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Perception, Representation, Awareness: the EUMM’s Experience

Rossella Salerno, Camilla Casonato, Daniele Villa

Rossella Salerno, Associate Professor in Techniques of Representation , DIAP, Politecnico di Milano,

via Bonardi 9, Edificio Nave, 20133 Milano, email: rossella.salerno@polimi.it

Camilla Casonato, PhD in Preservation of Architectural Heritage, Adjunct Professor,DIAP, Politecnico di Milano,

via Bonardi 9, Edificio Nave, 20133 Milano, email: camilla.casonato@polimi.it

Daniele Villa, PhD in Urban Planning, Research Fellow DIAP, Politecnico di Milano,

via Bonardi 9, Edificio Nave, 20133 Milano, email: daniele.villa@polimi.it

Foreword: A Wide Frame

This paper describes the experience is currently being carried on by the Urban Ecomuseum of

Niguarda in Milan, the first urban ecomuseum in Lombardy, the second one in Italy: in order to

catch it’s new feature, as regards the way of perceiving and living landscape, it’s necessary however

to set the experiment of re-knowing and re-appropriating of this part of Milanese urban landscape in

a wider framework, involving the relationship between the ideas of territory and landscape and a

broader consideration of landscapes, from extraordinary to ordinary landscapes.

From the point of view of who, in universities and other research centers, are occupied in observing

and studying landscapes, the sciences of territory aim to improve life of people by economic and

urban planning, with care towards sociological aspects, employing an expert knowledge. It’s well

known, however, that in those processes participatory practices are frequently used.

Which is the shift of sense introduced by the ELC?

Among several researches, the question put by the SETLAND research, Who owns the landscape?

seems suitable to tackle the issue1. In other words the starting point maybe the possibility of sharing

landscape planning, facing the points of view of politicians, experts, stakeholders and, last but not

least, of people.

So the questions of the SETLAND research group are crucial: which relationship is there between

people and landscape? Does a social demand of landscape exist? Who can express opinions and

values?

In such a perspective, landscape becomes a social construction, a place where converge different

interests, needs and desires, because it is made both by reality and image of reality.

That is the reason why landscape is a “medium” between people and territory, because images, like

perceptions, involve values. So the role of different actors toward landscape is of pointing out

interests and aspirations of people.

The Article 1 of The European Landscape Convention states that “Landscape” means an area as

perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or

human factors. As Riccardo Priore reminds us, this definition is made by two different components:

This text has been thought and discussed among Rossella Salerno, Camilla Casonato and Daniele Villa. About writing

the paper, Rossella Salerno is responsible of the first paragraph and the conclusions, Camilla Casonato of the second

and Daniele Villa of the the third one. 1 We refer to the SETLAND Research project (Sustainability Evaluation in Territory and Landscape) coordinated by

University of Padua and to the publication Castiglioni B, De Marchi M (eds), 2009.

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the first, the objective one is expressed by the phrase: area, portion of territory; the second, the

subjective one, instead by the words: as perceived by people. So “Landscape” is a result of the

relationship between the two aspects; such a relationship is allowed by perception that people have

of their territory2. This clarification helps to better precise the relationships between territory and

landscape.

Another crucial question is represented by the features of landscape: the characters expressing the

identity of a place, the possibility to recognize it through changes; but as everybody knows

transformations not always are positive; anyway the problem exists and it is very wide.

It is probably the main problem we have to face, because it is related to the urban spreading in

agricultural territory, in the country.

Two main scales help in describing this phenomenon: a large scale, for example in Italy, the Po

Valley is going to become a mega city region, a continuous city of houses, green spaces…, a vast

periphery, not ever country, nor city. The other scale is related to the inner changes of the

“traditional city”, that growing includes and transforms green spaces or villages and so on.

That’s the specific case of Niguarda, - the subject of the Ecomuseum - a town of Milan hinterland in

the past, and a now instead a quarter integrated in the same city.

