Routledge Handbook of Landscape Character Assessment

Current Approaches to Characterisation and Assessment

Graham Fairclough, Ingrid Sarlöv Herlin, Carys Swanwick, Graham Fairclough, Ingrid Sarlöv Herlin, Carys Swanwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317621034
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

In this multi-authored book, senior practitioners and researchers offer an international overview of landscape character approaches for those working in research, policy and practice relating to landscape.

Over the last three decades, European practice in landscape has moved from a narrow, if relatively straightforward, focus on natural beauty or scenery to a much broader concept of landscape character constructed through human perception, and transcending any of its individual elements. Methods, tools and techniques have been developed to give practical meaning to this idea of landscape character.

The two main methods, Landscape Character Assessment (LCA) and Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) were applied first in the United Kingdom, but other methods are in use elsewhere in Europe, and beyond, to achieve similar ends. This book explores why different approaches exist, the extent to which disciplinary or cultural specificities in different countries affect approaches to land management and landscape planning, and highlights areas for reciprocal learning and knowledge transfer.

Contributors to the book focus on examples of European countries – such as Sweden, Turkey and Portugal – that have adopted and extended UK-style landscape characterisation, but also on countries with their own distinctive approaches that have developed from different conceptual roots, as in Germany, France and the Netherlands. The collection is completed by chapters looking at landscape approaches based on non-European concepts of landscape in North America, Australia and New Zealand.

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PART I

Contexts and starting points

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1

LANDSCAPE CHARACTER APPROACHES IN GLOBAL, DISCIPLINARY AND POLICY CONTEXT

An introduction

Graham Fairclough, Ingrid Sarlöv Herlin and Carys Swanwick

Over the past 30 years, the idea of ‘landscape character’ has become an important interdisciplinary tool in many European countries and in other parts of the world. In various guises, methods of defining, studying and assessing landscape character regularly inform landscape research, territorial planning and land management. The approach grew from, but in contradistinction to, nineteenth- and twentieth-century anxieties about protecting and preserving special threatened landscapes, but it has matured into an approach that seeks to understand and, more importantly, to manage and shape landscape everywhere. Over the same period, academic, political and professional understanding of landscape has significantly expanded. This has been in the context of growing acceptance of local values and aspirations and of a growing concern for the democratic and participatory aspects of environmental protection management, place-making and sustainable land use. Since 2000, the growth of character-based approaches has been supported strongly by the European Landscape Convention (ELC) (Council of Europe 2000), whose ideas and text were themselves in some measure influenced by the rise of characterisation methods during the 1990s.

This book begins with the ‘Landscape Character Assessment’ (LCA) approach which was developed in England and Scotland from the later 1980s. In other countries, of course, similar innovations also occurred, and more or less at the same time, or at least from the early 1990s. These followed different routes, within different national traditions, but whilst they were different in technique they generally had very similar purposes. These include notably the Atlases des Paysage which emerged in France from the beginning of the 1990s and Marc Antrop’s work in Belgium from the mid-1990s, whilst (although from a different theoretical and philosophical starting point) the UNESCO cultural landscape approach also has origins in this broad ten year period. In that period, too, the Council of Europe began drawing up several policy documents that slowly crystallised into the draft ELC later in the 1990s.

Today, fully developed and widely adopted character-based approaches to landscape enable policy-makers, practitioners, landowners and communities throughout Europe to deal with a great variety of landscape challenges. Even more importantly, they can potentially help society to address some of the very great global challenges facing us in the twenty-first century, from responses and resilience to climate change to demographic change, migration and land abandonment to land use and food security issues.

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An overview of character-based landscape approaches

Individual characterisation methods are well represented in academic and professional literature, but there have been few comparative overviews at international level. This Handbook is therefore designed as an overview for practitioners and policy-makers of the current range of methods that exist for characterising landscape in Europe and in the wider world. Much of the work on landscape character has been carried out within national boundaries with limited cross-border comparison. In Europe, the Council of Europe’s programme of ELC Conferences and Workshops has, however, provided a significant platform for knowledge exchange across its 47 member states (and other observer states, such as Canada). One product for example is the published proceedings of the Council’s ELC Workshops, of which almost 20 have been held since 2002 in different parts of Europe (Council of Europe n.d).

A single book cannot be comprehensive, but we have attempted to cover the principal schools, or families, of character-based approaches. Our contributors are experienced practitioners and researchers in their respective fields and countries. Between them they cover a wide diversity of national and disciplinary standpoints which begins to reflect truly interdisciplinary understandings of landscape. The international range of the book provides examples of characterisation functioning and being applied in a variety of different governmental and theoretical situations, primarily in relation to spatial planning. Furthermore, in Part IV we look not only beyond Europe, but beyond European ideas, to consider quite different approaches that exist in other continents and which can provide perspective and, perhaps, reciprocal lessons.

