holistic perspective of the european landscape...

Holistic Perspective of the European Landscape Convention

Intensive social and economic processes and globalisation accelerate transformation of the landscape, making it more uniform.

The European Landscape Convention integrates concerns about the loss of landscape values and other qualities that are very important for individuals and society as a whole.

(Ministry for the Environment and Planning, Republic of Slovenia,

http://www.arhiv.mop.gov.si/fileadmin/mop.gov.si/pageuploads/publikacije/drugo/en/eek_izvajanje_v_sloveniji_ang.pdf)

LANDSCAPE IS A LIVING PROCESS.

Landscape never is static, it always has changed, does change and will change.

LANDSCAPE DOES NOT ONLY EXIST IN THREE DIMENSIONS,

but in four - and the fourth dimension, time, is at least as important as geographic, morphological or climatic aspects. In fact, all these aspects change in time as well. Human beings have shaped and changed the landscape they live in.

BUT MAN DOES NOT ONLY CHANGE LANDSCAPE,intentionally or unintentionally, but man also shapes the landscape in his mind and around his mind. The way people think, the things people believe in, have a crucial influence on how people treat the landscape, how they form it.

AS LANDSCAPE IS A PURELY HUMAN CONCEPT, the way how we perceive the landscape is an important part of this landscape.

THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE: the landscape in the mind of people, as a result of the history of the landscape and the actual state of the people living in the landscape,

is not only crucial for understanding the landscape and how it emerged, but

as well for planning the future development, for managing the change and the process of change.

(Pathways to Cultural Landscapes, Culture 2000 Project; http://www.pcl-eu.de/project/landscape/index.php)

PREAMBLEThe member States of the Council of Europe signatory hereto.

-Concerned to achieve sustainable development based on a balanced and harmonious relationship between social needs, economic activity and the environment;

-Noting that the landscape has an important public interest role in the cultural, ecological, environmental and social fields, and constitutes a resource favourable to economic activity and whose protection, management and planning can contribute to job creation;

-Aware that the landscape contributes to the formation of local cultures and that it is a basic component of the European natural and cultural heritage, contributing to human well-being and consolidation of the European identity;

Acknowledging that the landscape is an important part of the quality of life for people everywhere: in urban areas and in the countryside, in degraded areas as well as in areas of high quality, in areas recognised as being of outstanding beauty as well as everyday areas;

Noting that developments in agriculture, forestry, industrial and mineral production techniques and in regional planning, town planning, transport, infrastructure, tourism and recreation and, at a more general level, changes in the world economy are in many cases accelerating the transformation of landscapes;......Believing that the landscape is a key element of individual and social well-being and that its protection, management and planning entail rights and responsibilities for everyone;

Acknowledging that the quality and diversity of European landscapes constitute a common resource, and that it is important to co-operate towards its protection, management and planning;

Article 1 DefinitionsFor the purposes of the Convention:

-"Landscape" means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors;

-"Landscape policy" means an expression by the competent public authorities of general principles, strategies and guidelines that permit the taking of specific measures aimed at the protection, management and planning of landscapes;-...-"Landscape protection" means actions to conserve and maintain the significant or characteristic features of a landscape, justified by its heritage value derived from its natural configuration and/or from human activity;-...-"Landscape planning" means strong forward-looking action to enhance, restore or create landscapes.

Article 5 General measures

Each Party undertakes:

-to recognise landscapes in law as an essential component of peoples surroundings, an expression of the diversity of their shared cultural and natural heritage, and a foundation of their identity;-...-to establish procedures for the participation of the general public, local and regional authorities, and other parties with an interest in the definition and implementation of the landscape policies mentioned in paragraph b above;

-to integrate landscape into its regional and town planning policies and in its cultural, environmental, agricultural, social and economic policies, as well as in any other policies with possible direct or indirect impact on landscape.

Article 6 Specific measures

A Awareness-raisingEach Party undertakes to increase awareness among the civil society, private organisations, and public authorities of the value of landscapes, their role and changes to them.

B Training and educationEach Party undertakes to promote:-training for specialists in landscape appraisal and operations;

-multidisciplinary training programmes in landscape policy, protection, management and planning, for professionals in the private and public sectors and for associations concerned;

-school and university courses which, in the relevant subject areas, address the values attaching to landscapes and the issues raised by their protection, management and planning.

C Identification and assessmentWith the active participation of the interested parties, ..., and with a view to improving knowledge of its landscapes, each Party undertakes:

-to identify its own landscapes throughout its territory;

-to analyse their characteristics and the forces and pressures transforming them;

-to take note of changes;

-to assess the landscapes thus identified, taking into account the particular values assigned to them by the interested parties andthe population concerned.

...

Landscapes & Archaeology

The civilizations of classical antiquity viewed the landscape as a manifestation of ideas about the fulfillment of life’s aspirations (the bucolic landscape, warm sun, springtime, lush vegetation, fertility).

Martin Gojda, Landscape Archaeology(http://www.eolss.net/EolssSampleChapters/C04/E6-21-01-09/E6-21-01-09-TXT.aspx)

Medieval peasants, …were fully imbued with the landscape that surrounded their everyday horizons... They therefore felt no need to examine their environment from the outside and to consider it an autonomous or detachable part of reality. Medieval cosmology saw no difference between natural and anthropogenic landscape components.


… the ever-increasing number of town dwellers began to see nature as more distant from their immediate environment and experience,and the free landscape began to a greater extent to be understood as an artifact.


