ABSTRACT
The recognition of landscape systems as essential to ecological functioning, is rooted in historical and traditional rural practices. Farmers, through empirical knowledge, understood the interconnected roles of rivers, vegetation, and wildlife in maintaining ecological balance. Building on this legacy, the “Landscape-system approach” integrates traditional knowledge with modern scientific principles to address contemporary environmental and planning challenges.
The Landscape-system methodology builds on well-established landscape-planning concepts, including land ecological suitability, land morphology and complexity. It also incorporates systemic thinking principles, regarding the landscape as an open, autopoietic system that can be progressively enriched. This approach also addresses flexibility, recognising that planning must adapt to real-world demands, while safeguarding ecological and cultural sustainability. This holistic framework integrates physical, biological, and cultural systems, recognising the ecological structure as being fundamental to green infrastructure, in alignment with European Union directives. In parallel, it emphasises the cultural structure which integrates anthropic elements ensuring their articulation with the “ecological network.” Over the past three decades, the “Landscape-system” approach has been applied by multidisciplinary teams at multiple scales—national, regional (1:100,000), and local (1:25,000, 1:10,000, and 1:2,000)—across mainland Portugal and municipalities.