So in a broader consideration, relating the increasing territory’s changes to the point of view

introduced from the ELC, the very news is represented by the possibility to consider “Landscape”

the whole territory without distinction between city and country, in other words each portion of

territory where people live and of which they care for.

It’s clear further that values of landscape can be material rather than immaterial and they can

involve the future of a territory, like at the same time, the past, not only from the heritage point of

view.

But how is it possible to realize all that? Which are the strategies, the policies, the regional and local

laws permitting groups of people to become aware of the potentialities of their landscape or to own

again them?

And more: which are the better practices and tools to realize the goal? Undoubtedly we think that

the ELC represents a way to follow, because it is an international juridical expression of a political

idea and it is founded on the thought that landscape signifies a crucial resource from an

environmental point of view, and also a social and economic purpose. It is an occasion to realize a

sustainable development that is considered, from the international community a necessary

compromise to allow life continue on our planet.

Referring to the general frame outlined by the ELC, Pio Baldi, in the proceedings of the first Italian

Conference about Landscape3, wrote that a landscape “in order” is now to be considered like a

necessity, the right to a “good” landscape as the right to a “good” health.

We have to remark that is not the whole landscape dimension of territory to be protected with the

same intensity and through the same ways; on the other hand, not all territories have same

landscape values and consequently public intervention have to be different.

It is important to remind further, that in respect of the article 4 of the ELC: “Each Party shall

implement this Convention, in particular Articles 5 and 6, according to its division of powers, in

conformity with its constitutional principles and administrative arrangements, and respecting the

principle of subsidiarity, taking into account the European Charter of Local Self-government.

Without derogating from the provisions of this Convention, each Party shall harmonize the

implementation of this convention with its own policies.”4

So the point relevant to focus is how the “general frame” of the ELC, the guidelines and the

measures are harmonizing with regional and local policies and obviously with national, regional and

local laws on matter.

2 Priore R, 2009, p 42. 3 Baldi P, 2006. 4 ELC, English official text, art. 4.

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This is synthetically the background of each local experience of application of ELC, seen both in a

local context but, at the same time, aiming to a wider purpose to be built step by step.

So the question is how to catch the occasions being “Aware that the landscape contributes to the

formation of local cultures and that is a basic component of the European natural and cultural

heritage, contributing to human well-being and consolidation of the European identity”5. Or in other

words which are the forms to suggest, the experiences to support where the ELC is considered

nothing else that a paper full of “good intentions”.

The first European Conference on Local Implementation of the ELC, held in South Bohemia in

May 20096, helps our research group to focus the possibility to introduce the raising experience of

the Urban Ecomuseum of Niguarda in a wider context of debate and of problems. The aim of that

conference was to bring together people from non-profit organizations, local and regional

authorities, and ecomuseums and some scholars of the Uniscape net.

Among the objectives were: to share views about good practices in the implementation of the ELC;

to raise awareness among local and regional authorities of the opportunities provided by

ecomuseums and local non-profits to deliver the objectives of the ELC.

Many papers about local experiences, different criteria followed in organizing and managing

ecomuseums, the work of ONG especially in North Europe, were an interesting occasion to open

the local scale of the Ecomuseum of Niguarda to a regional and, at the same time, European

perspective.

The issues developed by the EUMM’s work group – first of all by the anthropologists’ team

Tramemetropolitane, after extended to a research group of Polytechnic of Milan linked to Uniscape

- were the sense of ownership of the Niguarda community through a huge change process, the aim

to protect memory to find their own place in the contemporary society looking at future and overall

to raise a sense of identity.

The starting point to a cohesive action was represented by realizing a community or cultural map

(Figure 1) ; like for every ecomuseum, this is a key tool in fact it makes up the features of a land

and of its history in order to focus the “character” of a place through a process of involving people.

It isn’t a geographical map or a list of monuments; it is a way to help a community in perceiving

more clearly their cultural heritage. For it is a “choral” telling, a community map contributes to

rebuilt collective histories aiming to preserve the memory to understand the present and to imagine

a future.

But building a community map means not only to realize a representation of places, but a device

where memory, skills and emotions of people may converge. In other words drawing a shared map,

brings people to take part directly in a process of appropriation (or re-appropriation) of their own

environment.

