Last update: 26/01/2007

Management and recovery

In Europe, studies and experimentation on environmental management and recovery action are being carried out in different ways.
One is related to the connection between different types of green areas in the cities, another regards the re-establishment of ecological systems in environments empoverished by human activities and another is related to ecoconnections in vast areas with highly natural or semi-natural environments.
Each different level, from the vast area to the more limited one to the specific intervention (i.e. on an operational scale), has a specific system of ecosystemic relations according to its structural and functional organization.
Therefore, if we consider the environmental system as a structured set of ecosystems, it is impossible to think that any single part of it can be transformed without affecting other territorial systems on other scales.
When evaluating possible interventions in a given area, it is fudamental that the choice is made on the basis of a deep knowledge of the territorial, environmental and landscape aspects of the same as well as of the different techniques that are available.
Indeed, the planning method consists of a series of complicated analyses and verifications of the various territorial “potentials” (natural, landscape, cultural, social, economic, etc.) which need to be carefully evaluated and adequately matched.
Technical evaluations need to refer to some fundamental considerations:

• interventions must reduce their effect on the environment as much as possible and re-establish any interruption in the continuity (defragmentation practice);
• any “amendments” to be made must not hinder the natural system’s evolutionary logic but develop conditions of autonomy in the environment;
• interventions must be aimed at consolidating and implementing the sites’ natural conditions, protecting landscape diversity even to maintain their cultural value with respect to the local identity and national image.

A correctly managed project therefore supports “proposals” for “flexible works” that do not impose themselves on the environment but create a flexible, even if stable, balance between the natural environment’s preservation and the work’s utilization by man. Such types of interventions are possible by means of adequate techniques, which are able to alter the environment’s local and distant components as little as possible while maintaining the balance, naturalizing the areas involved and promoting the development of biological components. Naturalistic engineering is an important reference for improving the quality of man-made works, while preserving the environment.
It is based on well-established experiences of intervention techniques involving the use of live plant material and are continuing to develop nowadays both in theory and practice.