Landscape Report

Landscape Report

With the coming into force of the Decree of the President of the Council of Ministers, on December 12th, 2005, every request for any intervention that requires the release of the so-called environmental authorization will have the obligation of being accompanied by a detailed “landscape” report that expresses in an incontestable way the quality of the intervention within the environmental context to which it belongs. The same decree defines the criteria and contents of the landscape report, subordinating any intervention that regards a protected area to the compilation of this document which, being added to the documents regarding the project and to the technical reports that generally already make up the project proposal, will form an essential element for the evaluation of the interventions with regard to landscape compatibility, aesthetics and decorum.
The landscape report will have to contain at least the following technical documentation:

A) Analysis documents
a. Description, even through cartographic extracts, of the landscape characteristics and contexts of the area (visual quality and panoramic, presence of elements of degradation, presence of elements characteristic to the area, etc.);
b. Indication and analysis of the levels of protection, also in relation to the characteristics of value as may be defined by the urbanistic instruments, in the intervention area;
c. Photographic representation of the actual state of the intervention area and the landscape context taken from places of normal accessibility (the surrounding environmental area);

B) Project documents:
In addition to the project documents and to the technical reports that already generally compose the project proposal, there must be produced, in relationship with the consistency of the foreseen interventions, the following documents:
a. Section of the whole area in a scale which is adequate for its extension;
b. Representation of the view and of any skylines, extended also to include neighbouring buildings in cases in which the interventions are situated in points of particular visibility, such as squares, promenades, etc.;
c. Accompanying report that motivates the project choices taken in reference to the characteristics of conservation and enhancement of the landscape in which they will be inserted. The project proposal must always motivate the choices of location and size compared to practicable alternatives;

C) Elements for the evaluation of compatibility with the landscape:
The following elements are to be considered in a broad sense, as they are greater in detail, and they must be enclosed for interventions that are of greater constructive-urbanistic complexity (new constructions, urbanistic transformations, etc):
a. Detailed simulation of the state of the places following the realization of the project made through realistic photo modelling (computerized or manual rendering) including an adequate rendition of the surrounding area;
b. Forecast of works of mitigation, both visual and environmental, aimed at improving the general landscape quality of the places.
It must be specified that the landscape report must thoroughly depict the state of the places, in a landscape context (rural, urban peri-urban, settled, etc.), and the area subject to the intervention (in a morphological sense: coastal, lowland, river, etc.) before carrying out the works and after their realization, and that these indications only have the aim of making the work of the experts called to draw up these documents and later verify that they correspond as easy and homogeneous as possible.

Guido Bissanti