The next step of EUMM’s program is employing other devices useful to understand and share

values towards sustainable landscape transformation, like Internet surveys to work-sessions open to

“no experts”; in fact, as Joan Nogué noticed: “Innovative technologies applied to participatory

actions open a lot of new possibilities to improve the information’s’ exchange and so to promote a

participatory process. [...] Using interactive devices or virtual reality allows a deeper people’s

understanding compared with conventional cartographic representations, involving further young

people, usually not so attracted to traditional ways of communicating.”7

Practices towards Awareness: the Niguarda neighbourhood and the community map

The Urban Ecomuseum of Milan was created in 2007 by Tramemetropolitane, an anthropological

research organisation dedicated to the description and interpretation of cultural and social

5 Recommendation of the Committee of the Council of Europe to States Members, 6th February 2008. 6 1st European Conference on Local Implementation of the ELC, 27-30 May 2009, Nove Hrady, South Bohemia, Czech

Republic, Proceedings to press. 7 Nogué J, 2009, in: Castiglioni B, De Marchi M (eds.), 2009, cit., p.28.

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transformation on territory. The birth of the Ecomuseum was supported by the city quarter council,

Consiglio di Zona Nove, and by a local cooperative society, Società Edificatrice Niguarda, that was

born at the end of XIX century to build houses for workers and to support the working class quality

of life.

Set up in response to society’s needs, through the proposal of a local non profit organisation, the

Ecomuseum starts his activities with a participative approach and builds day by day his identity on

the ground, in the line of a bottom-up strategy. In 2009 it is accredited by the local authority,

Regione Lombardia, and takes a more institutional position. It is called EUMM, Ecomuseo Urbano

Metropolitano Milano Nord (Urban Metropolitan Ecomuseum of North Milan), so its area of

responsibility becomes larger and is now extended to other municipalities in the north area of

Milan: Sesto San Giovanni, Cinisello Balsamo, Bresso, Cormano and Cusano Milanino. In this

context you can find old villages got swallowed up by the mega-city, urban sprawl but also an

important industrial heritage (Sesto S. Giovanni), an architectural heritage (XVII-XVIII century

Lombard architecture), a inter-municipal park (North Park of Milan).

In 2008 EUMM and Polytechnic of Milan begin to work together and in January 2010 an agreement

is concluded between ecomuseum and university. Institutions undertake to cooperate, in the

EUMM’s fields of interest, in research about technological innovation, sustainable development and

education of ecomuseum activities.

The anthropologists of Tramemetropolitane think that our towns, villages and land are crossed by

many hidden paths, something like warps (‘trame’ in Italian) or subtle textures that make up the

territory; these pathways are like roots of our culture and our memory and, to understand

contemporary urban transformations, we have to explore them. Therefore it is necessary to

investigate people memory, to listen their stories, to know their everyday life.8

As each ecomuseum, EUMM aims to preserve cultural heritage. Heritage includes tangibles and

also intangibles things, as history of inhabitants, their memories, their hopes and their wishes for the

future and also landscape and what community thinks about it.

If traditional museums focus on specific items and objects and then offer them to the public, the

ecomuseum helps local community to identify, interpret, and manage by herself the local heritage.9

For achieving this goal EUMM plans activities based on real actions based on local participation.

The goal is to give local people tools to read, interpret and communicate their ideas about places

and enable them to discuss with institution and stakeholders.

EUMM is therefore a dynamic system based on a community agreement. To make the process

successful you need both a general involvement and a close collaboration between specialists, local

actors and local community, all playing a vital role in an ecomuseum.

Niguarda was originally an autonomous municipality and the topographic plan still shows traces of

the ancient village. Today it is part of the mega city region and the urban expansion has almost

cancelled its rural heritage. Before the Second World War, a wide area in the south was occupied by

the fields, separating Niguarda from Milan, now this barrier corresponds to the huge hospital.

