Internationally renowned Italian landscape architect and Full Professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the “Mediterranean” University of Reggio Calabria as well as Author of groundbreaking books on garden design and landscape oriented topics (www.francozagari.it), Franco Zagari passed away on June 21, 2023 in Rome at the age of 78.
Zagari can be counted among the founding fathers of UNISCAPE, who first conceived the idea of creating a large European network dedicated to landscape studies and research, promoting the principles of the European Landscape Convention. He has collaborated in several scientific publications and events as member of the Executive Board and later as honorary vice-president.
We want to remember him with his inspiring contribution to the UNISCAPE’s tenth anniversary celebration
LANDSCAPE: “WHAT IS THE NIGHT?”
The political urgency of an implementation phase of the ELC
by Franco Zagari, 2018
I love my country and I always try, and not just because I’m fond of it, to be optimistically prejudiced despite the ever decreasing margins of choice in the organization of our lives while deep transformations are taking place in the territory. But it’s impossible not to see the situation of grave moral and material decay of a size and speed never before seen that is not only the effect but also the cause of the general economic and financial crisis, a weakening of our idea of civitas that has now become an institutional crisis because we now observe without reacting to the increasingly tenuous pact of awareness and responsibility that should be the basis of the relationship between spaces and society. It is against this backround that the European Landscape Convention has been able to articulate a response to petitions from illuminated local entities in the form of a law addressing universities, local entities and associations in the same language.
The strength of this splendid guiding star is its important cultural profile, the concept that “everything is landscape” and that people are put “center stage” while its weakness depends on the fact that not only has this law never been funded but, due to a lack of culture regarding projects, it has even been a terribly denigrated impassive bystander. UNISCAPE now has the responsibility of relaunching it, of not squandering this energy that has touched the minds and hearts of thousands of European citizens. Its natural home can be none other than Teide, the highest vulcano in Europe that like Atlantis is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, because this is where Alexander Humbolt climbed to study the Cosmos.
UNISCAPE has the carisma to clearly speak to the public of the cultural, social and economic prospects of landscape policy, starting from the implementation of the contents of the Convention’s law. The urgency to act is due to the certainty that the costs of a wise policy of landscape projects, today increasingly integrated with the training of new figures to manage them, are probably very low to non-existent. Not doing landscape projects costs much more. UNISCAPE has a valuable network of disciplines, tools and methods enabling it to give hope to this prospect. Because of this, it can be a virtual agency of “doing” and at the same time of “being able to foresee”, capable of capturing even the subtlest vocation of what a place could be, each with its own separate enigmatic laws.
From a political point of view, my first idea for UNISCAPE is that it strongly attack the anti-project party, a conservative coalition that acts upon both patrimony and sustainibility. And that it be not an academic exercise but rather a joyful war machine, a club of excellence promoting curriculum reform, fully utilizing its patrimony of international experience.
We have done a lot for the Convention but now we are betraying it. The crux is the inability to regulate a balanced relationship between global and local and, moreover, the ominous cristallization into an inalterable text that does not correspond to the document whose creation was meant for battle and, still more, in the lack of a resolute policy of strategies and practical experimentation.