Il “Dizionario delle parole territorialiste”: un progetto non più rinviabile

Abstract

The paper focuses on social sciences in Italy and their difficulty in creating a common lexicon for territorial sciences. The author wonders why in Italian geography, despite its very varied and interdisciplinary history, no geographer has so far felt the need of a dictionary or glossary that would make clarity on an unstable if not contradictory terminology, as is the case of words such as ‘space’, ‘place’, ‘territory’, ‘environment’ and ‘landscape’. To answer this question, the author turns to France where a geographical dictionary is usually published every 20 years, witnessing the change, for each generation, not only of the conception of geography but of the entire cluster of territorial sciences due to the increasing openness of geography towards spatial and social sciences and to the fruitful, mutual exchanges occurred. Through a detailed analysis of the Dictionnaire de la Géographie edited by George Pierre in 1970, of Les mots de la Géographie. Dictionnaire critique edited by Roger Brunet in 1992 and of the Dictionnaire de la Géographie et de l'espace des sociétés edited by Levy and Lussault in 2003, the author offers interesting insights and elaborates viable proposals for the development of a common dictionary for geography and territorial sciences.