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Institution and contact information: DICAR, Politecnico di Bari. [email protected], arc.carlo@

yahoo.it

KEYWORDS: Central Bari area, landscape plan, water spaces, brownfields, urban planning ABSTRACT:

Among the long sequence of the Adriatic cities, the metropolitan area of Bari is certainly custodian of some specificities – but only partially different from the others. Being the largest and the most southern on the coastal line, in fact, it summarizes all the problematic nature of Adriatic cities: infrastructural crushing, coastal artificialization, vulnerability in case of natural disasters, loss of its historical links with the backland, abandonment of the soils inside and around the urban borders. These issues are distinctive features of this area as of many others, but they appear here emphasized due to the city’s metropolitan dimension. A dimension, by the way, that was never managed as a whole, and therefore representing the result of disordered and overlapping policies and transformations which only recently have begun to compose a consistent framework.

This contribution aims at analyzing the environmental, landscape and settlement specificities of this metropolitan area, which now constitute at the same time its criticalities and a possible instrument of regeneration: the water system, which invisibly shaped the territory; random dynamics of the settlements, as well as the size and potential of the wrecks they produced: demise, abandonment.

These are the three elements which will be discussed, aiming at assessing each one’s size and challenges, the state of the art of innovative researches, in order to finally understand to what extent current policies (concerning the urban area, urban planning and the rural territory) are aware of the centrality of these themes. These reflections are placed today in a new scenario – the one of the recent Piano Paesaggistico, the first in Italy applying the European Landscape Convention and the Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape. A plan with an entirely new concept, projected into the social construction of the landscape and characterized by a series of widespread and innovative projects.

Combining dynamically the challenges of the metropolitan area of Bari with this planning, and especially with the attempt to build new landscapes and new “identity landscape” represents today a challenge and an unknown territory.

Bari area, the center of the metropolitan area

The institutional events of the last decade have led to identify – and now to formalize – the large extension of the metropolitan area of Bari, which includes the 41 municipalities of the former Province of Bari. This is a very broad and diverse territory, which has at its core the geographical environment that will be analyzed now: the basin of Bari in its most urbanized di-mension, next to its administrative center and, therefore, where the environmental, landscape and settlement-related issues show with greater intensity, deserving for this reason a closer look. This look, even if focused on the city of Bari, is still able to describe its surroundings in several ways.

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Among the long sequence of the Adriatic cities, the metropolitan area of Bari is certainly custodian of some specificities – but only partially different from the others. Being the largest and the most southern on the coastal line, in fact, it summarizes all the problematic nature of Adriatic cities: infra-structural crushing, coastal artificialization, vulnerability in case of natural disasters, loss of its histori-cal links with the backland, abandonment of the soils within and around the urban borders. These issues are distinctive features of this area as of many others, but they appear here emphasized due to the city’s metropolitan dimension. A dimension, by the way, that was never managed as a whole, rep-resenting for this reason the result of disordered and overlapping policies and transformations which only recently (and only regarding certain aspects) have begun to compose a consistent framework.

The conurbation of Bari has now dimensions and dynamics concerning the exploitation of the territory going well beyond its administrative borders. It is a highly urbanized area, resulting from the juxtaposition of local urban policies to the infrastructural ones, which during the decades of its growth resulted in the construction of its major urban facilities, production poles and infrastructural systems.

The planning of the administrative center, dating back to the 70s, still offers huge residual potentialities (estimated around 15 million cubic meters). On the other hand, urban policies promoted by other centers contributed to establish the former’s settlement dynamics, pour-ing into the market a wide offer of buildpour-ing soils competpour-ing with the expensive real estate market of the provincial capital. Today, after the decline of the real estate market, the settle-ment system is characterized by the juxtaposition of a range of urban patterns with their own form (historic centers, planned communities, large infrastructures), or lacking any structure or definite function (nebulae, rubble, sprawl, abandoned central and peripheral areas, derelict lands) – exactly how they have been described by the main theme of this conference.

