The meadows will not return

The meadows are not coming back, it should be said now.

Over the years of attending and participating in the schizophrenic Landscape debate, I have come to understand that Northeastern Italy still struggles to come to terms with its recent history and accept that it is the natural face of a legal market

, driven by the Tremonti Law on sheds and by those same individuals who, collecting dividends at the end of the year in the popular bank meetings, would then return on January 1 to re-invest in the same way. In that basket of circular wealth sat the politics of small and medium-sized cities, the business of small and medium-sized entrepreneurs, of small and medium-sized planners; in short, a chain of small and medium-sized facts that for better or worse, all added together, traced the furrow of a season. Of course, that season today has crashed against its own limits, and it even risks being the last if it continues to think that “green” means only making green roofs to be seen from above, or approving “green variants” in city councils that nullify a recently acquired right to build on land, or promoting green conferences on the peasant myth of when it was better when it was worse. No, the meadows will not come back, and no one will want or come to demolish the sheds, except for a short-sighted public machine that lacks first of all grey matter; a gray and not green matter, political and cultural, capable of uniting intelligences in higher thinking and recognizing the new models that the crisis necessarily forces us to seek. On the contrary, there is a great desire for new communities in the Northeast, perhaps because the classical tools of representation are in crisis, or because politics no longer has any power or language.
When the market “pulled” it had the task of protecting land consumption, but now that everything is at a standstill it must spur us not to thwart the opportunities for urban reuse, for the hybridization of resources, for the formation of new governance that emerge independently from many quarters and struggle to find formal recognition in the same public entity that should promote them. But it is known, homo homini lupus, and so is politics. Missing is always the project, which before being a landscape is a conscious transformation of a territory, beautiful or ugly. What is always lacking is governance of the issues, or rather governance, that which allows good projects to be transformed into good practices, to transform a free initiative into a critical mass that sets trends. And indeed, of good projects we have seen in recent years, inside factories of excellence that export good products and also generate good places to live and work. Indeed, we have hoped that they could become good practices to emulate, but this has not happened, and today only a newspaper short of ideas can look to them as the model from which to start again.
No, we need something more complex, narratable with a language that today is only at the first letters of the alphabet and does not yet have a reference literature. We need gray places in which to settle green communities, that is, smart, thinking, hybrid communities, free to take initiatives and give them a place untethered from predetermined uses. New centralities are needed, or old places that renew their role as centralities; a bit like Milan did during the Expo 2015 cyclone, to the point of being the hub even for a large slice of the Northeast, with good peace to the historical tradition of “Dominant Venice” on its own lands. No, the meadows are not coming back, and that is why a Green Week in the Venices is needed, to tell all that is green without appearing so.