Territorialist School

The so-called Territorialist School is a contemporary approach to urban and regional planning and design grown out from the work of a number of Italian scholars, among whom Alberto Magnaghi (Torino, 1941, for many years professor and currently professor emeritus at the University of Florence) is the most prominent figure.

Starting from a critique of the sustainable development concept, where both a strictly environmental vision of sustainability and the global quantitative development were challenged, the school has focused on the increasingly important role of local qualitative development and elaborated the concept of “local self-sustainable development”. This concept emphasized the balance between: directing development towards fundamental human requirements (which cannot be reduced to material needs alone); self-reliance and the development of self-government by local society; and enhancing environmental quality.

The Territorialist approach intends to combine these three objectives, according priority to "place-consciousness", i.e. a reflexive relation with local identity and heritage (with reference to the themes of bio-regionalism dealt with by Patrick Geddes), viewed as the strategic keys for a sustainable future. The definition of ‘heritage’ adopted by this school is an extensive one, identifying each ‘territorio’ both with its people and places, and including environment, landscape, urban features, local knowledge, culture and crafts in its unique character as a living entity.

This type of approach stresses the increasingly important role of the territory itself when tackling the problems of sustainability, and consequently assumes the arts and crafts of producing territorial quality as a key element for lasting wealth. Provided by Wikipedia