Abstract
This chapter collects the conclusions of the book and traces a brief agenda for future research work towards an entendement of the contemporary continuum, referred to as the Next Landscape. The text illustrates three main objectives marked in the agenda: the formation of a symbiotic vision, contaminating the technocratic regime governing today’s physical and intellectual production with a non-positivistic, non-systematic exploration; the determination of a set of novel attributes to analyze, evaluate, and compare the contemporary condition of the expanded citizenship and its varying contexts; the acknowledgement and implementation of a novel platform for the democratic interaction in the ‘post-urban cityness’; the under-arching of the spatial platform with a reformulated territorial mythology, to endow the expanded dwelling space with a new sense. The text deals with the notions of residence, monuments, urban and territorial grid, and comes to the idea of a network of interlaced ‘neo-monuments’. A few final considerations of more general, philosophical nature close the chapter and open perspectives for future work.
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In English: “[Europe’s expansion in the world] is a peculiar combination of curiosity and arrogance. […] In the foreign districts reserved to them or in the new cities built during the great phase of their expansion, the ‘colonizers’ reproduce the style, the space, and the main edifices of the places they come from. […] The style of these edifices and the construction materials are often a demonstration of the prehensile, mimetic curiosity through which the Europeans seize all that surrounds them. But the palaces and houses are related to each other by a spatial logic that reflects the political, civil, aesthetic culture of the colonizers” [translation by the author].
- 3.
The domestication of maize by prehistoric populations of the Oaxaca valley-starts from a variety of teosinte, a wild grass with a simple fruiting structure composed of loose kernels on a single row common in the region. Through still unclear anthropogenic manipulations, its fruiting structure mutates as radically as to give form to the corn ear we know today. The anomaly of maize stands in the structure of its ear, whose grains are so firmly attached to the cob in multiple rows and wrapped in such a resistant husk of leaves that the plant has lost its ability to autonomously reproduce itself by dispersion of seeds. While man becomes dependent on maize for daily survival, maize becomes dependent on man to detach and sow its grains. The man/maize relationship has been reshaped into a reciprocal interdependence (De Ávila and Salcedo 2006, pp. 16–8).
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The nopal-cochineal domestication does not just involve a plant’s relationship with man, but is rather performed on a parasitic connection bonding the prickly pear nopal and its plague, the cochineal. A trifold rapport involving man, plant, and insect is reformed into a munificent equilibrium that from cochineal extracts the ‘blood of the prickly pear’, according to its Nahuatl name, a dye that had colored textiles and artifacts of indigenous peoples. The domestication that stabilizes the parasite over the plant causes the insect to grow bigger and the nopal pads more delicate, dropping their thorns. After the Spanish conquest, the production of ‘Spanish red’, performed through indigenous labor, is at the basis of the worldwide trade that showers the Spanish crown and merchants with immense wealth (De Ávila and Salcedo 2006, pp. 21–5).
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An oral account in Mixtec, recollected in 1970 by linguist Cornelia Mak from a syncretic Christian-animistic community of the Oaxacan highland, attributes to the maguey plant the feelings of a sentient being. The man who cuts the maguey’s budding flower stem cannot be the one who scrapes the heart of the plant to draw sap. The man who cuts cannot be the one who has planted the maguey. The man who has planted it can be the one who scrapes. One can set a straw to suck up the sap into a jug. One can cover the scraping with a stone to prevent foxes from sucking the juice. If the scraping changes hand, the maguey stops yielding sap. If a man is hired to cut someone else’s maguey, he must burn copal incense and chant to the Virgin of Remedies before others can drink. An array of unfortunate to fatal occurrences expects the ones that do not comply with the rules. The ritualization of maguey-tending activities is aimed at optimizing pulque production, but also at harmonizing the social interaction of the social group before and during consumption (Mak 1977, pp. 115–9).
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Among other entheogen plants the salvia divinorum, or diviner’s sage, is one of the rarest psychoactive plants, native to a limited natural habitat in the Mazatec region on the Sierra Madre Oriental. The ‘Salvinorin A’ contained in the plant is considered as one of the most powerful psychoactive substances in nature. The Mazatecs, a syncretic Christian-animist people, call it María Pastora, as the female shepherd identified with the Virgin. As the plant’s natural reproduction through seeds dispersion is almost unknown, its propagation is obtained by means of plant cuttings, which conditions its survival upon human stewardship (Schultes et al. 1992, pp. 164–5).
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See Chap. 8 of this book.
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See Ernst Jünger’s discourse on pervading technique in Chap. 6 of this book.
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Already expressed by Carlo Cattaneo over a century before Heidegger. See Chap. 3 of this book.
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In ‘Il filosofo e l’Anarca. Intervista a Ernst Jünger’ with Antonio Gnoli, Franco Volpi, Jünger defines the ‘Wald’ as “… per me il bosco non è soltanto come per Heidegger il luogo naturale concreto in cui vivono e operano i contadini della Foresta Nera. […] Il bosco è per me soprattutto una metafora: sta a indicare un territorio vergine in cui ritirarsi dalla civiltà ormai segnata dal nichilismo e in cui l’individuo può ancora sottrarsi agli imperativi delle chiese e alle grinfie del Leviatano” (Jünger 2006, p. 54).
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For a definition of ‘semethic’ (semiotic + ethic), language and behavior, word and action, see (Farina 2009).
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See Chap. 6 of this book.
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See subchapter ‘Of new nomads’ in Chap. 2 of this book.
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See Chap. 2 of this book.
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See also subchapters ‘Athens’ on Rossi’s reading of Athens and ‘In Civibus et in parietibus’ on Saint Augustine’s civitas in civibus formulation, in Chap. 3 of this book.
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Almo Farina describes the ‘visible landscape’ as an assemblage where the visible spatial formation of the mosaic is ‘coupled’, that is coincident, with the observed regime of processes that generate it. In an ‘uncoupled landscape’, the regime of processes remains invisible. By that, Farina establishes a distinction between the mosaic formations and process metabolisms composing a landscape (Farina 2009, pp. 25–6).
- 18.
See ‘A Critique of the Urban Paradigm and Its Territory’ in Chap. 2 of this book.
- 19.
See ‘A Critiques of Landscape Urbanism’ in Chap. 2 of this book.
- 20.
See subchapter ‘Interstitial inhospitality’ in Chap. 3 of this book.
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Pasini, R. (2019). Conclusions: Life and Death of ‘14 Strength’ and Agenda for the Next Landscape. In: Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77887-7_9
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