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Palermo: Educational City – the Role of a Museum Network in Territorial Planning by Maurizio Carta

Refinement of Planning Methodologies CIED

Towards the Educational City

In European space, the central role that big cities have reached induces to re-think the city as a complex system of cultural structures, and this new importance of cities in territorial structure need a redrawing of their role in relation to other Cultural Subject and institutions that operate on urban land. The objective must be a close linkage among different cultural institutions, public and private: a link able to build a system and to give an organic framework, improving the public participation as much as possible.

The city begins a system, the city begins a system of systems, composed by museums, by libraries, by theaters, by cultural institutions and cultural associations. The Cultural System could be able to overcome the previous logic that divided the public aim from the private one; it can be able to reaffirm the sense of urban identity, the participation of urban cultural life. This is the meaning of a different urban development’s model, cultural-based, able to reaffirm the central role of European cities and the active role that they must have in characterizing their cultural growth.

            The Project named “Palermo: Educational City” constitutes the first step of museum system formed by the scientific collections of the University. The system is composed by twenty-five collections that compose the knots of an urban museum network that allows a complete knowledge of the scientific research conducted in the University of Palermo, that produces a scientific knowledge of the evolution, by the botanical point of view, by the zoological one, by the chemical one, by the technological one and so on. The following step will be the planning of the whole Urban Museum System to link the public museums and those private ones, the scientific collections and the humanistic ones. A Museum System of the city will draw a museum path through the city.

            This is the first step towards an “educational city”, able to improve a more conscious participation of citizens for a sustainable growth.

 

Leoluca Orlando, Mayor of Palermo

Francesco Giambrone, Assessor for Culture

Alberto Mangano, Assessor for Town Planning

 

 

Palermo: Educational City –

The Role of a Museum Network in Territorial Planning

 

Maurizio Carta

 

 

Key words

Cultural Heritage, Knowledge, Museum, Complexity, Participation, Education, Network System

 

  1. Introduction

 

Current situation in European society is characterized by a loss of identity. Ideology’s crisis leads people to an inferiority situation towards their past. Our civilization, after having exploited the technological process, and having sacrificed values and territories to the consumer’s culture, today is thinking about the defeat of this development model. This model in fact has not created a new identity for modern society, but it has produced only a homogeneity in the cultural, economical, social and political tissue. Today, cultural heritage’s function of “sign” of a territory in relation with the society has been completely forgotten. Its function of element for the communication of urban identity has been betrayed.

From this “cultural crisis” it must follow a new meaning of the relation among history, memory, territory and development; these elements must give again their important contribution to human development (social, cultural, political, biological).

Sustainable growth must be the real finality of physical planning, and “sustainability” can be obtained even by citizen’s participation to the development choices. But this participation, to be effective, must be conscious. The consciousness can be obtained by diffusion of knowledge, by role of memory, that can be able to describe the relationship between people and territory, between history and future, between conservation and innovation.

First of all planning is knowledge, interpretation and selection of territorial elements, and then a planner must translate this territorial knowledge into action, into a development model. But to reach this result, knowledge must be diffused as much as possible, so that people will know the history, past and identity of that territory.

Territorial identity should become a new source of development, in a situation of interurban competition, which will need more and more a territorial identity. And to this we, we propose the creation of a Cultural Network in Palermo, able to diffuse territorial knowledge and able to be the starting point of planned action.

 

  1. Territorial Complexity

 

New cultural, economic, social and scientific situations have brought occidental society to reflect upon its own development model: no more absolute certainty, no more inexorable dominion of humanity over nature, no more inexorable quantitative growth, but complexity, indetermination, flexibility.

Post-modern condition has been characterized by the rejection of all essentialist and transcendental conceptions of human nature; the rejection of unity, homogeneity, totality, closure and identity; the rejection of the pursuit of the real and the true and instead the celebration of fragmentation, particularity and difference; the acceptance of the contingent and apparent. One result of this intellectual ferment has been to raise politically and morally significant questions about hitherto generally accepted key dimensions of the practice of planning. The relationship of humanity to the physical environment, what constitutes the public interest, and the nature of rationality are important examples of aspects of planning, in the actual debate, that has been sharpened by critiques of modernism.

