Dynamic heritage. Designing landscape and ecosystem scenarios for the Po Delta area in Italy

The role of climate change in re-defining and improving the notion of heritage is a critical issue in many fields of study. During the last few years, an intense debate around the necessity of dislodging heritage from the conventional concept of its being somehow pre-figured or ready-made has been fed by a vast multidisciplinary literature that has highlighted the impacts of environmental transformations on both its tangible and intangible qualities. In such perspective, landscape architecture can contribute to articulate this dynamic nature of the cultural heritage concept into planning and development frameworks, by operating on the spatial implications associated with the construction of exploratory scenarios and adaptive strategies to climate change. With this aim, the present contribution focuses on the on-going transformations of deltaic systems, seen as an exemplar case-study of how the current conservation-driven management policies need to be deeply reformed to face the challenges of resilience. The article explores the potentials of alternative solutions to the orthodox implementation of landscape and ecological restoration criteria, proposing a selective retreat of human activities from the Po river Delta area in the northern Italy. A possible way of addressing the issue is to theoretically frame the actual trend of the Delta transformation within the definition of novel ecosystems. Following this concept, a more pragmatic and prospective mindset can affect the way into which the ideas of landscape and heritage conservation should inform the development of appropriate management goals and approaches. In order to understand whether these new systems are - or will be - persistent, sustainable, and what values they may have for the cultural identity of a territory, long-term strategic visions are needed and useful for addressing right away policymakers’ decisions for the future. The research work, considering the region’s increasing hydro-morphological degradation and other variables, depicts different scenarios of infrastructural and environmental evolution. In summary, the intent is to define procedures and ways according to which abandoning to the marine transgression selected areas of the Po Delta by re-organizing the whole landscape, infrastructural and environmental system at the light of a new dynamic ecosystem functioning. In this perspective, the proposal of a Selective Retreat investigates limits and potentials related to the possible transition of the Po Delta from an intensively-managed (and collapsing) systems to a novel and emerging heritage.