Two accounts of taking action
The theme of this paper concerns the place of planner’s knowledge in the government
of territorial transformations. Here, we assume that this old problem can
be discussed through some local stories. In stories, the kind of questions we raise
are usually put as questions about communication, digression and construction of
a language able to connect what we can see and say about territory with matters
around production, mediation, institution. We shall tell two little histories on the
Adriatic territory and its plans: the first one concerns the beach of Sottomarina,
near Chioggia; the second one the river Pescara. The two stories suggest that the
planning job is (for a large part) a job around cultural meaning (or invention of
the subjectivity of the territory). The mutual implications of politics of identity
with empirical investigation call our attention to post-colonial discourse: a field,
articulated and composite, of cultural anthropology.