In the central Bari area (a 22,402 hectares surface that includes the city of Bari, the adjacent urban centers and all the landlocked rural territory, where the greatest concentration of settlements dynamics and human fluxes is found, but also a great landscape and environmental junction), the urban area represents the 39.5%, the natural zones the 6.5% of its territory, the agricultural the 54%.

Since the latter still represents a perceptible presence, dominant in large districts or insinu-ated into urbanized areas, resistant but not resilient and therefore fragile, there are two as-pects worth noting, since they represent some of its current issues and, at the same time, a possible instrument for a potential regeneration. The first is its environmental features, and particularly its water system, which invisibly shaped the territory; the second is the random dynamics of the settlements, as well as the size and potential of the wrecks they produced:

demise, abandonment, terrain vague.(Fig. 1)

Water spaces as an invisible resource

Considering that Puglia is not excluded from the desertification process that involves all the southern regions, the area of Bari is characterized by an almost complete absence of a surface

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hydrographic network mainly due to the karstic nature of its soil, which quickly absorbs rain-water preventing the surface runoff. The “lame”, erosive cracks caused by the karstic activities, are dry for most part of the year but still periodically perform their function of rainwater receptors. In many of these “lame” located in the area of Bari converge, due to their slopes and geomorphologic trends (in this area, the “lame” occupy 1,900 hectares, approximately the 8.5% of the territory); the current conditions obstruct their hydraulic function due to the presence of buildings, fillings, improper uses. The poverty of the surface water system is associated with the limited amount of the natural spaces.

Climate changes, with its exasperation of the weather events, overlap the geography of the area; therefore any event that takes place upstream – on the Murgia – has downstream effects, and any improper use on the coastal strip pushes its effects more and more in depth in the backcountry, as for example in the case of the salinization of groundwater and soils caused by the uncontrolled captures – a widespread phenomenon in the whole region due to its shape, which has a large land/sea contact surface (over 700 km). If the entire coastal area is fragile and under stress, the one of Bari, because of its artificialization, is fragile in a very peculiar way.

The state of health and the scarcity of water resources requires as necessary – as well as prescribed by law – the reuse of water. This reuse was never made, despite the fact that dur-ing the 80s the Regional Administration invested substantial resources for the construction of

Fig. 1: Bari area, the center of the metropolitan area

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refining plants, which were never put into operation. Particularly significant is the case of the plant linked to the purification system of East Bari, built with CasMez funds, with a network of rural aqueduct for 1,800 hectares and now obsolete. (Fig. 2)

Settlements and abandonment

In a recent study conducted for the WWF Italy we mapped and classified within the central area of Bari all the abandoned or anthropized spaces that were never used. Brownfields rep-resent 8.5% of the urban areas, of which just under 2/3 is reprep-resented by production areas, and the remaining by former (or about to be abandoned) military zones, abandoned public property, infrastructural wrecks and historical sites. In the same area, as many as 13% of the non-urbanized areas are actually now anthropized but not used: residual areas or awaiting to be processed, unrealized standards, buffer areas and landlocked spaces.

In the analyzed territory, 11% of the soil belongs to the universe of decommissioning and abandonment, for a total of 2,500 hectares. Being the size of the problem this big, it is not a matter of single objects, but more of an actual structural layer of the territory and the city.

