New prospectives in planning and organization
di Francesco Morandi,Federico Niccolini e Massimo Sargolini
Il volume in inglese raccoglie i materiali di un seminario internazionale del Novembre 2009 organizzato a Visso dalle Università di Camerino, Macerata e Sassari.
La prima parte di Massimo Sargolini, Roberto Gambino e Paul Bray tratta della pianificazione dei parchi nei rapporti con il territorio e delle relazioni tra parchi e paesaggio in prospettiva europea.
La seconda parte di Federico Niccolini, Fabio Fraticelli, Sheridan Steele e Daniela Marzo mette in luce le nuove sfide nella organizzazione e gestione delle aree protette.
Si tratta di una riflessione ricca di documenti e dati a tutto campo da cui emerge anche un interessantissimo confronto tra l’esperienza europea e quella americana e internazionale alla luce dei degli ultimi congressi e appuntamenti dell’UICN.
Temi oggetto peraltro anche di un impegnativo lavoro in corso e prossimo alla conclusione da parte del Politecnico di Torino ( Roberto Gambino e Attilia Peano) su il paesaggio come ponte tra natura e cultura.
Un volume presentato recentemente anche negli USA al NPS.
Impossibile, naturalmente, render conto delle oltre 200 pagine di cui però si può e si deve dire senza alcuna concessione alla amicizia nei confronti dei relatori, che specie di questi tempi, cioè dopo l’indigestione che abbiamo dovuto fare di idee bislacche e strampalate sui nostri parchi e la nostra legge, conforta e ci fa apprezzare in tutto il suo valore l’impegno culturale. Quell’impegno che negli anni sembra essere stato bandito anche in sedi che ne avrebbero davvero bisogno. Visto perciò che nel libro è citata l’esperienza e l’iniziativa del Gruppo di San Rossore mi piace concludere assumendo l’impegno a promuovere un appuntamento nazionale in cui si possa tornare a riflettere sul ruolo dei nostri parchi che in troppi vorrebbero oggi ridurre a mera operazione di bottega o di cassa sulla base di norme che non stanno né in cielo né in terra.
Il libro sarà un valido stimolo.
Renzo Moschini
INTRODUCTION
by Francesco Morandi,Federico Niccolini e Massimo Sargolini
An international seminar (“Italian protected areas reaching the 2100 vision: strategies and actions. New organizational and planning perspectives”) was organized in Visso in November 2009 by the Universities of Camerino, Macerata, and Sassari. Those responsible for the planning, management, and administration of many Italian national and regional parks were invited, in addition to representatives from different environmental associations, as well as the largest and oldest organization dedicated to the management of national parks on the entire planet: the US National Park Service. The seminar highlighted the role that parks can have in reawakening and reinvigorating the sense of some local identities that value territories and communities by operating from two sides: planning, and organizing and managing the asset to be protected. We would like to focus the lively debate regarding the future of protected areas, which in recent times has involved an important slice of civil society, on these two principal themes, which cross into discussions of so many other problems. The present volume is therefore articulated in two parts.
The first section investigates the separation that has traditionally characterized the relationship between park policies and protected areas from those of urban planning and the territory. Forms of integration and convergence among different government levels are lacking in Europe, above all in Italy, in contrast to what occurs overseas, where these relationships have been consolidated for some time. The economic, territorial, and cultural importance that environmental politics has assumed in Europe in recent years, affecting a portion of national territory much greater than what is protected directly, renders this opening up of urban planning to the environmental question more opportune than ever (Massimo Sargolini).
Therefore, a new conceptual contiguity between environment and territory is being initiated, profitably anticipated by the European Landscape Convention, which since 2000 has extended landscape merit to the entire territory. The reports by Paul Bray and Roberto Gambino gathered in this first part describe in detail two new areas of contact from which arise effects that are important not only for the politics of park management, but especially for the entire territory, bringing into play scientific and cultural interests from the urban planning and socio-economic disciplines, disciplines that have much to learn from the experiences of planning protected areas.
