Paisagem: Revisão de conceitos e práticas. O desafio dos territórios difusos

Abstract

This dissertation is focused on the landscape, particularly its role in the construction of other maps and other representations of reality capable of triggering new ways of looking and projecting the contemporary territory. The relevance of this topic is justified not only by the need to clarify the complexity of the current process/form of extensive urbanization in its various scales and components, but, above all, to recognize it as a result of how the current society is territorialized. This invariably leads to a new way of understanding and build territory, no longer just emerging but absolutely installed in the landscape. Since the idea of 'Garden of Eden' to the contemplation of a 'commonplace', the landscape has always been a firm basis for understanding the world around us, in all civilizations following the changes that the territory and society that produces it will suffer. Until very recently, it was said that geography was the science studying the landscapes. And the landscapes were said to be a kind of synthesis and epiphenomenon resulting from a long-time relationship between the natural conditions (a set of biophysical determinants) and human action organized in societies bearers of a culture, a historicity and a technological evolution. Today, however, the resurgence of interest in the subject of Landscape has uncovered not only new ways of looking or approaches, but the emergence of new concerns as well. Be the growing importance of environmental and heritage values, either because of the fact that the rapid expansion of urbanization phenomenon at the territorial macro scale has been interlacing areas previously assigned to different disciplines, the fact is that, today, the landscape is placed on new theoretical and practical terms, combining or opposing multiple records and representations of diverse origin. In the various fields of scientific knowledge, through the field of Arts and Aesthetics, or by the social, political and media fields, the interest in the study of landscape is nowadays considered as a starting point and guideline in various domains; its aesthetic and cultural values, its dynamic and fragility are highlighted; attention is drawn to the need to protect the natural and cultural values; and, especially now, one tries to determine how the Landscape can trigger ways to requalify the framework of everyday life and rebuild any local identity. In fact, being an element that contemplates and that is the result of a long process of human modeling of natural conditions, the Landscape has become a kind of common denominator to where syntheses of knowledge converge from different sources, and therefore, also, and essential element for those who, by duty or necessity, seek for new ways of understanding and deciphering the reality, and, with them, raise clarifications and especially answers to new problems and challenges posed by the current processes of occupation and construction of contemporary territory. Indeed, in the field of study and territory planning, the sudden acceleration, in the past decades, of society's transformation and the processes of territory occupation, hand in hand with the intertwining of disciplines that analyze this phenomenon, have been causing the inflection of traditional territorial reading lenses for considering the dominance of the modes and geographies of relations and socio-spatial logics associated with new logics of massive urbanization. The systemic and relational vision that is founded and reflects in this renewed approach dimension of the territory is entirely imposed by the current need to glimpse new ways of looking and acting adapted to current processes of land occupation and, at the same time, able to overcome the proverbial inefficiency of planning concepts and tools in strict sense and outline new ways of thinking and planning better suited to new logics of urbanization. In fact, the notion of 'landscape', as usually inferred, makes sense only when related to the processes of social construction of the territory and, therefore, with those elements and/or factors that influence or lead such a construction. Hence, to understand and regulate the latest and contrasting realities of the current urbanization phenomenon, through their landscape component (in fact, the most interesting here as the consensually least studied topic), involves the identification of its structural components and the decomposition of the scaffolds and spacing that are intrinsically determinants in this social construction. As such, and focusing in particular on the possible and desirable ways to regenerate the new ground for urbanization - new in the sense that conformation does not represent nor the compact and limited city, nor the ground mainly unbuilt and governed by the rules of agriculture or the said nature - what is doubly considered here is the landscape of the designated diffused urbanization. On the one hand, while reality commonly known by the 'dispersion' of forms of occupation that produce it and represent it in their fragmentation (a term that captures it in general characteristics, but in operational terms ignores its diversity and complexity). On the other hand, as a starting point and thread of an approach significantly distinct from conventional geography which represents the territorial system as a set of points or centers (cities), on the backdrop of agricultural/rural or natural ground, and so, too, extremely relevant from the point of view of the scales and the most suitable contents for diagnosis and for planning strategies and management of current processes of occupation and construction of contemporary territory. The current landscape/urbanization, as a matter arising from a long process of construction and accumulation allowed by time (since, rather than replacing, it has been reconciling), is here seized up, either by the analysis of its evolution and physical, functional and environmental manifestation, either by the social, cultural and economic factors that territorialize it and make it specific to a given society and context; and that because it is always the result of the society that produces it and, in this respect, the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century are indeed endless disruptions and introduction of new paradigms. As such, perceive it from the society and the context that produces it is the first exercise, but its meaning is not perceived without the supplementary exercise of observing this landscape from other perspectives and placing it in broader relationships with existing processes of occupation of the territory and its regulation, on the one hand; and more specific, on the other hand, when confronted with concrete situations, such as the urbanized spot of Braga (district), extending though the Cávado almost until Barcelos, Vila Verde and Amares. Hence the bet on a scaffold of and to the landscape/urbanization, capable of responding and of introducing significant changes as processes and requirements of land occupation change and therefore also capable of maintaining their role as active support after successive transformations. This, through a positive guidance and regulation of such construction, mainly based on conceptualization and requalification of such support structures open to the uncertainty of the programs and of things built, but necessarily accurate in what concerns what they connect and separate.