Landscape and Sustainable Development

The French Perspective

Yves Luginbühl, Peter Howard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317108245
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Previously published in French by Éditions Quae, this volume presents findings of a major research programme into landscape and sustainable development. While led by French scholars, the research team and geographical scope of the project was international, collaborative and comparative. Using case studies from across Europe, the interdisciplinary team of contributors discuss the relationship between landscape as defined by the European Landscape Convention and the concept of sustainable development. This English edition has a new introduction written by Yves Luginbühl and Peter Howard. The book is then divided into three sections: Biophysical Realities and Landscape Practice; Landscape Resources-Inheritance and Renewal; Governance and Participation. Some of the topics covered, such as wind-farm landscapes, will be familiar to English language readers, but others, such as footpath economics, non-woodland trees, inter-generational equity, and the insistence on the necessary developments in governance less so.

PART I
Biophysical Realities and Landscape Practices

Introduction

Josefina Gomez-Mendoza

Biophysical and Cultural Interactions and Landscape Markers

The notion of interaction is at the heart of this part of the book which, whilst emphasising the part played by material structures in the production of landscapes, cannot ignore cultural and symbolic dimensions. These contributions are organised around both the conditions and the contexts of their economic, political and social production and evolution, and the role of the representations which they arouse. The richness of opinions and the recognition of the complexity of interactions which these texts possess demonstrate a wish to explain their complex processes. Even if they fall a little short of expectations in their European dimension and in the perspectives which they open, these contributions manifest the wish to ensure inter-disciplinarity and transversality, and the desire to ask ourselves important questions about landscape sustainability (resources, heritage, components, know-how) and its relationship to multi-functionality. They also answer some questions. The researchers have refused to restrict themselves to the closed concept of landscape as an object and follow the path which has emerged since the studies of material landscapes 30 or 40 years ago. The chapters also demonstrate innovation in the understanding of landscape organisation and new knowledge about landscape.

The approaches used are divided between holistic and iterative approaches, where landscape tells its own story thanks to the specific landscape markers which remind us of their economic, technical, social and cultural history. Among these markers are: the non-woodland trees of agrarian systems in the south of Europe with great diversity, but where farming has always been present and trees continue to play a more, or less, important role; cultivation terraces constructed on abrupt slopes to make them farmable and ensure water distribution; pruned trees, pollards, as witnesses of woodland landscapes in decline, where other elements like hedges have been eliminated, but others have been incorporated for different reasons (aesthetic, patrimonial or ecological) into new landscapes. Another marker, for most Mediterranean mountain landscapes is their groundcover vegetation which is extending and could eventually ‘close’ the landscape, or sometimes banalise it, but it is still subject to strong dynamisms. Equally, the roads, the network of both agricultural and non-agricultural paths and tracks, form ‘the framework of rural landscapes’, but which are at the same time landscapes in themselves and refuges for biodiversity. All these elements have a remarkable and above all sustainable presence, even if, as the authors show in detail, they are the object of more or less intense change.

Differences between Scales of Time and Space …

One of the great contributions of these chapters is the observation of the links of landscapes to time and space, even if these links do not work together, or no longer work together in a coherent way, and even when the most obvious element is the distance or the difference between landscapes, functions, policies and representations, and the anchoring of several practices on previous representations. These are not always in agreement with current dynamics, but in any case succeed each other, reinvent themselves, recover and invest in themselves, sometimes changing their meaning.

There is not only the well-established fact that landscapes last longer than the reasons which have contributed to putting them in place. The landscapes studied here, woodland, the polyculture of Mediterranean mountains, dehesas, olive groves, etc., bear witness to their longevity, but they also experience strong evolution. Sometimes, this longevity of forms conceals the dynamics. We could add that the opposite is also true – landscapes undoubtedly take longer to establish than the actions which produce or involve them. The creation of landscapes, in landscape projects, can be, if not questioned, at least subjected to temporal diagnosis, and this is probably one of the reasons why the European Landscape Convention is so cautious, almost silent about this matter. This critically confirms the contribution of landscape practitioners to the chapters of this part of the book.

If the difference between landscape and mere space is small in nature, change is still present. The morphology of landscapes is obviously linked to biophysical conditions but even if they remain within their environments, this does not prevent shrinking, confinement and a certain landscape mobility. The chapters on Mediterranean landscapes note again and again the decline of agricultural landscapes, their concentration in valleys or on the peripheries, or quite the contrary in specific cases and for economic reasons, their progress towards the borders of their area; this is the case, for example, with the olive groves in the French Mediterranean Midi. In any case, for rural landscapes throughout the south of Europe, the generality of the cases studied shows the extent to which the 1950s and 60s signalled the turning point between the stability of productive territories and the decline in farming and abandonment of practices which led to the beginning of new biophysical and social dynamics. In a less general but also notable way, the 1980s and 1990s marked a new direction, one we could call resource-landscape. At that time, both governments and the new users wanted to recover their living environment, concerned about conservation, if not about landscape rehabilitation and sometimes in conflict with those who still used them for agricultural production. We will see later that this turning point which was supposed to create a new economic and ‘landscape’ sector was not really successful in doing so.

