one grows rich in a year but dies in six months

The Times has an excellent article from a couple days ago on the work of recent Rome Prize winner Alan Berger (whose books, particularly Reclaiming the American West, I can highly recommend) in Italy's Pontine Marshes.

[google map of a portion of the project area]

The article (and Berger's work in general -- see P-REX) -- focuses on the damages caused by contemporary land uses (farming and industry, in this case) and repairing those damages through landscape architecture -- the practice of reclamation, as guided by landscape architects:

Before Michele Assunto hauls in his fishing net from the banks of a reed-lined canal here, he uses a pole to push the garbage out of the way. "They really need to clean this up," he growls.

Where another canal empties into the sea here at the small community of Porto Badino, the only animals that can survive are giant rats, local officials say. Of course, the sea is not fit for swimming for 200 yards on each side of the outlet, they add with a shrug -- yet bathers splash in the Mediterranean nearby.

In many parts of this affluent coastal region southeast of Rome and northwest of Naples, canals dumping effluent into the Mediterranean from farms and factories coexist with fishermen and beachgoers. There is little doubt that this area would need considerable work to return to a more pristine state. For places as far gone as this one, however, a new breed of landscape architect is recommending a radical solution: not so much to restore the environment as to redesign it.

[the Agri Pontini, image by flickr user nikonphotoslave, creative commons license]

Berger's proposal, now being developed in conjunction with the local Italian government, suggests constructing a wetland machine, which would serve both as a mechanism for cleansing the water supply of the Agri Pontini and as a regional recreation area. (For more detail on the proposal, I recommend reading Pruned's summary, which features some higher resolution images than the P-REX website).

[the canals and pine-forests of ravenna]

This sort of transformative reclamation process, where natural and artificial processes are blurred in the service of renewing the land, has a great deal of currency in contemporary landscape architectural practice, but it is perhaps not as new or foreign a concept as it might seem. While the particular problems being addressed by contemporary remediation efforts have shifted -- strip mines, rivers clogged with industrial wastes, and so on -- the notion of employing designs on the land as a means to reclaim damaged land is nearly as old as civilization.

[map of the Pontine Marshes, prior to reclamation]

The Agri Pontini itself, after all, is itself reclaimed: disease-ridden marshland (the Pontine Marshes) transformed into productive agricultural land and settled city centers. Generations of Italians, from the Romans to Popes Boniface VIII, Martin V, Sixtus V, and Pius VI to Major Fedor Maria von Donat (a Prussian military officer) battled the marshes, concocting various failed schemes to drain the marshes (though they did succeed in penetrating the marshes with the Via Appia).

The 19th century historian Victor Duruy notes the way in which the marshes of the Italian penisula were regarded:

There is nothing so charming and so treacherous as those plains of the Mal'aria ; a clear sky, fertile land, where an ocean of verdure waves under the sea-breeze; all around there is calm and silence; an atmosphere mild and warm, which seems to bring life but carries death. "In the Maremma," says an Italian proverb, "one grows rich in a year, but dies in six months."

Fred Toelle, "P.O.W.'s draining in the Pontine Marshes"

Success came in the late 1930's, when Mussolini initiated a massive centralized effort to drain the marshes:

The Pontine Marshes were finally drained and reclaimed in works begun in 1926 under the responsibility of the Opera Nazionale Combattenti, a governmental institution reformulated under the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini that supported both rural development and war veterans. The government drained the marshes via three canals that intercepted runoff from the hills and pumped out low-lying regions, cleared the scrub forest, and placed about 2000 families (most from northern Italy and of unimpeachable Fascist background) in standardised but carefully varied two-storey country-houses of blue stucco with tiled roofs. Each settler family was assigned a farmhouse, an oven, a plough and other agricultural tools, a stable, some cows and several hectares of land, depending on local soil fertility and the size of the family. The project, constantly referred to in terms of a battle, was a huge public relations boost for Mussolini, fulfilling his long-term belief in the "rural vocation of the Italian people" and their triumph over nature, an epitome of the Fascist conception of progress.

The Times has more on the literal machinery of progress (presumably the parallel between this original machinery of progress and the new wetland "machine" has not escaped Berger):

Latina's prosperity is built on drained swampland, kept habitable by six pumps as huge and noisy as airplanes, put in place in 1934 by Mussolini. Each day they pull millions of gallons of water -- up to 9,500 gallons a second -- out of the soggy ground, directing it into an elaborate system of cement-lined canals that ultimately dump it into the sea.

The entire province would return to marshland in seven days if the pumps were turned off, Carlo Cervellin of the Pontine Marsh Consortium said. He is in charge of maintaining and regulating the immense machines, which are in a pump house at the lowest point in the province, in Mazzochio.

This history reveals that there has been another, more subtle shift in the practice of remediation: in what counts as damaged and what counts as remediated. Where once the marsh was viewed as the problem, as a sort of landscape whose presence is compatible with human habitation, Berger is now suggesting that the marsh -- in some form, in perhaps an altered or designed form -- is in fact essential to sustaining human habitation. Perhaps restoration is even cyclical: marshes are drained to eliminate the threat of disease and yet draining is found to create the conditions for pollution and contamination, necessitating the human reintroduction of marshes into the landscape. In three hundred years, will future landscape architects need the develop systems to remediate the landscape that Berger's design seeds?

Posted by eatingbark at September 23, 2008 3:44 PM