Valuing Landscape:

Focusing on the Practices in Landscape Policy Promoted by the European Landscape Convention

Abstract

    This article is based on the report at the Symposium of the 68th Congress of the Japan Association of Economic Geographers, presented as a contribution to the common theme of “Valuing in Economic Geography” from the perspective of landscape policy. Careful reading of the main international conventions related to landscape, the World Heritage Convention (WHC) and the European Landscape Convention (ELC), provided a useful framework of our research, aimed at a synthetic analysis of definitions of landscape, academic discussion behind them and valuing of landscape. Although the WHC is the first international agreement in introducing formally the concept of landscape, for the objective of this work a special emphasis was placed on the ELC, because of the wide range of practices in landscape policy across the member countries prompted by the convention. For in-depth understanding of the development of landscape policy, an extensive reference was made of the experience in Spain, especially the Autonomous Community of Andalusia. The results of the research can be summarised as follows:
    The WHC's approach to landscape is expressed clearly in its operational guidelines, which define cultural landscape as cultural properties representative of combined work of nature and humans. Valuing of landscape is subsumed in the act of selecting and nominating landscapes with an outstanding universal value. The concept of landscape in the ELC, however, is much more complex and comprehensive. Two important aspects of landscape, morphology of land and perception of scenery, are clearly recognisable in the ELC, and can be interpreted as an institutional embodiment of both approaches developed along the history of landscape research. The experience in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia illustrates that where the act of valuing landscape becomes more relevant is in the assessment of landscape characters as well as the definition of landscape quality objectives. These practices are precisely what most requires public participation and respond to a third pillar of landscape present in the ELC: landscape as responsibility of participating population. Despite the deep historical roots of landscape as a polity, formalised methodology of public participation should be complemented with bottom-up actions of civic society. The example of Spain, in this case the experience in Priorat county in Catalonia, is also very significant, where potent social movements emerged to value their landscape against the implementation of wind power plants. The inscription of the county as a UNESCO cultural landscape is the goal proposed by the activists' platform to put together interests, often contradictory, of the different groups of people living in the area.
    Lessons from the two regions in Spain are insightful, when attempts are made to find out a common ground between rather different orientations of landscape policy defended by the two international conventions. Especially when landscape is assumed as a dynamic reality that is inherited and evolves over time with the interplay of humans and environment, there appears a possibility to link the valuing of selective cultural landscapes adjusted to the UNESCO standards to the proactive initiatives for landscape developed under the umbrella of the ELC.