My Taranto: A Critical Walk

To the eyes of all the world, Taranto is a city in a tragic state of degradation and abandon. Michael Jakob sees “over-planning” as the cause of this decline and believes an act of love is required for the good and the ugly, applying landscape architecture to heal its living spaces.

- Michael Jakob

Let us start by saying that, in the present case, the use of the possessive form (“my city”) should be understood as the result of a choice and of a belief. I elected Taranto “my city” in the conviction that it should be considered the city of us all. For now, Taranto is not seen this way, so much so that one could affirm the exact opposite: except for the Tarantini citizens, it is a city for no one. It is a city that only very few want to see and still fewer want to adopt as their own. For centuries in Taranto too many things have gone wrong. In this place, which demands a stratigraphic analysis and where the terrible red dust risks covering everything, manmade activity has produced a layer of tragedy. If, in the far-off 17th and 18th centuries the city’s stench was cause for complaint, there followed ecological destruction at the hands of the navy and, starting in 1960, physical transformation as a result of “barbaric” industrialisation. Of course, Taranto allows – rather, exacts – plural readings. Why evoke only the ravaged landscape and the pollution when, instead, we could highlight the various “bests” of the recent past? Why not speak of it as Italy’s largest military base and second-largest industrial centre, or of the country’s most important steel production site in a city of over 260,000 people that dreamed of reaching the level of 400,000?