Analyzing the phenomenon in its temporal evolution, in recent years the large-scale and chronic decommissioning (concerning large areas in which there was no intervention before the crisis) is accompanied by a “fine-grained”, widespread and common decommissioning in

Fig. 2: Water spaces as an invisible resource

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all types of contexts: residential, manufacturing, mixed, marginal, landlocked. This constitutes a diverse set of places and spaces, whose arrangement, size and memory have a potential that today is very little used, and often through “case by case” solutions and with too complex and expensive procedures. In particular, what seems to be completely lacking is that overall, stra-tegic vision needed to reuse in the best way a huge heritage, potentially able to give answers to many unresolved issues of our cities: equipment, environmental equipment, social housing, etc. In this way, the opportunity to create a system able to answer on one hand the growing demand for space for services, activities, residence and, on the other hand, the needs that the decommissioned areas could satisfy. This is an unbearable detachment, especially when the will to fighting against the land consumption has been claimed. (Fig. 3)

The new landscape plan, the ongoing planning and the strategies for a resilient landscape

The thesis here proposed is that the elements described in their critical condition, for their lying and size, represent also strategic resources for the requalification of the central and metropolitan area of Bari.

For this reason, it is necessary to ask whether the current policies are appropriate for the problems discussed here. Among these policies, the most recent and innovative is the new landscape planning, being the planning of the new metropolitan city still in its embryonic stage.

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Fig. 3: Settlements and abandonment

The new landscape plan certainly introduces requalification strategies regarding the aimed to obtain a greater resilience.

Undoubtedly the Regional Landscape Territorial Plan (PPTR) introduces a new vision of the territory for what regards its interpretation (the Atlas), its goals (the Strategic Projects) and, finally, its method (the Guidelines and the Instruments of Governance). The provisions of the PPTR, starting from the safeguard system and following the strategic projects, provide a “work environment” supported by a vision and a set of strategies, the implementation of which is entrusted to a variety of instruments, first of all the urban and agro-environmental policies – which are, in some cases, explicitly recalled. Under this light, the PPTR invites to rethink the entire territory through a new environmental and landscape sensitivity, as well as to compose a sort of ‘patchwork’ of good practices.

The visions and the strategic projects of the PPTR need to combine and connect with the practices of territory planning, in a dimension that can no longer depend upon the policies of the single municipalities; on the contrary, they must start from what all these municipalities have currently in progress. Among these new approaches, the Preliminary Planning Document (DPP) for the new General Urban Plan (currently being developed) adopts a new strategy for the building of a new ecological network founded on the environmental and landscape requalification of the “lame”. These are also considered as an instrument of morphological reconfiguration for the city and its territory, trying to use these signs (in addition to their role of nature carriers and instrument to allow the territory’s proper hydraulic functioning) also as spatial coordinates – in other word, as real morphological matrices – shaped around the city itself. Doing so, the usual logic (dating back to the 19th century) of a rational expansion which advancing in the territory cancels its signs can be finally reverted.

This process, however, starts from particularly difficult conditions: the traditional indicators of Territorial Biopotentials and the Compactness Index are, respectively, 1.11 mcal/m²/year and 0.19 mq/ml.

However, making the deep sign of the territory visible again in order to configure and connect the fragments of a city is, today, a difficult operation, whose outcome is far from obvious – and this for at least two reasons. First of all, because these signs are now fragments themselves, and their total reconfiguration is impossible; therefore, their ecological and landscape per-formances need to be reinvented from scratch. The open, landlocked spaces, even if they are wrecks of continuous environmental systems, must today be rethought; a simple return to the past is not enough, being necessary to reinterpret the connection with the broader context – creating, this way, new places.

Moreover, these goals inevitably intertwine with the management of urban provisions: in the case of Bari, the enforcement of these provisions would result in a further lowering to 0,90 of the territorial biopotential; on the other hand increasing it, for instance, to 1,5 mcal/m²/ year (that is, the average-class value) would led to a planning scenario which would force not only to dismiss all the plan’s provisions still to be enforced, but also to reconvert to green zones the areas currently hosting industries and infrastructures, for a total of almost 2,000 acres. This is an unlikely scenario that the DPP itself labeled as non-reachable directly; for

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this reason, the project of the ecological network was based on a set of specific actions of denaturalization, requalification and transformation aimed at working in accordance with the current territorial biopotential.

