Resilience. Sandrine Robert

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СКАЧАТЬ reality, centuriation is like all of the monuments which come down to us from ancient times: it passes through time unscathed; this is both its strength and its weakness, and this permanent character should be seen as a hallmark of Rome. Centuriation, born of the earth, was not a stone corset preventing it from breathing, but it did assign it a structure. The system gave it a stability, making it immune to successive recombinations and dismemberments. It only disappeared once it was no longer maintained, fragmenting much faster in regions artificially clawed back from the desert, where man’s continued survival is only attained through constant struggle.²⁵ (Chevallier 1958, p. 121)

In contrast, a “secondary” landscape is one which has undergone:

…numerous transformations [which] occurred over a period, often several centuries long, which changed the primary form to an extent which renders reconstitution necessary, laborious, difficult and, in most cases, only partially possible...²⁶ (Verhulst 1995, p. 49)

      For methodological reasons, the study of secondary landscapes has been largely abandoned due to its complexity, in favor of studying planned parcel systems: medieval urban foundations, parcel systems resulting from land clearances, rural parcel systems in Eastern France, etc. These specific town and land plans are still “readable” in the present, having undergone very limited degradation due to their original coherency. In this approach, time is seen as a framework which is external to the observed object, and acts on elements in the sense of alteration.

1.2.5. The notion of decay

      In the 19th century, linguists developed a theory of linguistic decline, whereby all languages are considered to be derived from a proto-human language (Ducrot and Todorov 1972). For Saussure, time is a universal law, which acts on language just as it acts on any other element: “For time changes everything. There is no reason why languages should be exempt from this universal law... This evolution is fatal” (de Saussure 1995b, Part I, Chapter II, § 2).

      A key goal in landscape studies is to identify the initial finished state of forms (a kind of “mother form”). All later additions or transformations are thus considered as disturbances or degradations to the original plan. For example, Bloch highlighted the case of drawings of fields or monuments which only very rarely survive to the present day in their “pure” form (Bloch 1988, p. 51). Maitland used the terms true village and purest form to describe a grouped village settlement, established at the time of the Germanic Conquests in the early Middle Ages (Maitland 1987, pp. 15–16). In this approach, there is an initial, finished, “pure” form which is then altered by time over the centuries. In ecology, the notion of a “pristine” ecosystem, untouched by human hands, plays a very similar role (see Part 2). This primal form, which, as we shall see, is more of an ideal type than an element which actually existed, is clearly situated in the past: in the present, we can only access a decayed image. The regressive approach aims to work backwards through time in order to reconstruct a “least decayed” version.

A major aim in morphology, for many years, was to conceptualize modes of decay rather than those of the persistence of past forms. For example, R. Chevallier proposed the criterion of “visible wear” for dating visible objects in a landscape:

Using the criterion of “visible wear”, within the framework of a morphological series, the structure which presents the most worn appearance is likely to be the oldest. Objects in a series may be arranged in order of decreasing sharpness: structures can be more or less “fresh”, more or less decayed by the effects of time, to the point where they become like ghosts... (Chevallier 1971, p. 108)²⁷

In 1983, Gérard Chouquer proposed a model for explaining the degradation and fossilization of centuriated cadastral plans (Chouquer 1983). According to this model, the original, regular centuriations were transformed as a result of the polarization of the road network around medieval grouped habitats (Figure 1.3)²⁸.

Figure 1.3. Theoretical illustration of the decay of a centuriated cadastral system (inspired by Chouquer 1983; Robert, 2020)

Until the 1980s–1990s, morphologists aimed to identify the traces of plans and parcel systems, based on a preconceived notion of the finished form which they were presumed to have in ancient and medieval times. This mother form was used as a reference for hypothetical reconstructions of missing sections on maps. In the context of the ancient world, many methods used standardized grids based on the most common dimensions of contemporary planned parcel systems, transferred onto an overlay then held up against topographical maps or aerial photographs (Chouquer 1990). For ancient urban environments, P. Pinon pioneered the use of “programmatic plans” using a unique, module-based orthogonal grid, based on current city layouts (Pinon 1994)²⁹. This approach consists of looking for traces on modern maps and photographs that correspond to the grid layout. However, it leaves little room for the geographical particularities of specific sites, which may warp the grid; the grid takes priority over the actual forms of the site. Studying planned layouts in this way implies a minimization of the effects of both time and space.

1.3. Reversible time

      1.3.1. Resistance to change

      During the 19th century, the development of research into planned layouts in the historical sciences ran parallel to a growing interest in ancient plans and morphological analysis within the emerging field of urban design. This interest appears to have drawn on a critical approach to industrial-era town design, in which settlements expanded beyond historical limits in the form of medieval and modern walls (Choay 1965; Cohen 1993). The desire to act on the forms of towns and cities went hand-in-hand with a desire to maintain a “legacy” state, or even to recreate an initial state from a contemporary “decayed” state. Certain town planners believed that the application of a historical plan would rejuvenate, or even resurrect, a former state. In 1936, for example, P. Lavedan criticized the vitalism present in his own earlier words as it did not correspond to planned cities:

[...] historical fatalism has its roots in the assimilation of the city to a living being. A city is seen as a living thing which, like all living things, is born, grows, and dies; it is a child, an adolescent, then an old man. I myself accepted this comparison for many years, even in the first edition of this work; now, however, I find it to be unacceptable. [...] On the contrary, a city can be rejuvenated or even resurrected. While all men start out as children, many towns do not have a “childhood”, being in possession of their full strength from the outset, like Athena springing fully-formed from the mind of Zeus; the existence, or even the very notion, of these planned cities has no place in the fatalist approach. (Lavedan 1959, p. 13)³⁰

      Among urban planners, there was an idea that certain types of town plans provided a means of combatting aging and decay. Michel Parent, museum conservator of relief plans, writing in 1948, considered that the knowledge of ancient could be seen as an “applied science of curation”:

The past can serve the future in all cases, on the condition that we do not make a tyrant of it: firstly, СКАЧАТЬ