by Taylor Richards
Medieval Italian “Comune” Liscia
There’s been many urban design buzzwords circling the internet lately: 15 minute cities, human-scaled design, walkability, etc. These concepts portray a utopian ideal that’s reactionary to the sprawled, isolating, car-scaled urban spaces dominant throughout the United States. Sprawl and car-focused design was a reaction to densely planned industrial cities of the past. When considering city design that’s walkable and human-scaled, it’s a good idea to look to the past, to a time when there weren’t cars, buses or trains, and the principal mode of transportation were feet and legs— human, horse, donkey, or otherwise.
The urban design of towns and cities from the middle ages in Europe can be classified under this utopic precedence: human-scaled, active street edges, plenty of third places, and densely settled. Development during this era formed organically, usually centered around churches and other religious structures; devoid of preconceived, rigid street plans like NYC’s grid plan or the grandeur of civic buildings and monuments popular in Roman times as well as during the City Beautiful movement. Elements of medieval urban design are worthy of study and re-creation. Yet at the same time, certain design elements necessary during this period led to the mass depopulation and eventual abandonment of many medieval towns today. This piece will focus on Italian medieval towns, as anecdotes of my travels to my mother’s medieval hometown in central Italy will inform a bit of the storytelling.
My mother is from a small village or “comune” named Lisicia with a current population of 642. This town looks the same as any other comune across Italy– the streets and alleys are narrow, housing is dense, and the entire town is accessible by foot within 15 minutes. Piazzas, or squares, are located in the center of the village. Piazza perimeters are lined with stores, bars, coffee shops, grocery stores, and parks with playgrounds for kids. They’re also used as gathering spaces for events and weekly regional food markets. Piazzas serve as essential third places for daily run-ins with friends, family, and acquaintances.
View of piazza from street with regional farmer’s market and residents chatting
Pre-car, -train, or -trolley village planning all feature town squares, a design feature of yesteryear lost in today’s sprawl. But medieval villages, while featuring the common town square, are unique in the sense that housing around it is considerably dense, and housing construction has stood the test of time. Homes in the villages are built on the street edge and are constructed of stone and plaster, staying cool in the summer and warm in the winter. When population would increase, they built up, adding stories to their existing family homes, and not out. Multiple generations usually live in the same home, allowing entire extended families to share the same space.
These villages are so dense and structures are so close, it’s easy to hear everything: gossip on the street, kids playing in the playground, a man riding a moped a few streets over, teenagers scheming in the alleyway. You can smell the scent of garlic and oregano wafting out of your neighbor’s kitchen during lunchtime, just a few meters away from your open window. If you’re not already hearing what’s going on around town from the comfort of your home due to sound bouncing off the stone houses, then you’ll hear about it when you step out and instantly run into a friend walking the street. The interconnectedness of social networks and general sense of community is considerable.
One can see the faraway cluster of a mountaintop village with surrounding farmland.
Many comunes are settled on mountain or hilltops. When driving or taking a train through the mountainous countryside, village after village carved into the green mountain sides pass above you; each house clustered together like a beige beehive, with the church steeple standing tallest amongst them all. Surrounding these villages is farmland, orchards, or vineyards. Land owners usually live in the dense towns and will walk or drive to their outlying parcels to work during the day.
Urban design practices can greatly contribute to the mental health of residents and users of a particular area. Mixed land use, public transportation, attractiveness, active edge, quality of the pedestrian path, soundscape, and air pollution have the closest beneficial association with mental health. The dominance of cars not only affects mental health through air and noise pollution but also threatens it by limiting the social experience of space.1 Medieval town streets can just barely accommodate small cars. The lack of outsized car infrastructure in these places greatly contributes to increased social interaction, positively affecting mental health. Additionally, since these villages are designed for walkability, the street edge is incredibly active. Spaces designed for cars feature monotonous design elements that are less favorable
experientially, while medieval towns feature “soft edges” throughout the whole town. Soft, active street edges include open storefronts, people walking in/out of spaces, and sights changing every 10-20 seconds.2
Since many of these Italian villages are on mountains, walking throughout the town often means climbing up stairs and steep hills. Residents enjoy the benefits of light-intensity physical workout every day. Places that encourage and support physical activity can not only prevent but also contribute to the treatment of depression.3 Another benefit of these villages being on mountainsides is that once you step out of the dense cluster of the town, you’re immersed in nature, often with incredible views of the country or other villages. Residents get to enjoy bustling village life with quiet, natural rural life at the same time.