In this way, other important contributions have characterized the Visso event, refining the environment/territory relationship in management practices in different fields. For example, from the agronomy point of view, it has been shown how quality agriculture can produce positive externality in the landscape quality of the site and therefore also in social and economic areas, favouring the permanence of a young population in a territorially marginal area of the parks (Francesco Ansaloni). However, the eventual abandonment of some portions of protected areas, and their natural transformation into wilderness landscapes, would not always be an event to contrast, considering the fact that the preservation of landscapes should also take into account their spontaneous evolution (Cosimo Marco Calò). At any rate, looking at the landscape of parks means linking the core of the protected area to the territorial surroundings and looking, finally, at the people. In such a sense, the park can also project the future of local communities, using the plan to construct a dialogue and start a cultural bet with the territorial context (Francesco Calzolaio). In this direction, a coordination model for park policies that substitutes the concept of vigilance with that of “coordination” could be of assistance to levels of central government, as has already been successfully experimented with by French and Spanish judicial organizations (Bonano, Lippi). However, the serious delay in planning for protected areas throughout Europe, particularly accentuated In Italy, is not encouraging (Maria Cecilia Natalia). With persistent difficulties editing and launching management instruments, parks stop trying to become auspicious laboratories for experimenting with new forms of sustainable eco-development, which would then be extended to the rest of the territory (Antonio Perrotti).
Too often, planners and designers have confronted this theme in a hurried manner, remaining trapped within their own disciplinary walls without even thinking to experiment with transdisciplinary and trans-scale approaches, without looking for new methods to work together with other fields of expertise. The planning activity of parks is constrained, instead, to measuring with ecology, geology, and economy and to examining closely some crucial dilemmas in the current debate on conservation/transformation, such as the relationships between local and global interests, between natural and cultural values, between property and environmental rights, between evaluation and project, between rules and cooperation. The same established objectives for a protected marine area that might seem more limited are at the same time environmental, socio-economic, and historical/cultural. Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM), pointed out by Fabio Vallarola at the Visso meeting, is a form of coastal planning and integrated management laid out in a specific protocol signed on 21 October 2008 in Madrid that became part of the actions outlined in the Barcelona Convention. The above-mentioned approach could allow the weak points in the actual management formulas of the coastal zone to be overcome, reinventing the socio-economic operational, planning, and programming modes.
It is evident, therefore, why park planning means not only parks. They can become the field to experiment with new applications in the planning process, to be extended though appropriate filters to the entire territory, in which landscape and environmental fragility and sensitivity are determining factors. Therefore, if the park needs the territorial context to escape from claustrophobic and “island” views, the territory, on its own account, has much to learn from the successes and failures of governing policies for protected area. All of this assumes particular significance in a country such as Italy, which our colleagues from the National Park Service, even considering the territorial dimensions they are used to in the US, recognize as one large park.
In the second section, some organizational and management themes for protected areas are examined, along with their relationship to the performance of those protected areas and to the global perspective of sustainable—or even better, responsible—socio-economic development. In this section, organizational factors of a structural type are examined, which affirms the systemic and organic perspective that protected areas, nature conservation, and more generally, responsible socio-economic development need to consolidate themselves on local, regional, and national scales.
The essential aspects in understanding how protected areas can undertake a real “laboratory” role to spread the values of nature conservation and responsible development in a nation are the following:
-structure and strategies adopted at the national level for the entire sector of protected areas, with particular reference to those of national interest (Nicolini);
-environmental education strategies—or better, nature conservation education—originally seen as secondary aims and not as fundamental elements in the mission of protected areas (Marzo);
-organizational characteristics of a single protected area, which should also respond to local needs and be based on institutional aims that reflect orientation and planetary necessities (Fraticelli).