In particular, in the sphere of planning activity the relationship heritage / conservation has received increased political prominence as critique of modern. It is an interesting question whether widespread recognition of the global environmental change has itself eroded modernist optimism about technology, or whether such recognition was, in fact, dependent upon prior disquiet about the modernist faith in virtually inexorable progress for a rationally organized, scientifically-based society. As faith in progress and an assured future has dimmed, so some have sought refuge in the certainties of the past. However, increasingly, such recourse seems inadequate, and there is n widespread interest in exploring principles which can guide design and conservation practice in the new complex environmental situation.

We want to oppose a city strictly stratified in classes and job with an image of a city as an encyclopedia: a place where all urban life’s components find out their significance, and where urban life’s relationships are evident.

The city is a place full of signals, styles and communication systems, and when we lose control of this urban grammar chaos prevails over knowledge. Urban tissue’s image of modernity crisis is fragmented; the city has become a kind of palimpsest where past and present signs are laid one upon the other.

Contemporary planner must read this palimpsest: what sign to read? What to ignore? What to select? Planning crisis is knowledge crisis: planning categories become indefinites, fluids.

Territorial complexity’s challenge is characterized by need to elaborate new representation and action’s way, by need to modify relationship between humanity (its science, its technology, its policy, its economics) and environment (landscape, biosphere, geo-sphere). And it’ll be impossible to foresee all effects of our planning, economic and technological actions over cities and territories.

The cultural planning could be an answer to planning crisis – that is even a knowledge crisis – because of increasing acceleration of events: contemporary people don’t possess all elements to interpret their own territory. Thus it is necessary to change from certainty to complexity, from facts to values, that are more able to represent territorial continuous evolution.

 

  1. Values and Planning

 

New Planning’s aim must become values’ knowledge. There are causes and reasons, objects and ideas, cities and plans, facts and values. Facts command assent, values evoke intention. Facts are hard, values soft. Facts are objective, values subjective. Facts are the object of scientific rational inquiry, values the subject of moral reflection. We need planning theory to unite the two worlds. Good planning theory provides a rational foundation upon which to build relationships between the two worlds. Among values, one of the most important is heritage, because it contains aesthetic, moral, historic values and so on.

We can define conservation as a movement which opposes modernism, usually in the name of the defense of the heritage. But confrontation between conservation and modernization, or development, takes on many forms depending on the values which are embodied in or represented by the particular artifact or environment which is at risk.

Relationship between environmental heritage and conservation is complex: the environment cannot be collected in the normal sense of objects being brought together to form a collection. Most environmental objects have to remain fixed in location, but sometimes open-air museums of buildings have been established in many countries to preserve buildings removed from their original site.

In general, to curate old environmental objects involves operating in a ‘normal’ economic situation, because continual use is the key to preservation.

The more usual environmental curator process is to impose controls on the way owners and occupiers use buildings and landscape. In this way environmental conservation challenges the right of property-owners to do what they want with their property. In a more general way, environmental conservation inhibits the process through which land and buildings are developed to satisfy economic and community demands for space and location.

 

Conservation limitations imposed by a public authority can be seen to represent a modern version of the concept of legal donors holding land in trust for future generations, or that owners had a duty of stewardship in relationship to their land. Good stewardship meant that current exploitation must not reduce its value to the subsequent generations who would inherit it. Modern conservation regimes draw heavily on the stewardship principles to justify the limitations of property rights, while at the same time massively extending the number to whom the duty of stewardship is owned.

Culturally defined conservation directed towards a heritage inventory seems to achieve the importance it enjoys currently only when the past becomes viewed as a lost space and the future is seen as a threat. Conservation of heritage in its practical / economic form is based on four imperatives:

  1. To maintain the natural resource base of future use
  2. To reduce the rate of exhaustion of non-renewable resources
  3. To re-use resources incorporated in expending objects
  4. To continue to extract value from objects while they remain useful.

