ABSTRACT
Economics is about satisfying competing human wants, within the limits set by scarce resources. The wants, ranging from physiological necessities to transient psychological desires, are embodied in demand – a relationship between amounts consumed and price willingly paid. The limited resources determine supply – a relationship between offered price and amounts willingly provided. Demand and supply interact in markets, which tend towards an equilibrium in which amounts provided and consumed are roughly equal. However, because of landscape’s nature as a publicly provided and involuntarily experienced service, demand and supply also interact in alternative means of allocating scarce resources, such as political debate, pressuring and trade-off. This is the perspective from which economists see the creation, destruction, enhancement,
degradation and preservation of landscape. All these processes affect landscape understood as territory – as a tract of land, which itself is a potential resource for other forms of production. The processes also require, or alleviate requirements for, other factors of production: labour, raw materials, capital (productive machinery, buildings, infrastructure etc.) and enterprise. The processes have the purpose of, or substantial effects upon, availability of landscape understood as a source of aesthetic experience. Such a perspective on the interaction of resources and human perceptions accords with the
European Landscape Convention’s definition of landscape as: ‘an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors’ (Council of Europe 2000). Economics, then, is not a discipline straying outside its normal or proper limits when applied to landscape: on the contrary, the discipline is deeply embedded in thoughts on what to do about landscape. Once landscape debates move beyond appreciation of what is, to contention about what might and what should be, economics is implicitly involved. Even discussion about how, in the past, landscape came to be properly refers to the forces of supply and demand, and their playing out in conflicts concerning the balance between them. The economics of landscape – in the aesthetic sense – ought not to include the economics of
all that happens in the landscape – in the territorial sense. But in practice it does so, because of
possible sacrifice of competing value of alternative, less aesthetic land uses (what economists term the opportunity cost of land: that is, loss of productive potential imposed by pro-landscape activity).
