The productive landscape as a driver for economic recovery. Diffused settlements and synergies between the agricultural-rural environment and the urban grid

In a national scenario which emphasises the need to start again from a level of productivity and quality of life below that of pre-recession levels, the diffused production landscape becomes an indispensable resource for a new type of – shared, compatible and fair – economic and social development, the best use of resources and a reassessment of how to live in low-anthropised environments of high landscape-environmental value. The research investigates a dense network of hillside and valley settlement filaments, with thousands of small businesses and urban nuclei, on which the “Marche way of development” was based. The article describes the serious shortcomings and pathologies of territorial planning-management by public bodies and proposes strategies, management suggestions, intervention and protection procedures for new employment development opportunities and a policy to ensure energy saving and the enhancement of local resources. The ultimate goal: to ensure strong synergy between the agricultural-rural environment, the diffused production and urban grid and the cultural, environmental, tourist networks that may be defined as the “Productive landscape”. In Europe diffused urban-rural landscapes are evolving toward new equilibriums poised between the urban development of low-density settlement territorial contexts and the regeneration of high-density settlement territorial contexts. This implies renewed focus on protecting the residency of inhabitants in places of settlement subject to rarefaction and on a fair-sustainable transformation of the landscape, characterised by an inorganic land waste and the risk of degradation and abandonment. By introducing specific supra-municipal governance actions and intersectoral planning, these diffused environments may become a chance to relaunch local values, the quality of life and support employment initiatives: a driver for a new model of economic and social development. In Italy, integrated interdisciplinary tools were not sufficiently analysed for a particular diffused settlement typology, that extends, in some regions of central Italy, for hundreds of kilometres along hilly ridges, valley bottoms and the filiform urban fringes of urban centres. The disciplinary context, on which this thesis is based, is that these low-anthropised settlement typologies, still have unexploited potential, and are experimental places that may produce transformation and regeneration energy which, in a context of global recession, may become areas that attract investments. In the developmental scenario of an economy poised between recovery and bankruptcy, the scientific community is called to propose solutions against intensive exploitation, the absence of maintenance strategies and the very high costs caused by abandonment of the rural territory. It is reasonable to start again from the rural territory as a driver for a new type of development, based on the transition between the social and production reconversion of the countryside and the revaluation of the diffused settlement model, structured over thousands of kilometres of linear semi-urbanisation, that winds over mountain 196 ridges (luminous serpentines), on valley bottoms (luminous paths), over sprawling urban-rural filaments (green comet), and diffused areas of urban peripheral fringes (urban nebulae) or around isolated villages of the hinterland (tiny settlement constellations). Marche region is particularly suited to starting again from a close relationship with the rural environment, securely linked to the system of cultural, food and wine, environmental and tourist networks and more than a thousand small ancient historical-artistic treasure troves, into which the “Culturally driven advanced production districts” engage. An efficient strategy must however be well measured according to the endogenous potential of places, involving different levels of operators: territorial entities (with the use of economic support and regulatory instruments to protect the land), business and farming groups, or food and wine groups (who must improve the quality of products), tourist groups (involved in the recreational, sports, social and environmental offer), cultural groups (with new ways of using the rural historical heritage), artisans, old and new residents of the places (with whom it is necessary to establish rules to protect and ensure the functionality of places), all of whom express a growing demand for high quality local products. This also implies a new designing logic of diffused public spaces in the territory of dispersion, proposing elements of recognition, identification, margining and qualification.