The book is not arranged (despite first appearances) on a purely country-by-country basis; the work of any one contributor may be rooted in a specific part of the world but also represents a distinct ‘school’ or ‘family’ of methods, whether defined by disciplinary starting points, cultural perspectives or practical goals. Each chapter in the book focusses on the methods and techniques of landscape characterisation by describing concrete examples of applications, looking particularly at three aspects of landscape characterisations and assessments – their making, their use and the scope for future improvement. It might be said that there are two main groups of approach, the visual and the historic, but both labels are misnomers and grossly oversimplified. ‘Visual’ methods in reality also extend to the other senses and to experiential and cognitive matters, and sometimes include historical perspectives; ‘Historical’ methods are as much about the present-day landscape as about the past, and of course may also be visual and experiential. There is also diversity in the different countries in where the actual work of characterisation is situated – in Britain, where such approaches first came to be established, character assessment has tended to be carried out within governmental (local or national) contexts by professional practitioners for policy clients, whereas in many other countries (cf. the chapters on Turkey or Portugal) universities carry out the work as research. In almost all chapters there is particular emphasis on the need for public participation as a real, influential part of the method, although success in achieving this is variable.

This Introduction provides a broad overview of this diversity of approach that should help readers to locate each method in a bigger picture and to place specific chapters in a broader context. The book has five parts. The first is scene-setting, in this Introduction and in two succeeding chapters which describe the British origins of the main methods. In Part II, the adoption and adaptation of those British methods is described through the experiences of researchers in six regions representative of differing landscape traditions – four in the European Union, the others in Turkey and in Tanzania. Approaches based on British LCA methods are not the only methods being used successfully, and in Part III we present a few of these culturally or disciplinary distinct methods. In a wider geographical and historical perspective, however, all the methods so far mentioned are fundamentally European in context, and Part IV of the book is therefore devoted to chapters that explore different traditions on the other side of the world, in Canada, Australia, Aotearoa-New Zealand and South Korea. Finally, in the fifth part of the book we look forward to newly emerging ideas in the context of metropolitan landscape, of the democratic aspects of landscape assessment and of the editors’ own brief conclusions drawing on the experience of editing this wide-ranging collection.

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Contexts

Before discussing the book’s contents in a little more detail, this Introduction first sets out a little of the wider context in which the various chapters should be read. First and foremost, and reflecting the European context of the major part of the book, is the role and influence of the European Landscape Convention and its influence. But almost equally important are three other components of the context for landscape character approaches – first, the great complexity and variety of the meanings afforded to the word landscape (and by implication, although differently, to its cognates in other languages such as paysage or krajina), second, the integrating power of the idea of landscape and of characterisation, and third, the idea that a landscape approach (including the practice of landscape character assessment of various sorts) can be a unifying approach and a stimulus for joined-up thinking at a very practical level.

The importance of the European Landscape Convention (ELC)

In most chapters of this book a central reference point is the European Landscape Convention (ELC), the ‘Florence Convention’ (Council of Europe 2000), which is an important reason why character-based methods spread so rapidly. The Convention which was published in 2000 but was organically constructed during the 1990s at the same time as LCA, and its archaeological counterpart, Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) were becoming mature approaches in the UK. Its influence is seen throughout the book. In part, this is because of its broad approach to defining landscape, with an emphasis on perception and plurality, and its connecting of landscape with human rights, social equity and democratic participation. More directly, the Convention was one of the first documents and frameworks outside the UK to foreground the concept of landscape ‘character’. It did so both within its formal definition of landscape (‘whose character is the result of . . .’) and in the actions that it requires of its signatories (‘to analyse their characteristics and the forces and pressures transforming them’; ELC Art 6 C1aii). This endorsement has been one of the most influential factors in the spread of landscape characterisation across Europe.

The ELC also underlines the social relevance of landscape, with a fundamental acceptance, through people-based and community-focussed definitions, of the public ‘ownership’ and belonging of landscape and of the importance of plural values and multiple voices in the identification and valuing of landscape. In this it might be argued to be much closer to the sentiments and values of ‘indigenous’ attitudes to landscape in other parts of the world (see Part IV) than, for example, to the ICOMOS and IUCN approaches promoted through UNESCO with their emphasis on the special and concern for protection, but it can also be seen as a partial return to earlier and different community-focussed views of landscape that used to exist in pre-modern Europe. These issues are returned to from different perspectives again and again in the various chapters of this book, no matter how diverse their origin or cultural context.

