The ‘measure’ of landscape transformations. Methods and techniques of multi-criteria evaluation in the opencast mining area of Paderno del Grappa (Venetian Pre-Alps, Italy)

The interpretation of the landscape strictly depends on the way human beings consider the places where they live and, therefore, this is not objective. For instance, the inhabitants of the city of Nairobi consider the natural landscape in a different way from the inhabitants of the city of London. This leads to a series of methodological and applicable considerations about how to read the landscape, how to regulate it legally and how to manage all the transformations taking place there. As the result of a cultural perception the landscape needs an accurate analytical and evaluative scientific methodology to be correctly interpreted, a methodology which can produce codes that can possibly be shared by different cultures and juridical administrations. In Italy the topic of the analysis and evaluation of the landscape and its transformations is particularly important as it is protected by the Constitution of the Republic. In a geographical context like Italy, where there is a redundancy of the beauties of the landscape and this territory is very dynamic, it is necessary to find out new ways of interpreting the landscape resulting from an approach which considers the evaluation of the landscape as a scientific and methodological receptacle. Through a thirty-year experience developed in the application of the Evaluation of the Environmental Impact of projects, in compliance with the European Directive (85/337/CEE), models of quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the environmental impact have already been consolidated, from which we can take inspiration to “measure” the landscape and its transformations. The scientific and methodological issue is thus to understand if the landscape is measurable and so to arrange the possible means to perform this evaluation, which must be necessarily multi-criteria. The essay aims at presenting also meaningful cases of evaluation of the transformations of the landscape as a result of the fulfilment of big projects (wind-projects, mines in the open air, etc.).