The Landscape plan of the Tuscan Region (Italy): identification, role and project of the in-between spaces

The assumption that drives our discourse is that the form of contemporary European cities, the broad metropolitan areas, is still "under construction": it is a huge amount of buildings and infrastructure, a patchwork of different landscapes, unfinished territories and indistinct spaces. The huge number of unfinished items immobilizes the capital invested for their realization; it makes evident the many mistakes made in the planning phase. For some of these spaces, maybe is recognizable a sort of rhythm, derived from what these spaces were previously, such as rural areas marked in the past by modifications, adaptations, reclamation. More frequently, we face an ubiquitous and unfinished "non-project" that has expanded enormously in the open spaces (in the natural areas, in the countryside) changing its meanings, and often erasing the possibility of referring to the past to find the right way to design the future. Therefore, our approach to address the conference themes, involve the interscalar aspect of the perceptive dimension of the landscape, that in Italy is a very important field of research, also for the urban planning; in fact, through the landscape planning in Italy we try to overcome some difficulties of regional planning like coordination between municipal plans, infrastructure policies, management of housing in rural areas, etc. Huge elements (i.e. large industrial areas, linear infrastructure, sprawled residential areas) they determine the emergence of spaces in-between, still to be submitted to the interdisciplinary statutes of urban planning. Sprawled urban areas, strongly infrastructured and low-skilled, parts of mutilated suburbs, almost uninhabited city centers, abandoned rural areas, over-exploited fringe areas... this elements wonder about the next step to take. The urban project, and the landscape design, at a different scale, could create some order over this work in progress, this unfinished immense "construction site": but the difficult task is to orient a completion that would give meaning of entireness, that would reanabled this powerful cumulative number of different parts to function as a well-built environment. The challenge is to involve residents and city users community to share a common goal. This action on the city resembles the retrofitting of a poorly constructed and never working apparatus: acting by addition, subtraction and finishing, working where it is necessary to give new meanings to existing materials (vegetation, water, soil) and providing new volumes built, new roads and paths, new infrastructures. This operation of repair involves all the ways of living, all manner of use the built environment, in its interactions with the different natural elements; this involves the integration between urban and rural dimensions, which are the interaction fields not only from the physical point of view, but also sociologically and scenically. The work that we present is based on these assumptions, and investigates the ways of qualifying contemporary urban areas in central Tuscany, considering to the principles of the new Landscape Plan. The work examines some types of recurrent urban tissue in the flat portions of denser settlement, assuming minimal but key actions for elevating their landscapes' quality: continues in reporting some possible new spatial configurations, drafted in specific guidelines, that are now become official recommendations for urban planning in Tuscany.