ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the work of the researchers and practitioners who carry out Landscape Character Assessment (LCA) and Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) type work. One of the distinctive aspects of landscape character approaches such as LCA or HLC, however, is that their results reach audience beyond both academic and specialised professional audiences. Landscape characterisation emerged in Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It has spread widely across Europe, and sometimes further afield; it is on the verge of becoming a global practice, albeit with a diversity of related approaches and methods. The European Landscape Convention might indeed be seen as an instrument that moves European thinking on landscape closer to the Indigenous perceptions and attitudes that exist on other continents. Entirely different alternative starting points to ways of looking after landscape exist beyond Europe in the rest of the world.
