Landscape Decoding in Urban City Planning

The European Landscape Convention, with great determination, has placed as a priority target, the necessity to promote a high level of attention to the landscape, as a common asset. According to the Convention each part of the landscape conveys meanings: the areas of particular beauty, daily life landscapes and degraded ones. The evidence of this changed reading is the “Law on the Cultural Heritage and Landscape” (DLgs 22 n. 42 of 2004), which in the 2008 version (Dlgs. n. 63) embrace even the principles of the European Landscape Convention, which Italy ratified in 2006. If the Territorial Landscape Plan and the Territorial Coordination Plan have the useful role of containing guidelines, directives and safeguard provisions for the areas with landscape value, the Urban City Plans are the most appropriate tool to allow a planning which is respectful of landscape requirements. As a consequence, the urban city planning has to investigate the values of the landscape decoding both its specific and relational characters. The proposed landscape decoding method, already experimented with different scales of planning, offers a possible key to read and interpret the landscape in order to orient the Government projects on territorial-land transformations, which must be linked to protection, redevelopment and enhancement