Landscapes at Risk: Social Capital Assets in the COVID-Scape Climate

Up until the current pandemic, the terms “urban-scape” and “human-scape” have been meant, assumed, and practised as parallel dimensions of in territorial analysis, marginalising our knowledge about and evaluation of landscape risk [1–12]. This has always been associated, and often confused, with diverse forms of environmental risk, despite the fact that they both represent some of the most important components of risk, but not its essence [13,14]. The relationship between social capital and landscape deserves to be examined and represented in its entirety: as a matter of fact, while social capital has mainly been considered in terms of its material, functional, economic [15–20], and ethical dimensions, landscapes have been examined in terms of their perceptual, psychological, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions [21–28]. Significant attempts to define the strong relationship between capital and landscape have been conducted in the field of the “real estate-scape”—the asset of real estate capital, indeed, shows the relationship between a monetary measurement (price) and an articulated and complex qualitative essence, which represents all of the attributes the market price is associated with [29–34]. Sudden and widespread environmental fluctuations, such as the one created by the current pandemic, significantly influence the relationship between the two main existential dimensions of settled communities—social capital and landscape—and their possible representations by means of their economic–monetary dimension as well [35–38]. In view of a possible renewal of the relationship between people and the city-landscape system, highly differentiated scenarios of new territorial arrangements could unfold. The ultimate aim of this territory renewal process, by virtue of the territory’s institutional dimension, is to resolve the traditional opposition between our social system and the environment, according to Luhmann’s macrosystemic approach [39]. From this perspective, this process should favour a renewed relationship between territorial attractors (dense areas and major cities) and environmental hindrances—the neglected parts of rural and state-owned territory, which are the main cause of environmental threats.