In the XX century the local economy turns from agricultural to industrial and Niguarda is converted

in a working class neighbourhood. Work is in fact the leitmotif of the inhabitants’ stories because it

determines social changes and urban transformation. Now there are no more factories in Niguarda

and the neighbourhood risks becoming a bedroom community. However, Niguarda preserves its

identity thanks to its memories and a vibrant community life, differently from the individualistic

society of contemporary mega cities.

8 See www.tramemetropolitane.it (accessed April 2010). 9 One of the most effective definition compares an ecomuseum with a classic museum: essentially a cultural process,

identified with a community (population), on a territory, using the common heritage as a resource for development, as

opposed to the more classical museum, an institution characterized by a collection, in a building, for a public of visitors.

See: Varine H de, 1991, and Varine H de, 2002.

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In the first year of the project Tramemetropolitane collected several documents about the

neighbourhood’s history and its community: it consulted local historians, invited people to share

old pictures of main events, family history and everyday life in the past, studied history of the local

associations, collected many oral witnesses, recorded video and audio interviews, made surveys and

discovery walks in the neighbourhood with local people, went into schools to speak with children

about their life in the neighbourhood.

EUMM, during 2008-2009, organised round tables (Figure 2) to share the results of their studies

and formed a team including about twenty-five volunteers, composed by old inhabitants of the

place, representatives of the associations (the Cooperativa Edificatrice, the local theatre association,

cultural and social associations and cooperatives) and institutions (the local council, Consiglio di

Zona Nove) and all other citizens who wanted to participate in the project.

Participation meetings had some specific purposes:

- reconstruct the recent history of urban and industrial changes that have altered the perceived

and experienced urban landscape

- map the sites of social life

- trace the relationship between built space and urban park

- define the elements of quality of the urban landscape in relation to the results of public

participation

- propose methods of connection between the results of public participation and local policy

makers.

After one year the working group had collected a large quantity of documents, pictures and stories

and didn’t know how to organise it in a useful way: the anthropologists proposed to start creating a

community map. According to Common Ground – the United Kingdom charity that aims to

promote "local distinctiveness"10 – realising a community map “can help people to come together to

chart the things that they value locally, to make their voice heard amongst professionals and

developers, to inform and assert their need for nature and culture on their own terms, and to begin to

take action and some control in shaping the future of their place.”11

Then Polytechnic of Milan was involved in the project so that a group was created which included:

- Facilitators provided by Tramemetropolitane (anthropologists, but also researchers, experts

in cultural heritage preservation, a video maker, an ethnomusicologist, educators).

The first significant task of the facilitators has been to create a framework and a language for

the mapping process that motivates the public to participate and allows people to

comfortably share their knowledge, ideas and vision for the community.

- A specialist staff from Polytechnic of Milan who contributes technical skills and knowledge.

The architects provided expertise in map design and participatory process planning,

therefore facilitating the collection, storage, maintenance and analysis of data and facilitated

mapping the community’s feedback.

- Groups of residents providing their input: community history, local knowledge, cultural

values and understanding.

These types of expertise complement each other and result in richer, more comprehensive mapping

solutions. The methodological framework is interdisciplinary in its approach, combining the use of

social science participatory techniques with geomatics technology and participatory assessment

procedures. The highly interactive process taking place between those with design and planning

10 “Common Ground invented the words Local Distinctiveness in 1983 and continues to campaign and collaborate in

celebrating and promoting variegation in our surroundings. Local implies neighborhood or parish. Distinctiveness is

about particularity, it is rehearsed in the buildings and land shapes, the brooks and birds, trees and cheeses, places of

worship and pieces of literature. It is about continuing history and nature jostling with each other, layers and fragments

– old and new. The ephemeral and invisible are important too: customs, dialects, celebrations, names, recipes, spoken

history, myths, legends and symbols. All these things are folded into identity and need reinvigoration by the new”

(http://www.commonground.org.uk, accessed on March 2010). 11 http://www.commonground.org.uk, accessed on March 2010.

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skills and those with knowledge of the neighbourhoods has determined the success of the project.