That said, it is the differences in policies, practices, and representations of landscapes and their dynamics which are the most apparent. On one hand, bocage and dehesas conserve their reputation as tree-filled landscapes which unite their aesthetic qualities with their multi-functionality. Nowadays they are almost unanimously cited as models of rational resource management, biodiversity niches and candidates for sustainable development. This unanimous appreciation is a bit paradoxical. It ignores, for example, the difficult regeneration of dehesas, noted in all studies on the subject, and unbalancing the distribution of trees by size, leading to an understorey of small trees, which at the same time questions the sustainability of the system. It is only one example of the permanence of a landscape archetype, immune to all interrogation or evidence.¹

… and Differences between Biophysical Dynamics and Social Representations

Neither bocage nor dehesas are directly discussed in these chapters, but they are involved via their trees (or the distribution of their trees) as identity markers. We will return to this. Firstly, let us note one of the ideas which the texts particularly highlight – the inversion of the meaning and value of certain elements of landscapes and their biophysical dynamics. The most common case mentioned in ecological and landscape literature is that of marshes and wetlands, formerly objects of repulsion due to their unhealthiness, to the point where draining and cleaning them was considered progress; today they are protected for their famous biodiversity. Among the landscape issues treated here, gully erosion in the Mediterranean mountains, as well as pruned trees on the urban fringes developing new functions, have been the object of the inversion of meaning and appreciation.

Erosion in the Mediterranean mountains was perceived throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and during most of the twentieth century as the cause which justified the restoration of mountain land and reforestation interventions by the skill of the forester. The reasoning, with all its symbolism, had penetrated laypeople’s discourse as well as experts’ – the stabilisation of the soil by means of forest planting would facilitate a ‘reconquest’ by vegetation and enable the use of sterile land to accomplish a social revolution. ‘To use reforestation to prevent the arid soil of the homeland from disappearing into the sea and to use education to avoid ignorance sterilising young brains’ said Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the most eminent Spanish scientist at the beginning of the twentieth century. The research led by Marianne Cohen’s team shows a reversal in this situation, from the moment when the abandonment of the land and loss of population becomes general in the mountains, then the extension of groundcover vegetation becomes an established fact, either in the form of forests or scrubland, then this perception of vegetation which dominates completely, while the continuing dynamics of erosion remain hidden.

The afforestation which mountain inhabitants easily perceived on a space-time scale, became a visible translation of their experiences, a series of results of negative transformations, either in production, as cultivation or demographic or political ones. ‘It’s the opposite, authors write, for erosion; stakeholders do not perceive the changes detected for a long time or the ablation processes and the transport of sediments’ and even less so the effects at a distance, the transport of sediments in big rivers. At that time, ‘the roubines (marly badlands) were even considered by some as picturesque and favourable for tourism’ as an unchanging resource. Landscape has, therefore, played the role of revealing a fundamental diagnosis of the territory and concealment of some of its dynamics. ‘Landscape is an illusion, its forms, its colours, its elements hide the processes which are going on underneath’. This statement is found in more than one text and deserves to be developed further.

The changing role and meaning of pruned trees is no less interesting. Today they have become highly appreciated niches of biodiversity and a heritage famous throughout Europe; English pollards, Basque trasmochos, French ragosses or têtards have, however, been the object of a change in perception, value and use which Monique Toublanc and her colleagues retrace with precision using two different cases, on the outskirts of Angers and Rennes. They are ‘masterpieces of a landscape system composed of agricultural plots surrounded by a network of ditches, banks and hedges, themselves made up of tree, scrub and herbaceous levels’. These singular trees are the result of an agricultural logic with well-established norms and practices codified by local uses – the trunk for the landowner, the branches for the tenant farmer, pruning which leaves a branch to draw sap and assist the tree’s regrowth. The crisis of the traditional agrarian systems of the middle years of the last century, the abandonment and reorganisation of woodland, and urban growth, have put these remaining trees in urban fringe areas, where they are no longer agricultural trees, but where they face renewed interest of a different purpose, for property enclosure, wood cultivation, alignment of paths, incorporation into city garden projects, and so on. They face a multitude of social relationships and different managers who do not respect common rules, ‘These anachronistic figures return to the stage, transformed in their materiality and social representations […] These pruned trees find new functionalities and meanings through three filters: theoretical, operational and environmental. They are part of the landscape and our heritage’.

