Cities’ Identity Through Architecture and Arts – Catalani et al. (Eds) © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-1-138-05409-7 From national disgrace to cultural heritage and international film set. The case of Matera (Italy) Ina Macaione, Antonio Ippolito, Anello Enrico & Roberto La Gioia Nature_city lab, DiCEM, University of Basilicata, Matera, Italy Are_lab, Massafra, Italy ABSTRACT: The change in Matera was born when it was declared a ‘national disgrace’ by De Gasperi and the ‘the shame of Italy’ by Togliatti1. While Italy was recovering and developing from the Second World War, Matera had an agricultural identity. This case was brought to light in the book ‘Christ Stopped at Eboli’ edited by Carlo Levi and others soci- ologists, anthropologists and began to be seriously interested in the city until the laws on ‘Risanamento dei Sassi’ started a process of renewal, bringing Matera to UNESCO Heritage. A cultural and architectural change supported the ability to be natural film set. An intuition of Carlo Lizzani emerged with Pier Paolo Pasolini and its ‘Il Vangelo secondo Matteo’, Mel Gibson with its ‘The Passion’ until ‘Ben-Hur’ in 2014. Now Matera is an open-air movie set, a city full of art, history and architecture. It is unique and part of the world’s heritage. Keywords: Matera; agricultural identity; architectural change; cultural change; world’s heritage 1 INTRODUCTION To regenerate a city is to satisfy urban, socio-economic and environmental needs expressed by the population. Citizens, through actions and reversible processes, are able to influence the development of the city. In this perspective, besides having an active role in shaping the sur- rounding environment (Bandura, 1999). The city can’t be compared to an ‘immutable institu- tion’ but to a set of interactions between citizens that create a constantly changing system. ‘Places, temporalities, and processes of change are the product of social interactions; they are the result of different processes, and the contextual character of change found a plurality of paths and diverse narratives constitutively heterogeneous, and they are socially constructed, an achievement never definitively accomplished, in a tangle of stories simultaneously becom- ing’ (Cremaschi, 2008). ‘The city is something more than a congeries of individual men and of social conveniences- streets, buildings, electric lights, tramways, and telephones, etc.; something more, also, than a mere constellation of institutions [...]. The city is not, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction. It is involved in the vital process of the people who compose it; is a product of nature, and particularly of human nature’ (Park et al., 1925). It is now known that the urban or environmental landscape is a system where the processes and elements that compose it are in continuous interaction between themselves, and Man’s ability is, in fact, to make changes in order to make a place were living Consequently, man can be considered an important agent: a modifier of the landscape. Therefore, cities need to be understood as process of flows that with physical actions are able to valorise the existing environmental, geographic and logistic conditions of the territory. In fact, actions of different stakeholders are constantly affected by the political processes. In this 1. This definition does not have a precise date, because it was born following a visit to Matera. 343 CITAA17_Book.indb 343 2/19/2018 10:07:50 AM context, the definition of resilience is important because it ‘is the ability of a social system to respond and recover from disasters and includes those inherent conditions that allow the system to absorb impacts and cope with an event, as well as post-event, adaptive processes that facilitate the ability of the social system to reorganize, change, and learn in response to a threat’ (Cutter et al., 2008). This concept appears in ecology where it is defined as the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to anomalies without changing the processes of self-organisation and basic struc- tures. It is also considered to be the capacity to regain a steady state after a disturbance. This is the case of Matera, a town that, throughout its history, has experienced many changes. It is a real example of a resilience change that has enabled the city of ‘Sassi’ to achieve, like few others, the regeneration that has made it famous worldwide. «to where among the mindful traces of past stories appears the resilience. In its elastic fluidity, one discovers the bio-diverse population, in the crisis, in the regeneration of the city. So, in the various times of living and in spacious types, the great enters the small: humanity, landscape, nature and the world, penetrate as icons, well within the matter. In living the limit, the ‘mind’ of architecture expands. In the heterotopia of the Nature-City the almost nothing nature is more where you expect it (Sichenze, 2014)». Matera is a city in which is present a «‘strange form’ of existence is nothing other than the ‘time to live’. A time which is always different. Like life. Materialised in Matera in its being a hybrid, from the Gravina to the streets of the Sassi, to the Corso, to the ‘alternative’ street of the Beccherie, to the pathways in the modern neighbourhoods of the Renaissance (Sichenze, 2014)». In our research, Matera, is a city that meets the requirements of a Nature-City. A city that possesses within itself the germ of a ‘new beginning’ and hence has a vital character that, beyond the difficulties of surviving the moment, allows it to resist the devastating impacts that are putting a strain on the world’s urban economy. 1.1 Background. About the research To measure the degree of resilience of a city is complicated and passes through different indi- cators. Linking again to a definition of a biological nature, you might say that architecture, especially in a city, is like an complex ‘autopoietic’ organisation. This definition merges with that of resilience: it is, once again, the identification of a system that has an affinity with bio- logical nature and looking to the city as an organism that can grow and eventually collapse after a state of shock. We define resilience not only as the property of recovering from an unpredictable event but also an innate capability to find new resources to react against a negative situation. It has been several years that, due to the general economic conditions, we have been in a situation of uncertainty. As depicted by the legal and social scientist, Charles Sabel, who was one of the first to address to expose the concept from the industrial production theory to the govern- ment politics, the rigidly vertical organisational model typical of modern western democra- cies, and their institutions, was to be replaced by an experimental continuous learning one, just like it had been done by the innovative enterprises (Sabel & Zeitlin, 2010). From the management point of view, it is necessary to choose an organisational system that favours the independence and responsibility of the people where the results and not the processes are evaluated. From the planning tools point of view, we should use the most flex- ible tool possible (e.g. strategic territorial development plans) and define the principles of planning through a set of integrated tools. (This shift has been particularly relevant for urban planning in Italy, a country that used to have a very strict ‘architecture’ of interdependent yet different types of plans). Identity and new technologies are both important to build resilience. In his independent report Fabrizio Barca (former Minister of Cohesion Policy of the Ital- ian Republic) describes a ‘model for the territorial development (economic and social) that contains the definition of a resilient community’ (Barca, 2010). This approach sees, in the conflict between endogenous (local society) and exogenous (know-how, technologies) elements, the possibility to produce innovation, starting by social equality. This is crucial for our discussion because enhancing the human and social capital is 344 CITAA17_Book.indb 344 2/19/2018 10:07:50 AM one of the actions that can create a resilient community. It is, once again, the quality of the people that determines the result. So, while the local people care about the city they are liv- ing in more than outsiders do, their capability of being smart and having a set of light tools, instead of a pedantic series of procedures, makes them able to solve a situation of uncer- tainty, even producing innovation. What conditions must be met in order for a city to be defined as a Nature-City? We use, once again, the research and study of Nature-City theory2 to find out that there are 10 key of reading, that also allow us to assess the degree of resilience of a city. They are Naturalness (linked to nature), Landscapeness (linked to the earth), Represent- ativeness (linked to the city), Domesticity (linked to the house), Insularity (linked to the boundary), Co-Existentiality (linked to ecology), Topicity (linked to archaeology topicity), Time Depth (linked to time), Centrality (linked to the world), Initiality (linked to phenom- ena) (Macaione, 2007; Macaione, 2016; Sichenze, 2000; Sichenze, 2006). The key feature of sustainability is resource efficiency, for which a solution could be the principle of using without possessing applied to each type of resource (buildings, roads, vehi- cles, offices and people); the important thing is knowing how and where to find it.