Articoli taggati con ‘Sustainable Development; Local Development; Territorial Development; Territory; Landscape Management; Cultural Heritage; Environmental Heritage; Cultural Management; Political Representation;’
The dark sides of culture
Barbara Kruger, in one of her famous artworks affirms: When I hear the word culture, I take out my checkbook. This provocation well evokes a wide range of associations related to culture: theatres, music performances, artworks, and so on. Another well-known quote says: “Whenever I hear of culture, I release the safety on my Browning”. This quote, misattributed to various Nazi leaders, is included in a Hanns Johst play “Schlageter”. Following recent interpretations, with this statement, the author well describes a common feelng related to what “Kultur” (the word used in the original play) represented during the ’20s and the ‘30s in Germany. In German, in fact, the word Kultur refers to what we could define as “high culture” in contemporary interpretation. This kind of culture was a privilege of the coeval elites. Kultur was often “a way of legitimizing the preferences of one group, and delegitimizing the preferences of another”. On closer inspection, these quotes have much in common: in both cases the word “culture” induces a reaction, and in both cases the “reaction” is in some way “violent”. The difference between the two interpretations is just in the weapon that Kruger (checkbook) or Josht (Browning) use.
Bone’s Territories: Territorial Heritage and Local Autonomy in Italian Inner Areas
“Areas in the bone” is not just a quote: it is the metaphor of the load bearing structure of Italy as well as the plastic representation of the marginalization process of the inner areas of the country that started from XX. In 1958, Manlio Rossi-Doria, coined the expression “flesh and bone” in order to underline the profound socio-economical feet apart among the numerous inner areas and the few valleys. His analysis coming from his specialization in agricultural economics was focused on the southern agricultural sector, in a historical phase in which were visible the firsts effects of the Riforma Agraria (Agrarian Reform) and of the investments of the Cassa del Mezzogiorno (Fund for the South) started since 1950. The interpretative framework developed by Rossi Doria can be extended to the entire peninsula, where the differences between urban and rural areas, inner territories or the coasts, mountains and valley grew more and more. Inner areas have experienced a deviation whose principal effects are the depopulation, the emigration, the social and economic rarefaction, the abandon of the soil and the landscape modification.
