ABSTRACT
The European Landscape Convention is ambitious. First of all, it subscribes to a cultural conception of landscape. The adopted definition indeed sets landscape as ‘an area, as perceived by people’. It is important to note that this approach does not deny the material aspects of landscape – as indicated in the continuation of the definition1 – but it implies that interventions in landscapes are considered as being influenced by actors’ perceptions and representations. According to this approach, the perceptions related to a same landscape can vary from a culture to another, from a social group to another, from an individual to another. The Convention thus emphasizes the need to recognize this variety in the characterization and assessment of landscapes and in doing so it calls for reviewing the usual methods and tools which mainly rely on the knowledge and the perceptions of experts. In other words, interventions in landscapes must consider other social groups’ knowledge and perceptions. This recognition of public actors is normally understood as requiring the implication of the local populations in so-called ‘participatory’ planning processes.