Two ideas can prolong this reasoning. Firstly, in this urban fringe woodland, residual and reinvented with mixed and discontinued physiognomy, either by sections or sectors or trees, the difference between the rural and urban landscape becomes blurred, it disappears, the result of rural know-how becoming part of urban environments from now on. Secondly in the same order of ideas, it would be interesting to examine the path of the incorporation of rural techniques by garden centres and landscape architects.²

In the two cases mentioned, both the Mediterranean mountains and the urban fringe environments with pruned trees, the dominant evolution of the representations which have just been traced does not prevent conflicts of perception and appreciation. In the southern European mountains, the more Arcadian representation of nature possessed by farmers and hikers contrasts with the wilder vision of ecologists and some experts. The opening or closing of the landscape and scale are also controversial questions. The controversies about pollarded trees come from the opposition between the defenders of the free tree, or of a less radical pruning, as most of the foresters think, and supporters of pruning because of its traditional, heritage and ecological value. Between the two are the public bodies who take a long time in putting considered policies into place (including all the linear elements of the landscape, for example) and whose strategies often lack coordination and coherence, but who in any case have to compromise between conflicting opinions. It is not the first time that we see an administration do one thing and its opposite, successively and even simultaneously, but in different places, regrouping, then dividing, taking trees from the roads to replant them, and so on.³

Describing Landscape and Economic Resources

Let us return to the identification of landscapes through markers. They allow us, if they are well chosen, to describe landscapes, to identify them and make them readable. These singular, sometimes exceptional markers enable us to describe an ordinary landscape, not necessarily exceptional, even if it is banal. However, we can add two reservations which have already been mentioned. These descriptors do not always reveal a landscape’s identity (if this rather simplistic notion is retained) or at least they do not reveal an uncontroversial identity. Examples of different opinions about pollards or more open or closed landscape mosaics prove this. The second reservation is that sometimes if the appearance of a landscape is too legible we can make mistakes about the current evolutionary process or the challenges of sustainability. The case of the dehesas would be an example of this; another would be the new Mediterranean wooded landscapes. It is in this sense that we can accept allusions to a landscape which tricks, conceals, and can even be called a trap-landscape. This is why the study of landscapes requires us not only to consider forms, but to make the socio-ecological dynamics visible and to confront them with sustainable development. In this order of things, the contribution of landscape practitioners to these chapters prefigures a tactical approach on their part. Sometimes the professional landscaper ‘proceeds with a mask on’, using circumvention to lead their interlocutors onto different terrains, especially to rid people of their nostalgia regarding aesthetic landscapes.

A mature description of landscape describes it, tells its story and in doing so contributes towards making it a resource and in this sense includes it in the field of economy. The European Landscape Convention insists on the capacity of landscape to become a favourable economic resource, whose protection, management and development would contribute to job creation. Ten years after the convention, we must admit that the economic dimension of landscape has mainly been developed in an indirect way, through different sectors for which good landscapes create value, in particular in tourism and real estate. On the other hand, the landscape sector has been little studied in a direct way. Some of these chapters put forward the idea of a néobocage (new woodland) sector or a country planning sector, a subject which opens up a new line of research.

From this arises interest in the contribution centred on the rural roads sector, considered from the point of view of the services economy and neo-institutional economy, and based on studies carried out in the Puy-de-Dôme department. Thanks to this work, we have new knowledge about the association between work commissioners, local authorities and a new agency of landscape management services. The formal conclusion is ‘the professionalisation of [landscape intervention] remains to be constructed both on the side of the commissioners (the ways of calling for public contracts) and on the side of the farmers themselves in terms of qualifications and skills’.

Levels of Landscape Action and Stakeholder Multiplication

There remain the practices which the texts also discuss in detail – interventions which start from scratch with the existing landscape are no longer conceivable and action in the name of sustainable development is becoming generalised. This does not prevent hesitation, errors and lack of coordination, which are in part justifiable due to the number of stakeholders involved and the different opinions about landscape representations which they hold. All this poses the question about the characterisation of what already exists and the knowledge on which we should draw.

Apart from national policies on landscape and planning and the economy of resources, the communes particularly intervene by establishing policies and acting as the main commissioners. Again and again, studies emphasise the fragmentation of public action, the lack of holistic vision and errors of perception. And we cannot forget the difficult harmonisation of the time and the duration of political action with ecological and landscape time. Landscapers complain about public authorities’ often nostalgic view and about the difference between institutional ideas about sustainable development and what it really is, and what the landscape experts take it to be. We could make a similar statement about the continuity of traditional knowledge and adopted solutions. Over the last decades, new stakeholders...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Glossary
• Introduction to the English Edition Light on a Parallel Path
• Introduction
• PART I BIOPHYSICAL REALITIES AND LANDSCAPE PRACTICES
• PART II LANDSCAPE RESOURCES BETWEEN HERITAGE AND PRACTICE
• PART III GOVERNANCE AND PARTICIPATION
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index