Landscape as an integrating Framework for Rural Policy and Planning

• Start date: 01 February 2005
• End date: 30 June 2005

Whilst ‘landscape’ has often been treated as a purely sectoral or specialist issue in land use decisions, it can more positively be viewed as an over-arching device for comprehending patterns and processes of countryside change. This Development Activity reflects our growing acknowledgement of landscape as a multifunctional, rather than essentially visual, construct. To this end, it will:
(1) produce a review paper examining the role of the rural cultural landscape – both as ‘container’ and ‘network’ – as a nexus of social, economic, natural and built ‘capital’;
(2) elaborate a conceptual and practical model in which landscape is seen as a framework for area-based rural governance, rural data management, policy delivery and stakeholder participation;
(3) suggest how this model might be tested by future, inter-disciplinary research;
(4) conclude with a seminar/workshop in which the nature and implications of an integrative landscape model can be debated and disseminated.
In so doing, it will explore landscape units as settings for a virtuous circle in which rural economic recovery, healthy lifestyles, sustainable environmental services and place-distinctiveness are mutually reinforcing; and it will broach impending major policy issues, such as the re-casting of protected areas as sustainability ‘greenprints’, and regeneration of rural economies through valorisation of local identity.