IFLA Europe Regional Meeting: Conference and General Assembly 16-18 October 2015 in Lisbon, Portugal

LANDSCAPE ARCHETYPES, Lessons for the Future

Landscapes are social and cultural interpretations of nature. The combined works of both man and the natural environment, represent the living archive of humankind’s technological and social development in its strive to adapt itself to natural circumstances.

Traditional landscapes are the result of millenary mechanisms, of intangible and physical processes, repositories of ancestral knowledge which made the best use of natural dynamics balancing them with the specific requirements of human societies.

However, throughout history, natural landscapes have been subject to changes produced by anthropogenic activity, and many of them have become clearly vulnerable once the balance between human communities and natural systems was interrupted.

This seminar will focus on landscapes constructed with great wisdom over several generations. These archetypal landscapes highlight a very special culture, revealing sound knowledge about making the best use of the natural elements and territory integration, promoting human presence, great attractiveness and aesthetic value.

These landscapes -which exist in all European countries- combine useful production for communities with water cycle regulation; soil, biodiversity and gene pool conservation and improvement; important multifunctionality; harmony and complementarity with surrounding landscapes; remarkable constructions and infrastructures (walls, fences, slopes, paths, channels, ponds, drinking troughs, stables, shelters, among others). More than reflect on the past, the challenge of this seminar is to interpret these landscapes as lessons for the future of the landscape in Europe, ensuring innovation, sustainability and quality of life.

The moment we are living requires of attitudes capable of generating sustainable answers to the changes underway. This seminar and the subsequent presentations by all the National Associations that compose IFLA EUROPE, will show us a diversity of approaches that will contribute to redefine our workmanship, expertise and professional practice. Sensitive to changes, holistic in their answers, integral as regards the complexity of their solutions, all of the conferences and presentations will establish a rich landscape mosaic of strategic answers.

Contemporary landscapes with emergent problems resulting from industrial and post-industrial development invite us to link individual experience to humankind’s future, so that projects presented will encompass articulations ranging from global evolution to interventions at the closest local level. They will bring our attention both to traditional landscapes that present an exceptional ecological performance and to the many and varied projects already under way based on ancestral knowledge. They will bring on solutions that have always been successful in their ecological and cultural context or are being currently experimented in the practice of landscape planning: learning from our landscape archetypes is also a way of planning the future to come.

 

Izvor: IFLA EU, 9/6/2015