Terraced Rice Fields, Paesaggio, and Territorio - Rethinking Ahead of the May Italy Training Program
As part of our efforts to apply the thinking of "Italian design"—which goes beyond mere aesthetic beauty—to Japanese business, we conduct training tours to learn about "territorio" in Alba and Milan, Italy. We are planning the third iteration of this tour for next May.
With a month and a half left until the event, I would like to record the realizations that felt like returning to our origins, sparked by conversations with my co-organizer Hiroyuki Anzai, who lives in Italy, and by re-examining the term "territorio," which I have been seeing frequently on the internet lately.
What are we going to see?
This year's third session will be held from May 24th to 30th. In Alba, we will engage in experiences and dialogues while interacting with local businesses, government, universities, and culture, and in Milan, we will sublimate those realizations into theory.
This tour is a journey to learn about the intersection of business and design. We conduct it with the desire to provide these experiences as an opportunity to bring significant insights to business minds, but this is often difficult to convey to Japanese corporate mindsets. What are we going to see? What is the impact on corporate performance? Will sales increase? These are the kinds of questions we are often asked.
Even when we explain the strategic implications that Italian design brings to business or the importance of heritage based on history and culture, unfortunately, it does not convey that this tour is a "must-have" experience.
What exactly are we going to see on this tour?
Are we going to see Italian design?
Are we going to learn the concept of territorio?
Or are we going to see the practice of business rooted in a region?
None of these are wrong.
However, it is a journey to confirm something more fundamental. When I thought about that "something fundamental," the landscape that we have long cherished as the original image of system design suddenly came back to my mind.
What we saw as our original image was the terraced rice field.
There is a landscape that we have repeatedly talked about since our founding as the "ultimate form" of system design. That is the terraced rice field.
At first glance, terraced rice fields look like natural scenery.
They spread out along the undulations of the mountains, blending into the land without any sense of incongruity, as if they had been there from the beginning. But in reality, they are things that human hands have created, protected, and updated over a long period of time. They have been maintained through the activities of a community by reading the topography, channeling water, and coming to terms with the climate and seasons.
In other words, a terraced rice field is not nature itself, but a landscape that appears as a result of the relationship between nature and humans being woven together.
Moreover, what is important is that it is not placed on the land as an artificial object.
Despite being created by people, it emerges as part of the land as a result. It looks as if it were meant to be there in the first place.
There is a certain kind of freedom there.
It is not the freedom to manipulate things as one pleases. It is the flexibility to establish relationships without force, while accepting the conditions that the land possesses, such as the topography, the flow of water, and the rhythm of life.
We have seen the ideal of system design in this way of being.
There are multiple layers behind the landscape.
The charm of terraced rice fields is not just that they are beautiful scenery.
There is a layered structure where multiple layers are folded over one another.
Topography, water, agriculture, life, community, history, and aesthetics.
These different layers overlap without being separated, forming a single landscape as a whole. I think what has attracted us to terraced rice fields is the richness of the layered structure behind them, even more than their visual beauty.
In that sense, system design is not about designing individual products or services.
It is an activity of grasping a subject, including its surrounding environment, history, relationships, and the accumulation of time, and thinking about how to make it work as a whole while deciphering its layered structure.
Instead of optimizing parts individually, it is about going to see the conditions for the whole to exist. What we have seen in terraced rice fields is precisely that form.
Alba and Langhe are the places to confirm that question.
The landscape we found in terraced rice fields as a "symbiotic system between humans and nature." There is a place that recognizes the same structure as a value on a global scale. That is the Alba and Langhe region we will visit this time.
Alba, which we will visit on this tour, is located in the Langhe region of Piedmont. The surrounding vineyard landscape, including these Langhe, was registered as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2014. Its official English name is Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero and Monferrato, in Japanese it is Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero and Monferrato, and in Italian it is expressed as Paesaggi vitivinicoli del Piemonte: Langhe-Roero e Monferrato. UNESCO treats this as a cultural landscape (paesaggio).
What is important here is that what is being evaluated is not merely a "beautiful view."
Even in UNESCO's explanation, this place is positioned as a landscape shaped over a long period of time by the deep relationship between people and the environment, soil, indigenous varieties, and the processes of wine production technology and economy. (UNESCO World Heritage Centre) In other words, while what we see is a vineyard landscape, behind it lies a system where the relationship between human activity and the land has been layered over a long period of time.
Visiting this place itself holds great significance for us.
This is because the relationship between "what is visible as scenery" and "the system that makes it possible" is manifested here extremely vividly.
