Ulrike Gawlik, who has already made an important contribution to Italian studies with her dissertation on the Italian landscape architect Raffaele De Vico (published 2012), now broadens the view with her post-doctoral thesis to the quite mutual influences of Italy and Germany in the ’saddle period‘ around 1930. In her new book she delves into the topic of inner colonization by transforming vast strips of landscape and settlement.
During early National Socialism, the „East Prussia Plan“ (Ostpreußenplan) was a colonization project that was intended to upgrade a structurally weak, climatically unfavorably situated province, which had been separated by the Treaty of Versailles. A similar project of inner colonization had already been under way in fascist Italy, by transforming and cultivating the Agro Pontino region near Rome (see the seminal book by Daniela Spiegel: Die Città Nuove des Agro Pontino im Rahmen der faschistischen Staatsarchitektur). In both cases, an ideological led vision to physically transform entire regions was developed and also accompanied by economic-structural and social transformations.
Ulrike Gawlik compares the two large-scale projects on the level of landscape and urban planning as well as on the level of architectural history and socio-culture and shows how it was possible at that time to bring spatial dimensions that had previously been used for military or aggressive-colonial purposes into the realm of civil planning. The resulting tools of landscape planning are still in use in Germany today.
Ulrike Gawlik: Innere Kolonisierung – Italien und Deutschland von 1927 bis 1935. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 2023, GERMAN, 446 pages, ill., ISBN: 9783170425156.
Luigi Monzo 