To make scientific and important reflections emerge from the preceding aspects, it has been important to focus attention on the examination of case studies that were recognized as benchmarks on the international level. In this respect, the American experience (in particular, that of the National Park Service for national parks and the Office of National Marine Sanctuary of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for marine sanctuaries) constitutes an important reference point for organizational and governing characteristics and for the results reached.
In this section, it was necessary to make an organizational diagnosis to identify possible causes and solutions for the difficult situation that for years, according to experts in he field, has affected Italian protected areas. The business organization and systemic perspective offer a key to understanding why protected areas grow in number, size, and effectiveness in some nations (such as the United States), and they “experience difficulties rather than grow and really survive” in other nations, as affirmed by many experts in the “Organization and Management” session of the “Italian Protected Areas, reaching the 2100 vision: strategies and actions. New Organizational and Planning Perspectives” international workshop.
Organizational comparative analysis between the American and Italian benchmark realities has uncovered an approach of analysing and interpreting the different realities: protected areas organized on the basis of unitary structural models can become promoters of sustainable ecological and socio-economic visions for the entire nation. Sheridan Steel, one of the most expert directors of the US’s 397 National Parks, has shown that the core strategy of American national parks, for example, is that of spreading and rooting the values of environmental conservation within the American public. The thousands of non-profit organizations, designed, created, and desired by the American public for the promotion of individual protected areas represent, on one hand, a formidable ally in this strategy, and they constitute, on the other hand, an important result, a vital testimony of the background and cultural support spread among those who enjoy the American protected areas.
Looking at the Italian reality, the essence of the results of comparative analysis have been cultivated and expressed synthetically by Sheridan Steel with this careful, analytical, and categorical confirmation: “Italian National Parks are a list and not a system”.
Italian protected areas still have not developed those systemic structures (Luigi Bertone) that not only allow for the availability of all those skills that no organ in a single park can contain (Fabio Modesti), but also allow the areas to remain alive, adapting to the challenges of modern times the mission, basic values, and visions that have generated them and that only growing in society can keep alive. As clearly expressed in response to the question, a historical director of a national park (Franco Tassi), with deep knowledge and acting in the Italian reality stated, “parks really risk losing the deepest sense of their ‘mission’ and ‘vision’ of the future, forgetting the ethics that have been promised and the passion that it so strongly desired”.
Organizational comparative analysis shows that there is elevated potential for improving the performance of Italian protected areas, re-evaluating or activating organizational variables of an institutional nature, and developing a systemic governing approach (Vittorio Ducoli). In the system of public organizations dedicated to the management of Italian protected areas, there are consistent intervention margins for some elementary organizational variables (such as structure and strategy) that have the potential to initiate systemic effects on the national level. In a special way, it is possible to pivot around a unitary and systemic structural approach in order to give a strong impulse to the effectiveness of protected areas (Sergio Paglialunga).
Changing and improving the organization in charge of managing the 871 Italian protected areas would imply a huge effort (if it were decided to modify the institutional mission of some public entities), as well as investments that are difficult to achieve in a time of crisis. It should be asked, however, if it is not precisely these “investments for growth” that, in a time of difficulty, it is necessary to look at with interest in order to start on some solid path of real development.
The activation of simple organizational interventions could have the effect of activating a slow and profound change in the mentality of the society, a sort of gradual “metanoia” according to Senge, which in a mid-range view would contribute to favouring a solid process of sustainable and responsible development based on the synergistic improvement of ecological, social, and economic conditions, and above all a grounding of a culture of social responsibility. The presence of a modern and effective national system of protected areas could, in fact, undertake an important role in spreading those values and visions of conservation of the natural environment and of responsible social and economic development, which are fundamental pillars for the real and long-lasting well-being of each nation. “New organizational and planning perspectives” exist to reach the vision for 2100 of “constructing a committed citizenship to conserve their home on Earth”. It is necessary to rediscover and keep alive the willingness to carry them out.
