The Transport System in the Land Organization of the Inner Regions of Sardinia
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
1 THE TRANSPORT SYSTEM IN THE LAND ORGANIZATION OF THE INNER REGIONS OF SARDINIA F. PINNA Department of Land Engineering - University of Cagliari Engineer, D.I.T.- sez.Trasporti, Facoltà di Ingegneria, P.zza D’Armi 09123 Cagliari, Italy, +39.070.6755256 M. CONI Department of Land Engineering - University of Cagliari Engineer, D.I.T.- sez.Trasporti, Facoltà di Ingegneria, P.zza D’Armi 09123 Cagliari, Italy, +39.070.6755254 F. ANNUNZIATA Department of Land Engineering - University of Cagliari Extraordinary Professor, D.I.T.- sez.Trasporti, Facoltà di Ingegneria, P.zza D’Armi 09123 Cagliari, Italy, +39.070.6755256, fax. +39.070.6755261, E-mail [email protected] The article analyses the state of the transport system in On a regional basis the strong areas would accomplish the Sardinia, with particular reference to inland areas. After task of a firm, efficient link with the mainland, while the illustrating the specificities of these areas, their orography lesser centres would have the function of spreading the urban and morphology as determinants of productive activity, and impact throughout the territory. the relationship between population and settlement that A further strategy is that of maximising the integration determines communication axes, the settlement tendencies among infrastructural systems, productive structures, and the new economic and territorial arrangement are pointed agricultural areas, services and residential centres, with the out. Finally a proposal is made about what the development perspective of promoting the tourist and environmental of the transport system of these marginal areas, and therefore vocation of Sardinia. of future scenarios, should be. Subsequently a few remarks Finally the necessity of a general adjustment of are made on the transport system, on infrastructural communication infrastructures, in terms of design standards, weaknesses, on the limited accessibility of a few inner areas is pointed out, in order to increase both the efficiency and the and on how this negatively affects the development of the safety of the system, to integrate the different modalities of local economy. transport, and to strengthen the railway links by reconverting Furthermore, we point out the necessity of locating urban end lines into local community transport strong poles with the function of supplying services and infrastructures. localise productive activity, in order to promote an organic structured aggregation of lesser settlements located in weak demand basins. This must coincide with the improvement in land accessibility, with vast intervention on the inner road system, and with the creation of a system of strong links with the main urban settlements of the island and with the regional and national transport network. 2 1. THE SPECIFICITY OF THE INNER REGIONS OF SARDINIA 1.1. OROGRAPHY AND MORPHOLOGY AS DETERMINANTS OF PRODUCTIVE ACTIVITY The South of Italy is at a disadvantage with respect to the rest of the country because of the fact that its hilly territory, that is often limited further by its morphology, is clearly predominant. This aspect at least partly explains the traditional importance of sheep rearing in the area.Sardinia has the same amount of flat land as the South, but since just above two thirds of its area is on hilly altitude and a very small amount on mountain altitude, its altitude distribution is grievously unbalanced. Even more unbalanced in favour of high altitudes are its inner areas, spaces that have historically become deeply affected by the forms and rhythms of transhumant sheep rearing in their society, their economy as well as their landscape. It is particularly significant to note in this connection that 35% of the province of Nuoro is made up of mountainous territory, an area that also represents about 85% of the whole mountain territory of Sardinia; on the other hand the remaining 65% of hilly territory only represents about 27% of the hilly territory of the island.Therefore the major expression of Sardinian mountainous territory, in other words the steepest, the most massive and the most extended, are in the inner areas. Far from being monotonous, in their great variety of landscape forms, these areas are made even more complex by a morphology that, in spite of the moderate altitude, has formed extremely rough and uneven hills, resembling mountains rather, and mountains that at a relatively high altitude with their soft rolling forms recall the hilly environment. Most of the territory of the province, moreover, has a step configuration, or a ditch configuration, and even at low altitudes it is characterised by ridges, while rolling or even flat table land is scarce (a very significant characteristic in respect to the economy of ordinary road building). 1.2. RELATIONS BETWEEN POPULATIONS AND SETTLEMENTS AS DETERMINANTS OF COMMUNICATION. In brief, from the point of view of cultural characteristics, this is a particular population that due to the viscosity exerted by transhumant sheep rearing, lives and preserves an environment that may be called specialised and exploited especially in function of the traditional characteristics of sheep rearing, though it is gradually becoming relatively less important.Therefore to think of a territory that tends to modernization appears to be somewhat in contrast with the main traditional economic activity that still guides its organization. On the other hand to conceive innovative connotations to sheep rearing implies the vision of a differently structured and organized territory, or rather of an entirely different territory.In the interior, most of the population closely or directly involved in sheep rearing is distributed in large villages located between the high hills and the mountain. The essential characters of these villages are aimed to: 1) guarantee social life in the village; social life meaning mutual aid, solidarity, mutual defence and cultural defence, especially among the weakest members of society, i.e. women, the elderly and the children, who are left alone by the men, the shepherds, who during the winter months of transhumance move their sheep to lowland pastures; 2) provide the communal territory - which on average is quite large due to the strong extensive character of sheep rearing with respect to land - with protection and order of a roughly barycentric pattern. The combination of the meanings of the two fundamental characteristics of the settlement explains the following: 3 a) major roads are essentially intended to ensure horizontal relations among the villages, that is to promote exchange between sheep rearing centres, that are different only in respect of their size - relations that are carried out also on long distances - and interprovince relations; b) major roads are essentially long yarns without weft; in other words, either because fundamentally useless or due to their morpho-altimetry, they are totally lacking in meshes and scarcely provided with nodes; c) minor roads, at the local level, on the other hand, are essentially oriented towards guaranteeing vertical (or ecological) relations; that is to further the pasture land economy with its rhythms marked by the presence of labour, the grazing of animals, the milking of ewes; d) in brief, neither the seat of community life (that is fully pre-urban), nor that of the main economic activity, are organized in “networks”, according to criteria of decentration and specialisation of production and services; in fact these criteria are not allowed by the scanty articulation of the economic structure and related functions, that favours the paradoxical polarisation of only small episodes. 1.3. THE DELOCALISATION-RELOCALISATION TENDENCIES OF THE POPULATION. THE TENDENCY TOWARDS A NEW MODEL OF SETTLEMENT AND THE NEW ECONOMIC-TERRITORIAL PATTERNS In the past thirty-odd years, the most important in the evolution of Sardinia's economy, the population of the inner areas was characterised by the combined meaning of four phenomena, that may be considered converging in the expression of a general, relative, weakening of the economic-productive structure of the area. The four phenomena are: 1) an absolute decrease in the general population; this is due to emigration to the rest of the island and outside it as a result of the change in age distribution; 2) a decrease in the total population's share in the Sardinian population; 3) in the balance between areas characterised by a population decrease and those characterised by an increase, the former have been extended to include the communes in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital town; 4) progressive shifting of the population from higher to lower altitudes, except for the 301-600 metre altitude range. The articulation of the above phenomena allows to propose a few strategic, though problematic, concepts of the evolution of the inner regions. First of all the population drop, that persists up to the past few years, could depend on a continuous general loss of resources. Though rather abstract because related to the indefinite nature of the causes of the phenomenon, the hypothesis could be given greater concreteness by observing that in fact the decrease or increase areas themselves qualify the nature of the crisis by their very own distribution. The former are the inner areas of the high hills and mountains, while the latter are essentially the coastal areas and those immediately gravitating around the industrial poles and capital towns. Considering the cases of consolidated increase and others where the population has