Working together on the field, utilising community expertise and local knowledge has helped to

bridge the gap between the vision of the resident community and the technical thinking and jargon

of the architects.12

As previous noticed, according to the European Landscape Convention “Landscape means an area,

as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or

human factors”13. Just like museums are gradually becoming museums of ideas rather than

museums of objects, landscape is gradually shifting to indicate the idea of a place rather than a

physical territory. Place, in fact, does not simply refer to a surface but to multiple layers of cultural,

social, environmental values which define a unique local heritage.

But how can a landscape be represented according to this vision? Mapping techniques and

symbology are inadequate to map the qualitative aspects of neighbourhoods: features that make a

neighbourhood unique, such as cultural characteristics and architecture, as well as places that have

community value are not normally collected in maps; as a matter of fact, knowledge of the value of

neighbourhood features is something that can only derive from the neighbourhood itself. How to

draw a map that not only describes fields, buildings, streets, rivers etc, but that also indicates about

quality of life, memories, perceptions, feelings, smells, hopes?

An effective neighbourhood map would need to be more than a fixed package of data and be able to

pull the data together in new ways. Even though it has been remarked that a participatory map does

not have to be precise or cartographically correct, but has to illustrate locally distinctive activities

and features, specialists wanted to produce a map useful to talk with institutions so they decided to

use a technical cartography as starting point. They choose to forego the picturesque codes that often

characterise community maps14 and adopt a more technical code, accepting the challenge of

creating a rigorous and linear map but also a map able to describe the qualitative values that local

people have identified.

Map design presents therefore several issues:

- there are many landmarks to indicate, but the map has to be easy to handle (even walking

through the neighbourhood) and not too large;

- cultural heritage includes existing landmarks but also places and objects that no longer exist;

- the map should include actual places and objects, but also the elusive responses which

cannot be measured or counted and also the invisible stories, dialects, names and fragments

of everyone's history;

- the boundaries of the district are not clearly defined: there exist an administrative boundary

of the ancient municipality which does not correspond to the subjective boundary of the

aged inhabitants; on the other hand young people do not recognise the boundaries drawn by

their parents and grandparents because it is based on a memory of places they do not have

(Figure 3) ;

- even if the map should be modern, precise and linear, it has to contain some images that best

represent the values in the community, its idea of the neighbourhood and that will allow

everybody to recognise places;

- the working team has produced several different map legends so many thematic maps

should be drawn, instead of one single community map;

- it is not possible to declare a participatory process “closed”, since it is impossible to draw a

single map; finally we just can create several open maps.

The specialist team prepares some proposal and submits them to the working group in several round

tables till when a final solution is ready. These are the main solutions to the problems indicated:

12 About interdisciplinary approach and good practices in participatory mapping see Craig WJ, Harris TM and Weiner

D (eds.), 2002. 13 ELC, English official text, art. 1. 14 See the parish maps or, in Italy, the community map of Parabiago (eutelia.comune.parabiago.mi.it/ecomuseo).

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- the map comprise three plans: a big plan of the quarter as it is today, with the most

important landmarks and two smaller thematic plans dedicated to the main themes emerged

by the participatory process (the social life, historical buildings, factories, rural life);

- object of the past and of today are both present, but it is possible to discern what is actual

and what is no more visible; so you can read the map following a thematic approach (you

can see for example the landscape in the perception of the working class, even if factories

are now disused) or distinguishing the past from the present.

It is important to realise that this map closes just the first phase of the participatory process and

begins a new starting point. The map, however, marks an important step in the path towards

awareness among the civil society of the values of landscapes, achieving one of the mains

objectives of the European Landscape Convention.15

Community Based Participatory Tools: Building Shared Landscape Values

The community map, as we have seen, represented an important result for EUMM, however the

working group knew that it was a limited device, a closed system, not dynamic and not easily or

continuously upgradable. So the process didn’t stop, it continued attending new specific goals:

- improved quality and variety of data available

- improved access to data

- better-informed decisions in planning and implementing data collection

- improved participation

- improved use of new media and technologies.

