The Machine in the Landscape
This book hosts the first part of a larger study about attraction in the context of the touristic city.
The city we focus on is Milano Marittima, it’s one of the most popular destinations on the Adriatic Riviera in north of Italy.
The aim of the study is to focus on the strategies of attraction, that the touristic city has been able to produce along its relatively brief lifespan of 100 years.
Since the foundation Milano Marittima is tourism in a pure form. It’s an industrial machine for the production of leisure, and since the very beginning the most proper inhabitant of the urban environment is actually the tourist.
As we know, tourism is a by-product of the industrial age, and therefore the touristic machine stands in a special relationship with the natural resources and the physical landscape.
The tendency of the industrial machine is often that of substitution to nature, and in that perspective is really interesting to realize how MiMa is instead not at all a tabula rasa.
The study analyzes the peculiar relationship between the forces of the artificial and the natural in the setting of the touristic city of Milano Marittima, during this century of existence.
It is mostly an historical survey, aimed to track the dynamics and principles that allowed the machine to survive, and to produce the current structure of urban space and experience.
We are convinced that the results can have interesting consequences on and analogies with the contemporary city in western world.
