Schnittlinien Zwischen Stadt und Land. Rural-urban intersections. Between Contemporary urban and rural spaces

Abstract

From December to April 2015 I was in Hannover for a postdoctoral period founded by DAAD. I was continued a study about contemporary territories and villages, started at University of Palermo and regarding western Sicilian areas. I found Jörg Schröder’s researches (LUH - Chair for Regional Building and Urban Planning) a lush field to compare cases and methods. In that period Prof. Schröder with his team were studying Hamburg Metropolitan Region (Regiobranding - Branding of rural-urban regions through cultural landscape characteristics). I participated in the surveys in Steinburg district, at the mouth of the Elbe. An agricultural area large more than 50,000 hectares has been observed. The urban settlements, on the contrary of Sicilian cases studied until then (PRIN 2009. The “extending town” in Sicily. Unit leader A. Sciascia), are rarefied and small. In according with Giuseppe Samonà’s “Extending-town” (Palermo 1976), Steinburg has been considered a unique “comprensorio” (district). It means that its limits are not administrative but geographical and physical. Moreover, the inhabitants and who visits the sites perceive this area as a unit and as mainly natural: even if the soil – totally artificial – has been changed substantially in the centuries to be saved from the water and the marshes. The man made the territory that today ecologists defend as “natural” and to be protected. This contradiction highlights cultural differences about the concept of nature and about what is commonly defined landscape, in different countries. The district of Steinburg is subject to various wills that come from the government, construction companies and, generally, from the inhabitants. Someone wishes the traditional houses (Fachhallenhaus) became museums in order to increase the tourism; others wish that these areas were urbanized, also because a new highway (Lubeck-Bremen) will soon serve them, radically changing, anyway, the territory; some people have to leave their homes because they are outdated or difficult to be managed. These features are only apparently irreconcilable. A synthesis can be sought, opening a debate based primarily on the combination preservation/transformation and on those other topics of the Restoration that can be transposed to the transformation of a territory with its own identity. These questions have been proposed to eleven professors from different countries and disciplines, three of them interviewed during the German stay. These dialogues are interwoven in a book in order to create an image of contemporary European living between urban and rural spaces (L. Macaluso, Rural-urban intersections, MUP, Parma 2016).