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The spread of character-based approaches, although encouraged by the influence of the ELC, also reflects landscape’s interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary potential, which is still only just beginning to be tapped. On that plane, this book is a contribution to the programme advocated by the ESF/COST Science Policy Briefing (SPB) Landscape in a Changing World, with its emphasis on an integrative, unifying, instrumental agenda addressed to global challenges (ESF/COST 2010). The diverse practice-contexts of the various chapters in this book also reflect the wide range of ways in which landscape provides a framework and a set of tools for policy and action on a wide range of fronts. So wide is landscape’s range of practical relevance, that its ideas are central not only to the ELC, but also to a spectrum of other treaties and agreements, from the Council of Europe’s Faro Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage to Society (Council of Europe 2005, 2009), to the Historic Urban Landscape recommendation from UNESCO (2013) and to UNESCO’s older and more traditional Lists of World Heritage and Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. They are also relevant to broader activities, such as spatial and territorial planning in general, and even to EC Habitat directives and ecosystems services theory.

The constructive complexity of the word ‘landscape’

There is thus a strong European consensus that landscape can be used in many different ways: to help plan the future, to support and increase social equity and justice, to encourage sustainable stewardship, to address global challenges by finding ‘cultural solutions for cultural problems’ (CHeriScape 2017), and to support cultural sustainability that simultaneously overarches and underpins the conventional three pillars of sustainable development (Dessein etal. 2015). ‘Landscape’ is one of the few concepts that can span this whole range and that fully integrates nature and culture, people and environment, and social concerns and the economy. On the other hand, it is not always the term that people and policy-makers reach for first, perhaps because of its vast array of meanings

The word ‘landscape’ means different things to different people (including the editors of this book), and is frequently treated as interchangeable with a variety of other words, notably including nature, countryside, scenery, place and environment. In the British public mind, for example, landscape is not always the word that comes to the fore when talking about places and their surroundings; for many British town dwellers (and there is no reason to think that British town dwellers are unusual in the respect compared to other countries) ‘landscape’ is a distant place in remote or rural areas, a place to be visited but not lived in. They do not (unlike the ELC) automatically think that landscape also covers the urban realm, or in farmland. When asked in opinion surveys about nature and the natural environment, people in the UK normally express high levels of interest and concern, but do not always mention landscape, using instead words like countryside, nature, rural, heritage or nature (Swanwick 2009).

There are particularly close connections between landscape and nature, which is a recurring theme in much of the literature (see for example Ermischer 2004; Lowenthal 2005; Olwig 2005). In Britain, the word landscape is often treated as being synonymous with countryside, which itself is a complex word with layers of meaning (Fairclough and Sarlöv Herlin 2005). In urban areas, the term ‘greenspace’ is commonly used instead of urban landscape (and the concept ‘urban landscape’ seems often confined in people’s imaginations, even in the minds of some landscape architects and planners, to ‘greenspace within cities’). Indeed, many ‘proxy’ terms for landscape in national policy documents – notably ‘environment’ in many different senses of varying degrees of precision – were identified during research carried out as a strategic impact assessment prior to ratifying the ELC (Roe etal. 2005 is not very accessible): (Roe etal. 2008, 23–45; Roe 2013). These are all British examples, but the same pattern is repeated in other countries, as is clear from the opening sections of many chapters in Part II of this book. In Sweden, alternative or proxy terms such as natur (nature), grönstruktur (green structure), grönområden (green areas) or utemiljö (outdoor environment) are common; additionally, in Sweden ‘landscape’ has retained to a much larger degree its medieval sense of democratic or collectively managed and defined territory, a meaning that has largely been buried in the UK (by enclosure and by feudal and capitalistic landowning structures), but which is also a substratum of the component ‘pays’ in the paysage/paesaggio/paisatge language family.

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The relationship between landscape and place has also been much debated and there is a wide range of research in several different disciplines on ‘place’ theory. The relationship between place and landscape is similarly complex (Relph 1976). Some commentators believe that place theory goes beyond landscape as the physical setting for people’s lives and is equally, or more, concerned with social and cultural dimension; others argue (cf. the ELC) that landscape is precisely all of those things. Other researchers claim that scale differences distinguish ‘place’ ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Routledge Handbook of Landscape Character Assessment
• Praise
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Part I Contexts and Starting Points
• Part II Adaptation and Expansion
• Part III Parallel European Traditions
• Part IV Non-Europeanised Conceptualisations
• Part V Future Challenges
• Index