River Landscape and Their Enhancement: Study Approaches

Dealing with the selection of the papers presented in this conference together with Dora Francese has given me the opportunity to have a privileged viewpoint on a very interesting topic river landscapes and their enhancement. This is a very complex issue about which there are different points of view, as usual when we talk about Landscape: in fact, this subject eludes simple schematizations. Each river is different from others because of their extremely metamorphic nature, as happens to other linear infrastructure crossing the territory, such as railways or motorways. It is hard to find comparable river parts because the relationship between water and territory is constantly changing and it depends on geology, human settlements and economic activities along the banks. Moreover, the river is a living presence in the territory and it changes its shape with the change of seasons: it thickens and dries up, diverts its course and constantly changes the shape of its mouth. Anticipating the content of the interesting papers presented in this session, I would say that they follow two prevailing approaches. On the one hand, some authors study in depth the aspects that guarantee the quality of river landscape from a perspective of transformation and avoiding the homologation of these places to the anonymous ones that characterize the contemporary landscape. On the other hand, some authors try to develop a more objective method to describe the relationships between rivers and territories, with the support of analytical tools derived from geographical and urban planning fields, offering operational tools useful to plan landscape maintenance.