 

 

4. Knowledge and Heritage as Planning Values

 

To plan it is necessary to simplify territorial complexity; it is necessary a reduction and a selection of elements. We can say that, it planning is above all knowing, knowledge is above all selection: and to know territory signifies to reduce its elements.

We must tackle knowledge questions in planning: in what limit and in what way scientific and technological knowledge can become disposable and useful to planning actors? At the beginning of planning action are reasoning and interpretation that involve what Juergen Habermas (1985) calls “communicative acts”: it is by means of communicative acts that knowledge arises. But this knowledge is a temporary one, because its object changes continuously.

Physical planning equivalent to this epistemological principle is an open structure, that consists in a lot of autonomous decision / action centers, organized by a network where no centre prevails over the other.

Planning must carry out is knowledge action over this network territory; it must select some prevalent signs, it must classify and represent historic signs, it must take relations, settlement ways. In a few words, planning is selection, interpretation and modification.

The attitude towards nature and society which has dominated the theory and practice of modern planning is one which locates the planner as analyst / intervener, outside the phenomena he seeks to understand and to influence. From this vantage point the planner first understands the object of attention (society, nature), and then controls, orders, shapes – in general, changes it – as appropriate.

This approach contains epistemological principles which have distinctive implications for discussion of values. It involves a model of how knowledge is obtained which stresses the importance of very specific modes of acquiring and validating evidence, of a separation between knower and known, and of the irrelevance of all but a few of the personal characteristics of the knower.

 

 

 

5. Improve the Participation in the Planning Process

 

            Planning under terms of territorial sustainability leads to tackle the problem of inhabitants’ participation in the development model’s definition: in our open society the problem of consent is a very important element in evaluation of planning efficacy. But consent and participation cannot be imposed, they must rise in consciousness, in a diffuse knowledge of territorial elements.

            In planning process, to obtain an effective inhabitants’ participation, an imperative must become knowledge’s diffusion as much as possible at all levels (stewardship, researcher, citizens), and this knowledge must regard environmental, historic, cultural, geological and biological values. In this way contributes to planning process could be consciousness and effectiveness, and not influenced by private interest.

            From this knowledge’s necessity derives, as an inevitable consequence, its communication: doesn’t exist knowledge without participation, and knowledge is a place where we can find out the meaning of things. Planning must contribute to build some codes to interpret environment and landscape, to give them an image and a language too.

            Only defense against individualism that characterize post-modern society is a vigorous politics that gives a great value at participation, at knowledge, at organization and at territorial stewardship. It is necessary to recover authenticity as a moral idea, because its daughter is identity, that derives from memory and knowledge. Authenticity’s sources can be found in cities that interpret need of identification and identity that oppose individualism.

 

 

  1. Cultural Network in Palermo Urban Area

 

Project’s topics are definition and construction of a Cultural Network able to interpret, to represent and to communicate territorial phenomena’s complexity. That must refuse contradictions (humanity / nature, conservation / innovation, past / future etc.), and it must contribute to build an integrated approach at planning, based on network system where elements are junctions, ganglia and tissues.

            The solution that we are trying at various levels consists in a knowledge museum network. These knowledge museums would be multi-cultural places like the famous “Geddes’ Edinburg Civic Tower”: an urban observatory which aims is the communication, not only the conservation.

The project has as its objectives:

 

We have chosen a network model formed by a lot of poles because it is able to cover completely environment: it doesn’t exist in only one center, but in lot of different places and with many ways to reach them. In this way territory is multi-polarized like Italian settlement which is multi-polarized as well, based on a diffusion of cities, each one with their characteristics.

            This proposal is inside the recent debate about cities’ hierarchies and networks, in which identities and differences, conservation and communication, relations and identities can find out a balance. In particular, we have had to define the guidelines for a Cultural Network’s Plan that utilizes an Italian peculiar value: museums’ diffusion in territory, and their characteristics as territorial museums.

            Then, an aim is to improve existing museums’ network, to succeed in having an urban and rural network formed by different themes or ambits: territorial museums, eco museums, historical museums of cities, urban museums, scientific museums, ethno-anthropological museums and so on.

