Military Training Areas as Semicommons: The Territorial Valorization of Quirra (Sardinia) from Easements to Ecosystem Services

Abstract

The paper addresses the issue of the concurrent use of coastal areas for military training and civil activities, namely tourism. In the paper, starting from the consideration of publicly owned assets as ‘semi-commons’, we propose a method based on the comparison of planning instruments related to the different uses, and try to model them in a grid, where different weights and degrees of evaluation can be considered, in order to promote, rather than blocking, possible activities, compatible with concurrent use. The military areas in Sardinia (region and island, Italy) are around 234 km2, which constitutes 60% of the national surface affected by military easements. This situation is due to its geographic position, considered centrality in the Mediterranean for strategic reasons. This contribution evaluates the performance of the Local Coastline Plan (LCP) and the Site management plan of Community Interest (SCI) in conditions of military constraint. The case study is the municipality of Villaputzu South Sardinia, Italy), where an important coastal military easement and the use of the coast for recreational tourism purposes coexist together through specific planning, a consequence of institutional agreements between the Municipal Administration of Villaputzu and the Ministry of Defense. The idea is considering the concurrent possible land uses guaranteed by the different planning instruments, instead of focusing, as it is generally the rule, on the sum of constraints provided by the laws. The local coastline plan has been identified as the ideal planning tool, which addresses the co-existence of apparently opposite land uses and interests, as those expressed by the local municipal planning and those expressed by the military. An evaluation of the congruence of the specific objectives of the LCP and SCI shows how their combined action favors the environmental enhancement of Sardinia, contributing to the formation of ecosystem services, even in particular conditions arising from military easements. These are sites that evolve from ‘anticommons’ to ‘semicommons’. In fact, the military release process in Sardinia, together with the promiscuous military and civil use, activates unique governance policies of their kind that find a significant field of application in Sardinia to guarantee sustainable renewal of economic development of the ‘semi-commons’ awaiting to become ‘commons’.

Natura 2000 Areas and Sites of National Interest (SNI): Measuring (un)Integration between Naturalness Preservation and Environmental Remediation Policies

“…The ES approach is considered adequate to deliver a common spatial evaluation framework in order to achieve a better integration of territorial governance, which has been fragmented into different decision centers (see also the work by Balletto et al 2020 [54]). The proposed methodology should be useful for the construction of a cognitive framework that supports a regional landscape plan which we consider to be the appropriate planning level to manage such a contradictory case (SNI and SCI/SPA overlapping).…”

Walkable City and Military Enclaves: Analysis and Decision-Making Approach to Support the Proximity Connection in Urban Regeneration

“…The COVID-19 epidemic highlighted, in fact, important critical issues in both inner houses and urban spaces, which can be overcome partly through the urban regeneration of disused buildings. In this sense, a process of urban regeneration aimed at the transformation of such spaces contributes to changing the condition of buildings disused from anti-commons to semi-commons [3,18] and can help promote the city of proximity [19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. As a matter of fact, military enclaves have characteristics typical of the so-called 'anti-commons', a concept introduced in the 1980s to explain the under-use of a resource caused by the right of ownership, in contrast to the well-known concept 'common'.…”

Walkable City and Military Enclaves. Analysis and Decision-Making Approach to Support the Proximity Connection in Urban Regeneration

“…Big 'enclaves' are, among others, often formerly military building-area, whose reconversion assumes a strategic role both in terms of re-functionalization but also of urban connections capable of attenuating the sense of anticommons in semicommons or commons [23,24,25].…”