Two “Blue Zone” locations, Ikaria, Greece, and Sardinia, Italy, are regions where residents primarily live in medieval villages. A blue zone is a region of the world where there is the highest concentration of centenarians, or people living over 100 years old. In reports defining Ikaria and Sardinia as blue zones, the frequency of social interactions, daily walking, multi-generational living, and abundance of local food are main elements that contribute to these residents’ long life span.
With so many beneficial urban design elements on its side, one can argue that medieval villages are utopian places where the needs of residents are thoroughly met. There’s local food, proximity to friends and family, exercise built into your daily routine, active streets, closeness to nature, plenty of wine… yet why are so many Italian medieval villages rapidly depopulating? Many sit as shells of the abundant life that once bustled within its walls. Some throughout the country have been completely abandoned, with others facing abandonment in the near future.
Although these places are so human-forward in their design, other elements of their design have hampered their ability to meet demands of the future. Since they’re from the middle ages, the positioning of the villages are far away from each other. They’re usually built on the highest ground possible to obtain vantage points for defense or other purposes. Life within the villages are communal and social, yet they’re extremely isolated from other villages. So much so that my mom’s town of under 1000 (also rapidly depopulating) has their own distinct dialect. Her town, once you get off the main highway, takes 30 minutes to drive up to on windy mountain roads. Public buses do travel from village to village, but do so infrequently. Many aren’t linked to trains. These villages are often too inconveniently located for commutes to modern jobs in nearby cities. The design of these towns don’t contribute to interconnectivity between each other, and interconnectivity is essential in a world continuing to globalize.
View of vast countryside from within village walls
Some younger generations will stay and work on family farms or in local shops, but many will leave to pursue higher education in bigger cities and never come back, since the pay in big Italian cities is much higher. The youth are leaving these towns in droves, and many are leaving the country altogether. The inability of these towns to meet demands of the future, like increased accessibility, high-paying jobs, access to global goods and technology, are forevermore leaving these places stuck in the past. In 2022, the unemployment rate in Italy was 8.2%, while it was only 3.5% in Germany and 3.6% in the US. Population is rapidly decreasing and the majority of residents who still live in these towns are older generations.
Small Italian governments are getting creative to save these historic places. Some pay people to move to dying villages. Sardinia, the Italian Mediterranean island with one of the highest life expectancies in the world, is so acutely experiencing the effects of depopulation that some local governments enacted a program to sell houses for one euro to convince people to move to these towns. However, there has been a small counterflow of young people leaving cities to move to the country and take up small-scale farming, mostly as a means to save region-specific Italian specialty products like certain wines, cured meats, or cheeses.
It’s important for new world countries like the United States, whose cities have been planned and designed based on technological advances like cars, trains, streetcars, etc. to look to cities of the old world and take inspiration where our technology-forward approach has impeded us. It’s ironic to note that Americans, so advanced in capitalism, massively contribute to the tourist economy of medieval Italian cities like Positano or various Tuscan villages; idolizing the ancient, hilly streets and slower way of life, yet this way of life will be what ultimately destroys some of these places. Italy’s inability to keep up with fast-paced, capitalist demands of the future will ultimately push more of these beautiful, human-forward into a dystopian reminder of a smaller-scaled past.
Sources
- Hematian and Ranjbar. “Evaluating Urban Public Spaces from Mental Health Point of View: Comparing Pedestrian and Car Dominated Streets.” Journal of Transport
& Health 27 (December 1, 2022): 101532. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jth.2022.101532. ↩︎ - Gehl, Jan, and Birgitte Svarre. “Soft Edges – Lively Cities.” In How to Study Public Life, 74–88.
Island Press, 2013. ↩︎ - Hematian and Ranjbar. “Evaluating Urban Public Spaces from Mental Health Point of View: Comparing Pedestrian and Car Dominated Streets.” Journal of Transport
& Health 27 (December 1, 2022): 101532. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jth.2022.101532 ↩︎
Taylor Richards is an urban planning student who came to the program as a career switch. She’s from the Hartford, CT area and received her undergraduate degree in Journalism, so writing a magazine piece in her new field was a welcome blending of her former and current interests. She’s fascinated with the built environment: urban design, infrastructure, landscape architecture, architecture, land use, and more. Other interests include skating, cooking, biking, and thrifting.
