GIVING POLITICAL DIGNITY TO INDECISION

Scuola del Terzo Luogo

Can we imagine a space that anyone can use and transform freely, without imposing upon it the notion of the survival of the fittest? Can we conceive of a common space that exists precisely because of this? Does organizing mean planning everything, and leaving no room for the unforeseen, or does it mean creating the best conditions for something unexpected to take place? And what if minimal care was enough to leave room for spontaneity, without turning everything into chaos?  
With his theory of the “third landscape”, the famous gardener Gilles Clément argues that spaces usually treated as neglected are the most important: they are privileged areas of receptivity to biological diversity, and places of biological invention. They are road edges, abandoned factories or quarries, or eluded spaces. In 2012 Manifatture Knos and Clêment started to question what “third landscape” could be: not just spaces abandoned by man, but also inhabited places. The project “Incontri del terzo luogo” (“Encounters of the Third Space”) was created in order to start this research, with practical workshops in the direct transformation of certain areas of the city aimed at opening up spaces of indecision.  
By observing the movements of his garden, and through the practice he has experimented with, Gilles Clément has posited a relationship between man and nature that does not stop at the tension between the dominated and the dominator. This is not a relationship of the frightened submission of man to nature, nor of the total domination of man over it. Rather it is a symbiotic relationship of mutual care, in which man has the task of acting as little as possible to allow the greatest possible diversity.
In short, between the forest and the zoo there is the possibility of a planetary garden.
From the idea of a garden in movement, Clément has arrived to that of the third landscape, allowing everyone to become aware of a reality that has always been there for all to see. This thinker focused on those places that had become apparently abandoned by man. In that abandonment, and in that indecision on their fate, Clément recognized a place welcome to diversity. The third landscape is therefore neither a primary, wild place in which nature has taken over with its conservative balance, nor is it subject to urban or agricultural transformation by man. It is neither a place totally decided by nature, nor one totally decided by man, but it is instead that border, an interstice, abandoned by man but not yet reabsorbed by nature, one in which something new can happen: it is a place of biological invention.  
Starting from the idea of a third landscape and from practices related to new forms of management of the common good, we asked ourselves how this idea might be declined in other possible terms.  
So we started to perceive third places as spaces of the city where everything is not yet decided, where everything is not totally chaotic and wild, but where everything is not yet organized and planned. It is a matter, as Gilles Clément would put it, of giving political dignity to indecision.  
After all, the third place is not a physical place, but a political place (or perhaps even an existential one: an immediate opening that can occur at any moment in anyone’s life).  
Basically, it is a question of trying to think outside of rigid political-economic categories, such as those of the State and the Market, which seem to hold exclusive dominion over what we call the common good. The third place is neither, but perhaps that preliminary dimension that allows them both, as places - perhaps insufficient - of exchange and participation.
The garden and its collective construction respond first of all to an existential need, and to the need for expression of a nascent community. The Planetary Garden is a story capable of representing this exceptional reality because it is configured as an undesigned project that imagines and describes a space of relationships rather than a physical space, an ecosystem in which the vegetable part constitutes only the most visible aspect.  
It is primarily a matter of care, affection and watching things grow. Care stimulates affection and a feeling of ownership. Watching things grow is an engaging experience that brings people to feel an affectionate apprehension.  
We all work with the desire that one day every citizen will feel the need, together with their neighbours, to take care of the public space of their neighbourhood directly. To achieve this goal, a policy is needed, formed by all the actors of the social, economic and cultural fabric, one which imagines new models of city management and which is capable of translating them into understandable tools, simple rules and resources accessible to all citizens.


Scuola del Terzo Luogo
Scuola del Terzo Luogo was born and has been developed over the course of several editions of the Incontri del Terzo Luogo, moments of research on the "undecided" spaces of the city of Lecce. Since 2012 an informal group of people began a journey within these spaces that has facilitated comparison, actions on public space, experimentation, relations with the context and various forms of life with special regard to the topic of the garden. The reference place that gave life to this path, supporting it with its own resources, is Manifatture Knos, an undecided space in the city of Lecce, recovered after a long period of abandonment and returned to the city as an independent cultural centre.  
The cyclical nature of these moments meant that a group of  Incontri del Terzo Luogo participants could give continuity to the path, intensifying the moments of confrontation and opening the way to new possibilities for intervention not only in the suburbs of Lecce, but also in the cities of Taranto, Palermo, Lausanne and Matera.  
Scuola del Terzo Luogo is a place where we discuss the concept of school itself, a time in which we face everyday life, where we look for solutions and where we expect to understand how small human actions can evolve in synergy with the places that welcome them.  
Scuola del Terzo Luogo wants to deal with new forms of pedagogy by challenging conventional teaching models, where giving political dignity to indecision becomes the modality of intervention on the common good, or the practice through which we take care of places.


