Landscape as a Common. Collective Protection and Management

Design approaches to the landscape and to the enhancement of cultural heritage based on the thematisation and spectacularisation of landscapes and architectures or the propensity for constructing simulacra, no longer constitute an exception but if anything the rule. This is favoured by processes of privatisation of space to the detriment of public space with the commercial standardisation of places for selling and consuming (Sorkin, 1992, 2001). In fact, if the landscape is private, no longer freely available or available on payment and organised according to private models, we risk globalising the landscape, too, turning it into a consumer good and relegating it to the sphere of appearances. A landscape to sell, but not to inhabit. But there is also the opposite problem: where the landscape is public and freely accessible, there is a tendency to exploit it, to manage and protect it by authoritarian and sanction-based methods that make both landscape and environmental and cultural heritage even more remote and forgotten by people. Is it then possible to consider the landscape as a common good and safeguard it locally without hetero-directed interventions by means of forms of collective management? This paper explores these issues through some examples of protection and management of landscape and public goods. These forms operate in an intermediate dimension and transform landscape and environmental resources into something that is neither public, nor private, but shared and collective.