Landscape Identity: implications for policy making

Landscape is recognised to be an important asset for people’s quality of life and people and the landscape interact in multiple and complex ways. Both in science and policy, this interaction has been dealt with in a fragmented way, depending on the objectives, the disciplinary perspective, as well as the used concep- tual backdrop. In this wider framework, landscape identity emerges in policy discourses as a powerful argument to value landscape but it lacks an operationalised framework for policymaking. This paper has two major goals. One is to review the conceptual dialogue between landscape’s and people’s identity. The other is to identify contents of identity in the landscape (i.e. attributes used to define landscape identity) and the complexity of the identity (i.e. dimensions used to define landscape identity) as a way to increase efficiency in more spatially targeted policies. Above all, this paper discusses how landscape identity has been approached, in order to get an improved understanding of its potential for introducing the landscape concept at multiple levels of governance and how an increased knowledge base might be useful to inform policy making.

Valuing landscape identity of local inhabitants through a tourism discourse

Landscape, people and identity Landscape is about the interaction of a place or an area with people, which is reflected in the material interaction of people creating or shaping the landscape as well as in their mental perception, valuation and symbolic meaning of that landscape (Cosgrove 1998). This mutual and dynamic interaction forms the fundamental principle of the concept of landscape identity. Landscape identity has been described in scientific literature as a concept to bridge the physical, social and cultural aspects of landscapes. Also policy documents related with landscape and heritage (for example the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, the European Landscape Convention, the Faro Convention) are mentioning identity and landscape as key concepts. In those examples, landscape identity can refer to either the landscape itself - its features that makes the landscape unique (thus the landscape character), or to the social and personal construction. However, there is an interdependency between those two perspectives that needs to be conceptualised. Landscape identity is therefore defined as the multiple ways and dynamic relation between landscape and people (Loupa Ramos et al 2016).