TERRITORIES: THE TERRITORII METHOD. A territorial look a projects and investigations that are not always territorial

HORACIO BOZZANO

Salerno

Conferencia; VII ENTI Salerno International Conference of Territorial Intelligence; 2009

ENTI European Network Territorial Intelligence y UniSa Universitá di Salerno

Territorial understanding with maps opens the door to territorial intelligence. It is conceived as the way in which public actors and citizens (who) manage to make territories and possible places more sustainable and durable utilizing scientific support.  It occurs on the small and intermediate scale, within the context of true-life governance (not academic discourse) that promotes and makes real the development of territories.  Three decades ago, our fellow teachers and colleagues of the European Network of Territorial Intelligence – now ENTI PM7 European Union – investigated and worked towards this end with vulnerable populations in many European countries.  As they did 20 years ago on other continents, in 2007our teachers and colleagues have opened the doors to co-construct paths of scientific and technological production that are useful to institutions and societies.  Simultaneously, they have respected the special blend of characteristics in each country by listening to the people and incorporating their ideas.   With the support of the Territorii Method, one attempts to make territories, its actors, its problems and its solutions more useful to institutions and society in general. A conception of territory as simply a constructed space, theoretically solid and broadly applied to the object of study and to the forms of intervention, makes up the pillars in territorial understanding, intelligence and development.   Territorii is a geographic method incorporated into interdisciplinary research projects. It can be applied not only to territorial projects, but to social, environmental, cultural, political, economic, touristic, agrarian, urban, educative, sanitary, industrial, commercial, road, railway, archeological and other undertakings with a territorial base and application.  At the same time, not everything is territorial.  Therefore, the Territorii Method represents a territorial perspective for projects that are never exclusively territorial.  What this means, at the point of application, is that it is necessary to complement it with other methods and tools that come from sociology, anthropology, economics, history, city planning, political science, tourism, agronomy, archeology and other disciplines.  For example, each project has its own central methodology – social, natural, political, economic, socio-economic, socio-cultural, etc – that will be guided by a functional need and not necessarily based on territorial understanding.  At the same time, the decisive actors in investigations do not always act and decide in terms of territory.  Thus, the Territorii Method will frequently be complementary to other methods and tools used in the diverse scientific disciplines.   This work has three parts. The first part gives a feeling of scope for what we understand to be method and methodology. The second puts forth the theoretical-methodological criteria of the Territorii Method. The final part contains four very different applications that demonstrate that the method can be useful to and replicable in the scientific and academic fields and diverse investigative groups, as well as in public institutions, social organizations, the general citizen and the business community. The conclusion offers and attempt to articulate and unite three methods: Territorii, Stlocus and Portulano.   To understand and apply this method it is timely to consider what theoretical and methodological foundations are being laid, and based on this, to know what we understand to be cartography. Finally, we must solidify why we consider it prudent to work with real, lived, conceptualized, legal and possible territories.  On a more theoretically abstract level, due to its scope and complexity, territory as a substantive concept is considered a “discipline-object of study”, similar to the study of society, the state, the environment, and others.  This can be the result of various concrete applications that may be useful when incorporating operational concepts from a wide range of studies.  Moreover, this will solidify why we choose real, lived, conceptualized, legal and possible territories. Respectively, these represent to a large degree the descriptive, perceived, explicative, prescribed and proposed schemes and interpretations of territories, independent of the theoretical conception that each researcher chooses to specify.   Three very different research projects already carried out in Argentina are examined and interpreted according to the Territorii Method:  (1) “Development of Territorial and Re-activation of a Train, A Case in Entre Ríos”  (2) “Territorial Hypotheses for Huanguelén, Buenos Aires” (3) Urban Planning and Territory Code of La Plata, Buenos Aires.  It is important to consider that note of these projects were exclusively territorial.  Each one applied other methods and tools that come from other disciplines: sociology, urban planning, history, anthropology, economy, etc.  Examining the five types of territories in the three projects, the reader gets a better idea of the way in which, according to a few particular theoretical criteria, each researcher or group chooses, on a theoretical perspective basis, its territory and what weight their research will give to the descriptive, perceived, explanatory, prescriptive, and proposed territorial instances.