Landscape temporality and change: values in action

This chapter explores the potential of adopting, within landscape research, an approach attentive to landscape temporalities understood not only as multiple but also as discordant. A complex and non-linear conception of time, as implied in the notion of temporality, can make a valuable contribution to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms underpinning landscape change, in both its material and immaterial dimensions — namely meanings and values. The temporal discordance between these two dimensions emerges as a significant driver of transformation.
The complex trajectory of the rise, decline, and revival of coltura promiscua provides an opportunity to test these ideas empirically, confirming the influence of the past on the future, the importance of shifts in the rhythm of processes, and the existence of performative intertemporal contacts, capable of reshaping how landscape futures are imagined and negotiated.