The research group of Polytechnic of Milan therefore proposed to develop new tools for urban

simulation and description using web oriented applications to create dynamic, open and

participatory mapping systems. The main purpose was to create tools that citizens can easily use to

interact with administrators and technicians.

Community mapping, in the experience of EUMM practices, has shown to be useful tools,

increasing the users capacity to plan, manage and monitor territorial and landscape–related issues

within the mapped area, also inside a specific planning process such as, for example the drafting of

the new local urban plan, the “Piano di Governo del Territorio” (PGT).

Often the ultimate aim of community mapping actions may not be the final drawings on a map so

much as developing the community interest to define shared methods for revitalizing collective

memory, build consensus around a common idea of landscape and sustainable development and

take collective action within the institutional processes of landscape and urban planning.

Certainly one of the major goals is to develop strategic partnerships between government and civil

society in an effort to make mapping outcomes binding on the executive planning application.

As mentioned above the European Landscape Convention gives great importance to the social

perception of landscape. This requires the introduction of perceptual and symbolic evaluation

criteria to take people directly involved, both locally and within a more extensive scope, especially

when operating within an urban context, where is more difficult to understand the “legibility” of

landscape.

The knowledge of how landscape is perceived, allows administrators and experts to identify

strength or weakness aspects that are not always obvious and easy to define, it is also a useful basis

to start the comparison between different local stakeholders and to build maps of memories and

15 “Each Party undertakes to increase awareness among the civil society, private organizations, and public authorities of

the value of landscapes, their role and changes to them” (ELC, English official text, art. 6).

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“symbolic landscape” able to reflect the prevailing feelings of the community in relation to different

aspects of their territory.

The involvement of people, defining quality and main characteristics of an urban landscape requires

also the use of innovative and diversified tools, focusing on those who allow wide interaction and,

first of all, assessment of perceived quality of a shared landscape.

Firstly it is useful to define a hybrid method based on a democratic interactive process where

different groups of participants come to understand each other’s perspective: this may lead to the

construction of a landscape assessment of an area carried out by the people who live there.

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To reach most of the goals set was essential to calibrate the main methods used to manage public

participation through extensive use of views, maps, and tools capable of making visible points of

interest identified by participants, facilitating forms of sharing, management and analysis of local

knowledge expressed by the populations.

The research group, after a detailed comparison of different methods, chooses to use a broad and

thorough participatory mapping and visualizing technique, an arrangement of levels as a necessity

of the large and complex environment. “Rather than a single comprehensive image, there seemed to

be sets of images, which more or less overlapped and interrelated. They were typically arranged in a

series of levels, roughly by the scale of area involved, so that the observer moved as necessary form

an image at street level to levels of neighborhood, a city, or a metropolitan area.”16

Participatory mapping, used in conjunction with various forms (physical and virtual) of urban

simulation is a relatively new communicative facilitation method used in innovation processes

related mainly to the validation of the technical possibilities offered by different simulation tools for

the assessment of the impact of urban transformations, in relation to the morphology of the urban

fabric and the environmental quality of the public open spaces. The method was designed to support

collaborative efforts to increase public participation in problem analysis and decision-making with

particular attention to the problems of perception and definition of “landscape quality”.

In this particular actions and advice, the research group uses participatory mapping with different

purposes:

- increase the capacity of people to recognize the value of its territory and landscape - promote community cohesion, self actualization and self-determination - allow a more correct assessment of the impacts of territorial transformations underway - manage and guide conflicts by facilitating cooperation in decision making - help relevant players to raise their motivation, coordinate a shared perception and formulate

a shared vision and strategy.

In order to work on this perspective, the use of tools and techniques of participation and simulation

intends to produce new descriptions of urban landscape, starting from the elaboration, use,

experimentation of new ways of telling and reading the landscape, but also new interpretative

images, seen as descriptions, not just spatial, but also metaphorical and symbolic, like frames,

scenarios, visions with a communicative role, in so far they are forms of interpretation of rules and

forms of interaction between actors in the framework of territorial policies.

