Urban environment evaluation

URBAN ENVIRONMENT EVALUATION

Ugo Carughi (ICOMOS Italia)

In the protection laws of many European states, the definition and evaluation of an urban complex in function of a protection measure can be conducted with reference to a building that is part of it, which has been recognised as having a relevant and autonomous cultural interest. But it is also possible to consider an urban ensemble as a whole, as a sort of ‘built landscape’, such as a historic town centre, on which an overall protection of public interest can be placed.

Building and context

The first case concerns the relationship between a building declared to be of cultural interest and its context. The importance of the context of the building is fundamental, to the point that in many countries a building is not listed without, at the same time, extending protection requirements to the urban or territorial context to which it relates. This is the case, for example, in Spain, with the Spanish Historical Heritage Law no. 16/1985; in the United Kingdom, where among the Principles of Selection for Listing Buildings is recognition of their historical and material context; or in France, where the protection measure on a building is extended to the surrounding territorial or settlement system for a maximum radius of five hundred metres, or by specifying its boundaries from time to time, according to the concepts of reciprocal visibility adopted also in Italy. We find similar criteria in Hungary or Bulgaria. A context-conscious idea referring to the monument is already taken up in the first decades of the 20th century: in 1931 the Athens Charter ‘recommends that in the construction of buildings the character and physiognomy of the city should be respected, especially in the vicinity of ancient monuments’.

In Italy, the work-context relationship, especially if urban, is not a recent topic. Already Francesco Milizia wrote in 1781: ‘it is not enough that the houses in detail are well built, it is necessary that the city is well laid out’. Thus Mario Zocca observes that ‘For Milizia, the transformation of old cities is closely associated with ... an arrangement of the adjacent environment through the formation of appropriate spaces’ (Zocca, 1953: 221-232). Today, in Italy, the answer to this need is represented by Article 45 of Legislative Decree 42/2004. However, the technical and administrative discretionality that conditions the opinions of the public administration on the subject of ‘distances’, ‘measures’, ‘integrity’, ‘perspective’, ‘light’, ‘environment’, ‘decorum’, inevitably entails interpretative problems and occasions for clashes between opposing interests if we only think, for example, that certain prescriptions can go so far as to impose the unbuildability of even vast portions of territory. Another circumstance to be noted is the procedural and conceptual separation, in Italian law, between cultural property (Art. 10 et seq.) and context.

Historical Centres

The second of the cases mentioned at the beginning is identified in the historic centres that are protected, in Italy, by the landscape protection constraint (art. 136 c). The argument can be referred to the relationship between planning and protection, which is found in decentralised administrative systems characterised by a tried and tested civilisation of behaviour of public and private subjects. Suffice it to mention Ireland, federalist Belgium, the Canton of Geneva in Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Poland. In these countries, the protection of the built heritage is variously implemented within planning instruments and generally under the control of local authorities.

In Italy, in ‘31 Gustavo Giovannoni in his book “Vecchie città ed edilizia nuova” (Old Towns and New Buildings) emphasised traditional architectural ensembles as evidence of the historical values of the community.

Beginning in the 1950s and continuing into the following decade, at the same time as the interest shown in the international sphere, attention to the historic environment was reaffirmed, while speculative development, by now well established after the hardships of the post-World War II period, was also attacking historic centres. At the international level, the 1975 Amsterdam Declaration reaffirmed that ‘the preservation of the architectural heritage must be considered ... as the principal objective of urban and territorial planning’ (point d). The following year, the Nairobi Declaration reiterated that ‘historic or traditional complexes and their environment should be actively protected’ (II. General Principles, 4).

Along the same lines, the Machu Picchu Charter of 1977: ‘This planning requires a continuous, systematic process of interaction between planners, users, administrators and politicians’. Thus, in all subsequent international documents, the call for coordination between preservation and urban planning, with the participation of all social components, has emerged, ever more decisively.

An example of evaluation

Between July and December 1995, the historic centre of Naples, one of the largest in Europe, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List on the basis of criteria II and IV:

• II - Having exercised great influence, over a period of time and in a cultural area of the world, on the evolution of architecture, monumental arts or urban and landscape planning.
• IV - To constitute an outstanding example of a type of structure illustrating a significant stage in history.

We reproduce part of the text of the request for inclusion made to UNESCO:

‘Being an extensive area, the inevitable solutions of continuity or even considerable differences between adjacent urban parts should be considered as characteristics of the site's uniqueness, expressions of precise moments and changes in history; differences in environmental tone are never such as to cancel out the continuity of the city's cultural and civil development, which always, sometimes suddenly, transpires even from a simple detail. Within the fabric of the buildings, even through the successive architectural stratifications, it is possible to detect stylistic assonances, similarities of space and architecture, which are recalled from sometimes hidden corners, from closed courtyards, from the deep shadow of precious interiors where history seems to have stopped, chasing itself through the narrow alleys or the wider 19th-century streets, like the rhymes of an ancient but still unfinished sonnet.On the other hand, in the continuum of construction, where the urban fabric is tightly woven, elements of a past grandeur suddenly emerge, unrelated to the size of the external spaces, but appropriate to the historical role of certain classes of the time, to trade, and to the social and cultural dynamics that for long periods placed Naples among the most important European metropolises. Along the dignified building curtains of the alleys rise gigantic portals or majestic façades; tall bell towers or incredible celebratory spires: like a resounding of sudden screams interspersed with long murmurs. The narrow, high spaces between the buildings sometimes open up into wide open spaces or squares, often churchyards carved out of the urban fabric and subsequently acquired by the city; this alternation determines an urban rhythm, a sort of real ‘breath’ of the city that is in itself a unifying factor and often unique in the quality that characterises the environment.’ (U. Carughi, in: F. Lucarelli, G. Marotta (eds.), UNESCO per la tutela dei centri storici. NAPOLI patrimonio dell’Umanità, StudioIdea, Napoli 24 ottobre 1994).