"Faraway, So Close!" The landscapital proof-of-concept applied to the terraced landscapes of the Canary Islands and of the Alps

Abstract

The landscape is the resultant perception of the tireless choices of people acting on a territory. In the case of steeply sloping vineyards, the landscape continuously evolves adapting itself to changes of the physical environment, the climate, the culture and the technological innovation. As a primary sector, the wine production must be able to guarantee the income of the winemakers and the vine growers, currently attending global economic and climatic forcings. In this sense, the terraced vineyard landscapes, under great pressure, are experiencing a phase of extreme choices, balanced between conservation and destruction. We will therefore use the “landscapital” tool to identify the formal and plastic variables that define the viticultural landscapes of Vallehermoso (Canary Islands, ES) and Val di Cembra (in the Alps, IT) together with the agronomic, organizational, spatial, architectural, historical and social variables. If analyzed by mean of the landscapital these distant - both spatially, culturally and topologically - productive landscapes, are indeed close if other extremely relevant aspects are taken into account. Our goal is to interpret the effect and the extent of changes in the total landscape capital, identifying the causes and the possible consequences of the current changes that is how the landscape will be perceived by those who create it, by those who exploit it and by those who value it. We will present here how the terraces represent one of the elements that characterize the wine-growing landscape and, as a preliminary result of the ongoing research, we will show how the landscapital approach, with its both a theoretical and formal analysis system, helps to recognize the elements - and their mutual interaction and how this interaction allows the emergence of the terraced vineyard landscape, of which the terraces are one of the compositional elements.