Paesaggio come mediatore culturale: il luogo di vita nelle percezioni e nelle attese dei giovani immigrati

Landscape, considered as a medium between people and space and due to its identity values, can play a relevant role in the process of integration of immigrants. In this investigation field, some questions arise: what are the relationships that immigrants build with the “new” space in which they live? Are these relationships different from the ones of the native? Is landscape relevant for the increasing of their sense of “feeling at home”? The research deals with the mental representations of space, the sense of attachment to ordinary landscapes and the residential well-being. It proposes landscape as a tool in order to understand how new territorial belongings develop, as well as an intermediary agent between the local and the immigrant young people. The research focuses on the second generation of immigrants, the one more involved in the integration process. The field work analyses with a mixed methodology the relationship between teenagers and the place in which they live, in a study case of North-East of Italy (the town of Montebelluna). Information coming from interviews, photo-interviews, mental maps, focus groups, etc. are compared with the one arising from a quantitative analysis that involves a bigger sample of teenagers from different parts of Italy. As a first general observation, both Italian and foreign teenagers pay a lower attention to the external territorial issues than to the interior dimension of landscape witch mainly involves the presence of family and friends. Then many differences arise inside both groups, concerning the relationship with the place of everyday life and the attitude towards its development processes. Quite unexpectedly, “new” inhabitants, probably due to a higher and more evident need of “orientation”, show higher attitude towards local landscapes. It emerges that landscape, used as a trans-cultural medium, has large potentialities in making young people more aware and less passive in the building process of a multiethnic society.