This allows looking at the landscape assessment as a process of collective learning and sense

making, which has also a political dimension and can no more be seen as an external construction

but as an outcome of a wider participative approach focused to produce tools for interaction of

differences in order to build forms of collective/connective intelligence.

From a practical point of view, the reading experience of mapping the urban landscape turned from

EUMM shows the difficulty of “making visible” values that are often hidden and not tangible. It’s

difficult to synthesize clear and shared images of a complex landscape subject to extreme physical 16 Lynch K, 1960.

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and social changes. From this point of view it seems very useful to apply a broad concept of

relational landscape. The relational landscape17 is a method that applies to situations where non-

structured knowledge needs to be collected systematically in order to map and visualize value

networks. In EUMM’s experience the use of different communication and representation tools

allowed:

- to develop a detail understanding of functional and symbolic interdependences perception of

citizens, urban landscapes and collective memories;

- to tie a quantitative approach (the physical relief of places and physical transformations)

with a qualitative one (the reading memories, desires, and personal use of urban spaces);

- to tie a synchronic representation with a diachronic one, in a dynamic system, to relate past,

present and future;

- to lay the foundations for further studies on the not-visible transformation of the “latent

landscape” , kind of “ landscape development on the quiet” due to interactions between local

cultures, new forms of citizenship, territorial transformation and new ways of understanding

the urban landscape.

To fix some of these issues it was decided to use hybrid and mixed techniques of participation and

visualization: Metaplan, geoblog, urban scenarios simulation and PGIS.

Regular meetings where citizens were invited to discuss the most relevant issues related to their

relationships with the places and urban memory: during meetings EUMM staff used a visualization

technique similar to Metaplan, an interactive approach using the direct drawing on different types of

map in a group interview setting to interrogate qualitative questions. The act of drawing on a map

allows the participant to focus attention on the selection of items, choice and exclusion, drawing

codes, boundaries and on primary and secondary elements to underline, it also provides the

interviewer with a record that can be interrogated as it is being drawn, during its crafting by the

participant, and when it is completed. The tangibility of the map allows people to return to features

of the map in the interview and subsequent interviews to unfold the process of description,

elaboration, analysis.

The process of building awareness of the landscape values must also assume responsibility to

broaden stakeholders and facilitate the return on policies and urban planning, for this reason it was

decided to develop, with the direct participation of citizens and the physical mapping, innovative

tools for e-participation like a Geoblog and Participatory GIS (PGIS).

The Geoblog (Figure 4) makes use of the social innovations of Web 2.0 to combine visual data with

geospatial data and to enable the general public to contribute their local knowledge through

effective communication tools; Geoblog is a communication and visualization platform on the

everyday landscape which brings together scientific information with feedback, sharing of local and

historical information, observations of ordinary people. It broadens the thematic spectrum of

landscape issue by integrating the possibility of geo-referenced data with social networking tools

allowing to catalog and overlay all types of multimedia content. The technology employed at this

stage will evolve into a virtual implementation of an early detection system using satellite data in

combination with in-situ data and helping to scale the information from global to local level.

In the last year EUMM’s staff has also experimented different kind of urban scenario simulation.

This tool allows creating different visualisations of the urban landscape with the collaboration of the

local community. During the round tables the technical staff proposes some images of strategic

places in the neighbourhood, for example places of significance to the community, or that have

17 Kruse C, 2008.

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undergone major transformations or that will undergo major changes. People can modify the

scenario using some parameters (presence of trees, viability, traffic, shops, size or typology of

buildings, places to socialize, composition of society: most aged, most young, multiethnic etc.) and

choosing between three different degrees of intensity for each parameter. Combining this factors

stakeholders create hypothetical scenarios that are intended to facilitate and stimulate the discussion

and to support the path of confrontation. This tool has been tested in a student research project for

now, but it has had a very good feedback in the round tables: it brings a high level of involvement,

facilitates communication, allows an instant processing and stimulates the activation of a proactive

approach and not just of an analytical approach. So it deserves further development.

