directed to the referents for the adoption of the most appropriate measures.

Office hours

See the website of Roberto Pasini