The pact with the countryside. The new urban-rural question

The question of the fringe areas and settlement filaments The countryside is perhaps a little like poetry, an incorporeal combination of intuition that becomes a composition. A composition of elements filled with significance – air, land, smells, light, colours, noise, wind and the morpho-forms of nature and man – that communicate sensations and emotions, moods and the inner meanings of thought. One may listen to the landscape as though it were a musical score, marked by oxymoron and transgressions, that draws together harmonies and dissonance, solos and choirs, movements and fugues. The beauty of the countryside is mental utopia, a special and multi-facetted quality, a combination of qualities that may be appreciated with sight, hearing, touch and breath, a wonderful ability to exalt and combine antimonies and juxtapositions, nebula and rarefaction, limitations and openness, continuity and rupture, perennially balanced precariously between the abyss and deliverance. And the tools to use to face the “need” to save, preserve, enjoy and live the countryside, are those tied to the sense of “being” rather than “possessing”. The forgotten meanings, on which planning and project choices are based, thus reappear, and the threats for the modern territory: a mix of city, country-sides, parks and “new territories of urban planning”: with unbroken filaments that run like luminous serpentines over the hilltops of central Italy, and in particular Marche. It is thus that the inhabitants who protect these places, the middle lands, reappear: elves and fairies who want to reclaim their urban and rural country-side. Tired of waiting for answers to their hopes and the hardships of their living and working environments. The indignados of the fields, are the new leading players of the physical and incorporeal landscape. Marche, an unusual territory with respect to the rest of Italy, hides a secret. A mysterious thread links the cities and territories, the sea and hillside landscapes. A link which appears only to those who have the sensitivity to see it. A luminous pattern which appears at night to elves and fairies, who climb to the highest peaks of hilltops and mountains, to enjoy the marvel. It is then, when the whole world sleeps, that the chain of lights alight to show the road to travellers and the vision appears in all its unexpected beauty: an imaginary nocturnal vision. The first to appear on moonless nights is a Comet. Fragments of urban and farming areas along radiocentric systems that link rarefied and broken urban fringes that disappear into the nocturnal landscapes. The light of the Green Comet that throws its rays from Mount Conero towards the peripheral districts of Ancona, is reflected into the darkness of the sky. Then slowly, lithe winding lights multiply on the arena of the territory, and Luminous Serpentines appear along the hilltops of Marche Region; broken formations that twist over the hilltops: never-ending rising and falling, environmental beauty to discover. Linking people and animals, homes and parks, fields and courtyards, towers and fortresses. An uncontrolled twisting of ramshackle or restructured farmhouses, small houses, workshops, shacks, building material deposits, crumbling buildings, empty settlements gardens, vegetable gardens, crops, widening of tarmacked or un-tarmacked roads, and small rural groupings. And for those who fear that they might go astray in this encircling labyrinth, the safe and reassuring luminous Paths suddenly appear to show the way to the main roads. Settlement offshoots, narrow flat segments of continuous urban fabric along the valley bottoms close to the urban centres, linking them like a spider web to their inescapable destiny. And when night falls, and dreams give respite to thought, the Urban Nebulas appear like a carpet of glow worms. Constellations of indistinctly defined scattered stars. Urbanoid masses, peripheral lights of transition between city and countryside. And when the early light of dawn rips the shadows, and the physicians of the territory awake, with the revealing lights of night imprinted in their eyes, the time has come to heal this “urban-rural territory: narrow segments of city and countryside ridges, peri-urban rural areas, fragments of farming fabric, which, as a result of expanding urbanisation, tend to become interstitial residual areas of competition between function, transformation and abandonment”. The land of Marche Region is like an indissoluble web of thousands of kilometres of woven threads, with uncontrolled semi-urbanisation, a new and very personal type of settlement: neither city, nor countryside nor park. And so the physicians of the territory have gone to work to endeavouring to find planning and administrative consistency for the fringe countryside, concentrating their efforts on planning these new settlement systems. They chose the pathologies and prescribed the most efficient therapies. We do not know if the nocturnal visions of these physicians who never sleep have suggested the best solutions for those who love this unusual territory. We can however say that «we have endeavoured» to do so.