ABSTRACT
During the last decades historical research has become ever less important in landscape studies. This is also true for the Permanent European Conference for the Study of the Rural Landscape (PECSRL), which started during the 1950s as a forum for historic, particularly morphogenetic, research into European landscapes. During their first decades, these conferences focused on the history of village types and field-patterns. During the 1980s and 1990s, the conferences became more oriented towards planning, by presenting historic landscapes as part of our heritage. Since the 1990s, the emphasis on modern developments grew, when growing numbers of ecologists and planners visited the conferences. One of the side-effects of the more interdisciplinary character of the conferences was a growing confusion regarding the term ‘landscape’.