Considering also that, for the shape of the soil and for the size and the multi-polarity of the settlement system, the index of compactness appears not particularly relevant, it is evident how these traditional indicators fail to deal with the problem of resilience in the heart of the metropolitan area. New indicators and realistic policies, therefore, are needed.

Work themes

The research and plans for the area clearly show the problems and difficulties in pursuing structural solutions, especially at a time in history when it seems that there are no resources for those big investments necessary to modernize the infrastructures and for the environ-mental remediation. In fact, the practices are oriented towards smaller, increenviron-mental, tempo-rary greening interventions: green roofs, social gardens, reuse – usually without any broader strategy. Those are certainly signs of the birth of a new awareness on the topics covered, but it risks of being simply an epidermal and extemporaneous consciousness, reaching only non-structural, local effects.

Within this framework, we have highlighted some work themes that can help in different ways building a resilient landscape.

First of all, considering the restrictions as strengths, a policy for the management of water resources becomes fundamental, from the safety of the territory to the capillary and cautious management of the water. If the landscape is an indicator of the state of health of an area, the quality of life of its inhabitants, the sustainability of the development, then the protection of water and its spaces, in this context, is able to shape the city and increase its quality.

The urban greening, in its various forms already mentioned, as well as the reuse of abandoned and decommissioned spaces, should have a background strategy aimed at selecting places and proper operations, in order to maximize the benefits in terms of connectivity and both environmental and urban requalification.

For this reason, the PPTR and the DPP need today to be paired with strategies able to make them feasible: managing for an urban standpoint the implementation of the current Town Gen-eral Plan’s provisions, through the adoption of proper compensation and mitigation measures of the new settlements and, where necessary, through their delocalization, currently means that together with each environmental requalification must be produced elsewhere new impacts – both in terms of new transformations and amount of compensation. The urban planning, if lacking the complementary instruments and the connected policies (environmental, landscape, economic, fiscal), appears doomed to perpetrate unsustainable transformations in space and time, being forced measures to mitigate their effects later on.

In other words, we need a good urban planning to obtain a better landscape; to have a good urban planning, able to contribute to the quality of the city, an integrated and

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sional approach to the territorial government is needed. Therefore, it is necessary that the urban planning forms an alliance with environmental and economic policies. The former will ensure that the transformations are able to increase effectively and significantly the quality of the environment; the latter, to make these interventions feasible without necessarily be forced to resort the volumetric lever – which, presently, is the only we use.

Such strategy also implies that, in view of the overcoming of the “case by case” basis and of the definition of policies synergic with the environmental and economic ones, the planning would be built around these strategies, not considering them as desirable eventuality, but as an actual performance planning. This could be done also orienting awarding mechanisms and formulas in this direction, obviously at the expense of simpler operations with a simpler procedure, but inevitably involving the consumption of new soil. More importantly, this could be done overcoming the now inadequate local dimension, using a renewed notion of public interest, specifically related to the constitutional principles of landscape preservation and hu-man health.

References

AA.VV., 2013, Dossier Legambiente La depurazione in Puglia

Calace F., Angelastro C., Lo Muzio Lezza L., 2013, “Puglia. Il riuso come opportunità di riqualificazione del paesag-gio”, in Filpa A., Lenzi S. Ed., Riutilizziamo l’Italia, WWF Italia pp. 65-79

Comune di Bari, 2010, Documento Programmatico Preliminare, pp. 112-117 CRA, INEA, 2007, Atlante nazionale delle aree rischio di desertificazione

Mininni M. Ed., 2011, “La sfida del Piano Paesaggistico per una nuova idea di sviluppo sociale sostenibile”, Urban-istica, n.147, pp. 7-71

Mossa, M., 2007, “The floods in Bari: what history should have taught”, Journal of Hydraulic Research, Vol. 45, No.

5, pp. 579-594

Regione Puglia, 2015, Piano Paesaggistico Territoriale Regionale

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