Considered to be formed in some way by natural forces and man, the landscape was at the same time something with its own internal dynamics, secrets, and poetry, a space worthy of

the attention of artists.

In the period of European Romanticism, a reaction of people against rigorous Rationalism, estrangement from and disillusionment with modern civilization, this relationship with the landscape came to a head. Nature became a temple and forgotten paradise to which it was necessary to return and in which it was necessary to seek out the ancient roots of human nature.


For Romantic poets and painters, the return to the womb of nature was thus not only a return to the original natural environment but also to the past, to human history. Merging into the landscape was for the Romantic spirit the most propitious means of coming closer to the thought processes and perceptions of the world of the ancestors.

This dualistic model is, however, shaken by the discoveries of science, atheism, and the secularism of the modern age—it has come to the crossroads of one antithesis with another (the profanation of the sacred, or the secularization of the profane).


European understanding of space (and thus landscapes) is marked by a typical dualism, differentiating between worldly (profane) and sacred (sacral) places. This approach is a typical expression ofmythological thought, adopted into the Christian worldview and spreading from there into diverse secular ideologies; it is linked to the emotional experience of space.

Modernist (rational)

space: access, control, order, resource, economy,

function…

PostmodeRn

(eclectic) plaza:

Social and cultural pluralism, disunity, unclear bases for socialunity, simulacrum, fragmentation, individualization

ARCHAEOLOGICAL

REPRESENTATIONS OF

SPACE

TRADITIONAL ARCHAEOLOGY

REPRESENTATIONS: distribution, territory, 2D geometry, political geography, PROCESSES: migrations/adaptation/colonization RELATIONSHIPS: geographic detereminism, non‐theorised space,

MODERNIST ARCHAEOLOGY

REPRESENTATIONS: abstract/universal/objective/neutral/atemporal space, activities polygonPROCESSES: ecosystemic adaptation, rational exploitation, systemic balance,RELATIONSHIPS: ecologic/economic determinsmARCHAEOLOGICAL and HISTORICAL THEORIES ecosystemic, economic,

POSTMODERN ARCHAEOLOGY

REPRESENTATIONS: humanized space (place, landscape), space as medium, subjective space, power strategies, contradiction, temporalPROCESSES: simbolization, perception, active transformation RELATIONSHIP (HUMANS : SPACE): dialectic, indirect (through perception)ARCHAEOLOGICAL and HISTORICAL THEORIES : structuration, textual metaphors, phenomenology...

LANDSCAPE IS NOT SPACEIt is concrete places for which we care. It is in our caring where meaning of things in landscape are created.

PEOPLE DO NOT REACT ON LANDSCAPE DIRECTLYPeople react through meanings attributed to things in our process of care.

SPACE DOES NOT EXIST APRIORI.It exists only as world which exists only if we care. The relationshipo of care constitutes the world.

CAPITALIST SOCIETY CONSIDERS SPACE AS RESOURCE FOR EXPLOITATIONIn capitalist system relationship between human activities and space are functional.

THE ‚SPACE‘ OF PRE-CAPITALIST SOCIETIES IS ANTHROPOMORPHICIts order has references in cosmological, religious and mythological. Places are chosen for certain needs because they are useful for thinking (C. Tilley 1994, 20).

Particular meaning of space is directly associated with experiences of living in it.

Human experiencing is mental process which simultaneously grasp reality (world-around), its meanings and its representations. In this process horizons of past, future and reality (present) are fused together. Time and space create a singularity.

Every „staying or living with things“ is act of humanization in which things achieve their meanings which can not be separated from the things themselves.

Space is never neutral – it is always contextualized in the form of humanized medium.

THIS IS LANDSCAPE.

LANDSCAPES AS MATERIAL ARCHIVES OF MEMORIES:

-collective and individual memories on significant events, peoples, origins, ancestors, myths, cosmology... are stored in landscape.

-such an archive is not closed and completed, and is constantly enriched by new experiences and representations

-archive accentuates cultural and historic continuity of community

-Human memory does not exploit directly from such an archive, rather than fom ad hoc construction from certain associations

-This is the very reason why there is not one definitive meaning of a landscape; landscape is object and mean of numerous practoces and reinterpretations

LANDSCAPE AS IDENTITY:

-People constantly create and attribute meanings to cestain places

-Identification with such places (i.e. evidences of human activities in landscape) represent expression of social and cultural identity

LANDSCAPE AS EXPRESSION OF SOCIAL ORDER

-Every collective identity is closely tied to particular social order and order of things.

Constructed landscapes:

-Created by man-made physical/material transformation of space: settlements, infrastructure, land-use, changes of morphology, vegetation...

-Mostly as result of everyday life

-Reasons: economic, political, religios, cosmological...

Archaeological systemization of landscapes (afterW. Ashmore in B. Knapp 1999):

Conceptualized landscapes:

-Enable creation of various images and representations stemming social practices and experiences.

-Conceptualized landscapes are mediated through different social processes and are part of this processes

-They serve for further production of concepts


IDEATIONAL LANDSCAPES

-Mental images or projections

-Emotional representations of some ideals or value

(in broader sense, all constructed or conceptualizted landscapes).

...we would suggest that landscape is esentially all of these things at all times: it is the arena in which and through which memory, identity, social order and transformation are constructed, played out, re-invented, and changed.” (Ashmore and Knapp 1999, 10).


Thank You

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