Anchored in the European Landscape Convention—extending attention from exceptional sites to ordinary and degraded contexts—and in UNESCO’s typology of cultural landscapes (intentional, organically evolved, associative), the GLAS’ research project places diachronic interpretation at its core: tracing transformations, identifying cultural matrices, and understanding how values emerge, persist, or erode. This historical reading couples with a systematic diagnosis of current dysfunctions—ecological, social, economic—and with the recognition of both latent and acknowledged assets.
From this double register (history/diagnosis) the research derives design protocols and planning tools that integrate past and present and translate evidence into spatial strategies. By bridging territorial planning, landscape ecology, and the humanities, it advances transferable methodologies for marginal contexts; integrates historical, ecological, and sociocultural dimensions; and supports governance models grounded in community participation, aiming to interpret layered territorial geographies as platforms for contemporary design and policy rather than merely as heritage.

Francesca Mazzino, Paola Sabbion