ABSTRACT
The European Landscape Convention was steered by the Council of Europe and agreed upon in Florence in 2000. The emphasis is – as in this article as well – on the cultural dimensions of landscape: “‘landscape’ means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors.” The Convention has only one mention of the notion of right, and it occurs in the Preamble, stating that “protection, management and planning [of landscape] entail rights and responsibilities for everyone.” Despite this probably deliberate omission, the idea of the human right to the cultural landscape has been developed in the literature. The nature of the article is explorative besides being argumentative. Instead of taking an immediate position to defend, we proceed to flesh out how regulation based on the notion of landscape differs from other considerations that delimit the use of property. Instead of taking a “polity-blind”, or universalistic, approach, we will pay special attention to landscape protection policies in Finland, including its indigenous Sámi people and their homeland. The protection of cultural landscape is in the public interest that requires land-use regulation since cultural landscapes are typically not singly-owned lands. The scale and the character of valuable landscapes are defined in public and secured by the public authorities. We claim that rights to landscape should be understood in terms of procedural rather than substantial rights. Furthermore, the landscapes are usually not a product of any single cultural community but accumulation of traces from several human generations and different cultural communities. Therefore, the idea of human right to landscape has a dimension of the politics of identity – in particular, in the case of the Sámi people – that is linked to procedural rights.