            The museum must become a real territorial information place – like in a lot of European experiences with three effects: the first with regards to tourism, because they could give some exact information about geology, biology, ethnology or history of the places visited; the second with regards to the development of the education system; and third, with regards to territorial monitoring, in order to see how it was planned.

 

The first experiment under the guidance of the Palermo Administration (Town Planning Assessorship with consultation by the author) was with regards to relationships among disused quarters in urban areas (as selected according to the Master Plan), the university scientific museums, territorial knowledge and consciousness cities’ fruition as an experience of cultural development.

            The city has always been a place in which civilization progressed, a place where citizens were educated and informed about history, philosophy, ethics, science; in the city a citizen has always felt to be a member of society. The city was always an unifying element, a synthesis of knowledge.

            Our hypothesis with regards to a network of Science, Technology and Art museum in Palermo, organized in such a way as to have a head and some knots, is that all this can be represented by an actual science museum.

            Research consists of four components:

1)      state of the art

  1. individualizing some urban areas that have been disused in their functions and that are able to constitute important resources in order to contain some cultural function to improve urban innovation, based on information and knowledge technology
  2. individualizing museum’s network
  3. cataloging patrimony and relationships between research and territorial knowledge

2)      selection and interpretation of data

3)      relationship with other systems

a)      with educational system, in order to value scholarship users’ numbers

b)      with tourist systems

c)      with transport system

d)     with socio-economic system

4)      Network system proposal to verify real importance of elements that would constitute the system.

 

We have fixed two levels. The first level consists of a central pole, a HEAD, that represents the ScienceMuseum, where all information is kept as to what exists in all other museums. It represents the state of art of knowledge and gives us a synthetic vision about environment – physics, biology, anthropology etc. The second level consists out of the development of existing structures, which show in this way what is able to form poles in the urban network and to give inputs to the Head. In this way museums and laboratories will continue to be linked at their own place. At the level of the Head, we will have specificity and confrontation: a complete image of knowledge; at the POLES we will have specificity and disciplinary search about specific themes of territorial knowledge.

Moreover, poles in the urban tissue must contribute to revitalization because they must constitute some attractive centers for researchers, visitors, students and for all citizens as well, since they can find there an opportunity for their development and stimuli to build a future.

Poles can be constituted furthermore by some places where planning finds certainty and indications to action: information museum system could be able to give some information about state of environment, from many points of view: social, economic, physics, biology, arts etc.

In actual moments, public stewardship feels the need for planning, but we feel also the absence of an institution able to give data for planning and for revitalizing the environment. Only a museum research institute can give a support to public administrators or planners, in order to realize sustainable development in urban or rural areas and in order to bring about a cultural development for the benefit of all inhabitants.

Hence Knowledge Museum Network should be considered to be a simple conservation place, and function as such as archive, data center, center of environmental research due to having scientific laboratory and being a school of learning at all levels.

In this way we’ll have a kind of educational city, that will invite us to explore; it will encourage us to manipulate, renew and make changes. It’ll offer us surprises and new experiences, challenges to our knowledge and provoke actions. Some experiments in this direction have already been achieved with various results. One of these was conducted by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, another by the Parkway High School of Philadelphia where education involved environmental studies. In Italy we can mention the UrbanCenter project in Milan.

These initiatives allow that planning choices and modifications can have a more general value insofar as they can be easily understood and create an intelligible reality for as many people as possible.

New ideas about museums goes hand in hand with the ability to modify the urban aspects, not only by means of a setting, but also by means of urban organization and revitalization of urban, social and cultural tissues (and structures). In this way the museum becomes an aggregation of many moments taken from different institutions (universities, schools, archives, libraries etc.). A museums’ system, extended all over the region, becomes a fundamental tool to define the relationship town / environment and to define a different relationship between institutions and citizens, between cultural heritage and the city.

In this way museology concerns not only past knowledge but also future’s one and it needs new structures and models where future could emerge from the knowledge about the past.

Concluding, we can cite Shakespeare: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”, but perhaps we could say that all of these dreams could be contained in a Museum’s network.

 

 

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