Case study #1: Lecce - Manifatture Knos
Manifatture Knos shares with its surrounding neighbourhood an external area as large as a football stadium. Until 2012 this area was an “asphalt desert” used only as a parking lot, which then slowly became a moving garden: chunks of asphalt were taken out to give more space to trees and plants tended by whoever wanted to take care of them or let them grow spontaneously. Then came the vegetable garden, trees and some medical herbs. During the previous editions of “Incontri del terzo luogo” we wondered how it could be possible to make this space more inhabitable, more useful and adaptable for everyone. We could not find an answer. One day, one of the participants took a pickaxe and started to look for water in the desert: he broke the asphalt, making space for something unexpected. In doing so, he created the conditions conducive to spontaneous change. So now the garden is carrying on by itself, and the site is welcoming people for various spontaneous activities, like cricket matches, dog walks, children’s games, teenage biking, and there are people who are still parking their cars.


Case study #2: Lecce - The quarry
Is “as little as possible against, as much as possible in favour” a way to transform and operate? What happens if you ask the municipality to give you the permits to organize a workshop, with the famous gardener Gilles Clément, in a wonderful and abandoned park on the threshold of the city, crowned by a dovecote from the XVI century?  
It so happened that, in a wave of hospitality and care, the day before the beginning of the workshop and unbeknownst to anyone, the municipality sent bulldozers to eradicate all the spontaneous greenery and to destroy the underground microclimate. Following this “cleaning”, the workshop became impossible. So we had to move illegally to the next space, abandoned all the same. But that space was full of brambles and impossible to use. The neighbours came out of their houses and looked at us perplexed, especially when we started walking amongst the brambles, cutting them down here and there. Our work appeared to them useless and absurd. However, some simple and spontaneous paths through the tall grasses took us into a secret garden. The garden is one of the old quarries where  previous workers had extracted the stone that built the city of Lecce. After two days the inhabitants discovered that they have a beautiful park right outside their homes, and they offered to be gardeners.


Case study #3: Palermo
The creation of a Planetary Garden in the ZEN district of Palermo represents a challenge at different levels and scales, one which affects the nature of the city and the human vision of nature in the city.  
On the basis of a series of consecutive workshops, carried out both before and during Manifesta 12, was born not only a garden but at the same time a community of gardeners, passionate about transforming an abandoned, empty space, outside of institutional management. The experience of this collective work  on the construction of a common good reveals both the operational capacity and effectiveness of spontaneous groups, as well as the difficulties in finding synergy with the community.
Through the constant involvement of local citizens, the project aims to take care of a place, to find resilient and lasting solutions with a long-term impact, to create fertile soil conditions in the changing Mediterranean climate, to host biodiversity and to reveal the natural ability of plants to inspire solutions for contemporary habitation.



To decide not to decide
Short online conversation with Rossella Tricarico (Scuola del Terzo Luogo).


Even if it´s a tricky question, how do you read the Lido site from a distance (based on materials we´ve shared with you)? What are its characteristics from the third landscape perspective and what are its weaknesses?  

From the third landscape perspective we should look at all the interstices where pioneer plants started to grow: so not only the street borders but also certain areas where, despite the many different uses within the site, nobody had yet planned anything or it had been abandoned. From our point of view every planning project leaves undefined spaces, so we should find them and observe them in order to know what kind of spontaneous life has started to take root there (vegetables, animals and humans). Then we should understand how to take care of it, and how to encourage biodiversity. It seems there are different activities and uses for the whole area, both public and private, so we should find a balance in the relationship with the context, and we should also listen to the needs of the city as a complex system.

One of the reasons we´ve picked up the Lido site for this project is that it represents for us a model case of an urban transformation where a “development” takes over an undetermined site from a very clear power position (public-private entanglement). Third landscapes can generate very complex micro-utopia which are nevertheless very fragile when faced with such obvious inequality. How can third landscape be mobilized politically and structurally?  

In previous experience we met not only the inhabitants but also institutions in order to define a new strategy in approaching public spaces. The involvement of institutions is necessary in terms of the management of the gardens, which means making a maintenance plan by using as few financial and human resources as possible. But the garden is also a pedagogical and relational place, so it could host a programme of activities that is able to encourage demand for unplanned spaces within the city. The third landscape is a tool to be used with politicians and subsequently to be handed over to them, because politicians are always moved by the spirit of domination, and they want to decide. So you have to give them the illusion of deciding something: To decide not to decide.

To some people, third landscape can imply a place “uncared for”. Which narrative and imaginary strategies do you use when explaining the meaning and importance of the third landscapes, not only to the wider public but also to political representatives?  

Gilles Clément approaches the third landscape by attending to the borders that will become frames for spontaneous processes, thereby highlighting them. A useful working rule could be to start the process by working on the borders.
Our experience in the Lecce quarry taught us that working on the ground allows the inhabitants to perceive the abandoned spaces with different eyes, both in terms of their life and the discovery of diversity. This could help in setting up a pedagogical action which would be able to change the view on such things.
It could be useful to identify the level of biodiversity by studying what kind of plants/animal/humans are already using the spaces, and to then find a way to share this information in order to better understand the values of these areas. Educational and artistic programs related to the topic of the third landscape could help in offering new value, by giving care and new attention to the site. It would then be necessary to develop a political program for the future and to share it with everybody, in order to spread a new approach to public spaces that could be useful for the institution too, through the iteration of a model.

PHOTO CREDITS:  Roberto Dell'Orco, Peppe Frisino, Rossella Tricarico, Maurizio Buttazzo, Giorgio Coen Cagli