The long time habitat: Recolonization versus Renaturalization

This paper aims to focus on the forms of the long and slow colonization of territories. Such a colonization is indeed able to trigger virtuous processes of maintenance for the so-called “socio-ecological systems”, in evolving interrelation between the human activities and the environment. This issue is included in the greater theme of the contemporary transformations in rural landscapes, namely in the Mediterranean. As E. Sereni put it in 1961, this transformation has been characterized by a deep semantic layering, producing forms of resilient habitats and high-value inertial. Nowadays, these landscapes are crossed by a deep dichotomy: on one hand the loss of meaning not only physical, of the weaker margins of rurality, in a continuous trend toward uncontrolled re-naturalization and ecological flattening. On the other hand, we could see an interesting phenomenon of a gradual yet unpredictable re-appropriation of these new forms of wilderness. Now the core issue of the long-time construction of landscape has a peculiar standpoint in those contests at the limits of the contemporaneity. As a matter of facts, a prime example is Sardinia, where this dichotomy between re-colonization and re-naturalization takes unusual characters for the contemporary project. Through the explication of transformative processes in the Oddoene Valley, a rural context in Sardinia, this paper tries to relate the catalyst role of the landscape design to the cyclical process of recolonization and re-naturalization. The transformative power of the landscape design would strengthens only by coming to terms with its intrinsic contradiction; such design is, in fact, a temporary act, but intended in accordance with the long time transformation of the same landscape. In other words, the landscape design, seen as further slice over the longue durée of any palimpsest, became a tool that might be valuable only through a deep understanding of the history of the places. Only in this way, the landscape design could become the preferred relational instrument between time and space.