ABSTRACT
Other fields than landscape ecology have also attached great significance to the issue of scale, and the ‘landscape unit’ is more widely canvassed as a framework for analysing inter-relationships and delivering joined-up policy within a comprehensible and identifiable space. Bioregionalists, for example, have argued that ‘nature’ defines its own integral systems and that, historically, sustainability in human systems has been a consequence of close alignment between socio-economic practices and environmental capacity. This leads to arguments, discussed more fully below, that natural, rather than political, boundaries could form the basis of many planning and management choices. Fairclough (2006), writing from an archaeological perspective, argues that attention to the issue of scale enables time-depth in landscapes to be imagined in different ways, depending on the grain and extent adopted. Further, he suggests that scale not only possesses spatial dimensions, but also dimensions of time, perception, expertise and management. Writers concerned with issues of aesthetics, political identity and emotional attachment have also expressed comparable views. A key property of landscapes – whether perceived in scientific or humanistic terms – is that they are ‘areas that can be viewed at a glance’ (Jackson, 1984, in Terkenli, 2001), and thus represent intuitive spatial units in which multiple patterns and processes congeal.