Some goals of direct interaction between citizens and public administration will be obtained

through the use of GIS mapping technology. The people themselves, through dedicated meetings,

with the help of architects-mediators, build GIS layers focused on shared issues perfectly integrated

with the official map managed by the municipalities and provinces.

More advanced technologies, such as those related to Geoblog and Web 2.0, permit a wider use of

vast amounts of geographical and spatial information but, sometimes, run the risk of increasing the

distance between actors making the maps and those providing the needed local knowledge.

Capacity building in the use of mapping technologies can represent an empowering experience for

local people, but this may happen at the expense of other community members. Training, including

the production of reference materials and the conductions special technical training sessions, is

important in improving the capacity of community members to understand and take part in all

stages of the process. This should prompt a lot of attention in the interaction between 'expert

knowledge' and 'citizens knowledge'. “Citizens know more about experiencing the city from their

position an perspective than any outside expert. This knoledge is validated by observation and by

sharing experiences with others. So expert groups, whether scientific goups or policy-making

teams, have their own ‘local knowledge’. This knowledge production becomes a social process of

making meanings, shaped by the situations, trajectories, activities and values of particular social

grouping”18

One important challenge, from this inclusive technological and cross-media point of view, is to

relate participatory meetings with the of on-line mapping community, avoiding the excessive,

ineffective, proliferation of the issues discussed, and, on the other side, encourage the use of

appropriate technologies for more fast sharing of results with the public administration and decision

makers. It deals with using an integrated approach.

First: the great size of spatial and social interrelations has to be illustrated to foster collective

understanding and insight.

Secondly: the abstract concepts of perceived and shared urban landscape have to be translated in to

concrete and tangible images, maps, scenarios, proposals for preservation and change.

It is a circular process, in constant growth and improvement, which must also allow developing

useful and different tools for direct communication between citizens and politicians in a

constructive approach and engaging the dialogue. All this kind of analysis and maps built together

and shared with local stakeholders should be followed by concrete and tangible impact on local

planning and, in particular, inside the institutional forms of popular consultation.

The "landscape-issue" in a participatory process, remains complex, very difficult to make visible

and full of gaps, non-trackable elements and actors, shifting perspectives but despite these

fundamental problems, it is evident the growing of social demand for landscape quality and

landscape-centered urban development that requires to develop innovative tools for the detection,

representation and sharing visions of urban landscape. “With the awareness that dealing with the

18 Healey P, 2007.

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landscape, understood as the complex multidimensional phenomenon composed of material and

immaterial characteristics and subject to constant modification by natural and manmade factors, it is

unrealistic to define the “minimum quantity” of awareness that is capable of guaranteeing the

corrective governance of change”19.

Conclusions

The EUMM’s experience is a work in progress: it’s the result of cooperation between a working

group moving from a scholar approach about urban landscape, in the perspective of the ELC, the

ONG “Tramemetropolitane” and people living in the neighbourhood of Niguarda.

The change of point of view in considering landscape, not only from the point of view of experts or

scholars, but as outcome of memories and desires of changes from the people, represents a crucial

point in a democratic process to identify the idea that citizens have of their own urban landscape.

In this process, a fundamental way of communication, as well of re-appropriation and of planning

the site, is made up by representation tools using new interpretative images, not only spatial but also

metaphorical and symbolic, because landscape is at the same time “material and immaterial”.

So landscape perception is deeply related to means of communication and representation as device

to increase awareness of people about heritage and potentialities of their site. Further this way of

working makes up, in our opinion, the first step towards a correct and useful dialogue with experts

in landscape planning.

A field still difficult to explore concerns the relationship with politicians, not ready yet to catch the

new instances people are asking and so to let needs and projects become real.

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Images

Figure 1

The Niguarda Community Map, recto and verso (2009), source: EUMM Archive

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Figure 2

Personal mapping using Metaplan approach during a participation meeting, source: EUMM Archive

Figure 3

Defining the Niguarda boundaries during a participation meeting, source: EUMM Archive

Figure 4

The first Beta-version of the EUMM Geoblog