The reason why the word paesaggio resonates strongly
When thinking about it this way, the Italian word paesaggio resonates strongly.
It is often translated as "keikan" (landscape) in Japanese and "landscape" in English.
However, the Italian "paesaggio" is said to refer not just to the visible scenery, but also to the invisible structure behind it. It contains a "living system" where the land's history, industry, culture, and people's lives overlap and influence one another.
In other words, at the root of what is visible as a paesaggio, there is a system that creates it.
In this place, which is a UNESCO cultural landscape (paesaggio) World Heritage site, what we should face is not so much the landscape itself, but the multi-layered whole that appears as a landscape.
When I realized this, I felt that what we had seen in the terraced rice fields and the sense of paesaggio were deeply connected.
Even if what we see is scenery, the essence is not the view itself. What kind of relationships are woven into it, what kind of activities are accumulated, and what kind of structure supports that appearance? The value we have found in terraced rice fields was exactly that.
Territorio is the whole from which value arises
This discovery is directly connected to the context of territorio where we are trying to learn about the "intersection of business and design."
Territorio is not merely a "region."
It is a whole where the natural environment, history, culture, industry, food, life, and human relationships are organically connected, forming the meaning and value unique to that land. In this program as well, territorio is positioned as something to "experience the value of the entire region," and as an ecosystem formed by the connection of regional industry, culture, and history.
Italian design, too, does not simply refer to beautiful products or sophisticated forms.
It is established by including materials, industry, culture, craftsmanship, life, and even the relationship with the land. That is precisely why design and business intersect deeply in Italy, and it appears not as a mere methodology, but as the very way of being of the region and companies. The program itself is structured to grasp this by perceiving Italy as a "place where business and design intersect," through the experience in Alba and the synthesis in Milan.
Thinking about it this way, what we are trying to learn from Italy now is not importing some new ideology from the outside.
Rather, it is closer to the feeling that the Italian language and context are now being given to what we have intuitively grasped through the existence of "terraced rice fields" since we began working on "system design."
A journey to see the system behind the landscape, not the landscape itself
What we are truly aiming for in this training is not to trace the surface of advanced overseas cases.
We will encounter local companies, government, universities, and culture in Alba, receive primary information through dialogue with key persons, and connect that experience to theory in Milan.
Through that back-and-forth, it is meaningful to have participants grasp what kind of system exists behind what is visible with both their own senses and thoughts. The program is designed with the goals of "gaining a yardstick for value," "turning heritage into assets," and "soil for innovation."
In other words, I want participants to actually see and feel Italy's territorio and engrave the system behind that scenery into their own minds.
Not ending with "it was a beautiful landscape," but deeply internalizing why it is established in this land, what supports it, and what kind of relationships make that appearance possible. That is the purpose of this tour.
Toward acquiring a perspective to view companies and organizations, not just regional revitalization
Therefore, I believe this learning goes beyond the mere context of "regional revitalization."
Of course, there is no doubt that this is an extremely important perspective for observing a region.
But it is not just that. In corporate activities and organizational activities as well, there is a layered structure of history, culture, tacit knowledge, and relationships beneath the visible systems and results. What kind of system lies behind the phenomena visible before our eyes? How do we grasp that system, and how do we reweave it? This question is deeply involved in management, business development, and organizational building.
Thinking about it this way, visiting Italy's territorio is not simply about going to see advanced overseas examples.It is about honing the sensibility to decipher the 'living system' behind the landscape, and at the same time, it is a journey to re-examine our own work, organizations, and businesses as a single 'territorio' and to look at their structures once again.
To a journey of discovery together
What we have felt for a long time while looking at terraced rice fields.
What has taken on a new outline after encountering the word paesaggio.
And what we hope to confirm on-site in the territorio.
I would like to deepen this discovery together on-site.
This tour is scheduled to take place with a gathering in Alba on the evening of May 24th and dispersal in Milan on the morning of May 30th. (The application deadline is April 20th.) I hope to share this feeling on-site with those who are interested.
Information on details and registration can be found here.
In closing
I would like to touch upon the trigger for the new realization I gained from the word paesaggio this time. It was an article about territorio introduced to me by Mr. I, who participated in the project with POLI.design that we conducted in Milan last month. I encountered the word paesaggio in a series titled 'Toshiki Miyauchi's Territorio Stroll' written by Mr. Toshiki Miyauchi, formerly of Yahoo. Although it was a word I had heard before, encountering Mr. Miyauchi's deep insights vividly connected it with the philosophy of 'terraced rice fields,' which is our starting point. I would like to take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude to Mr. I, who provided such a wonderful perspective, and to Mr. Miyauchi.