6

LANDSCAPE ASSESSMENTS AS
IMAGINATIVE (POETIC) LANDSCAPE
NARRATIVES
Contemporary pastorals

Anne Katrine Geelmuyden

The European Landscape Convention and current advances in

landscape assessment methodology
More than a decade after the European Landscape Convention (ELC) was con-
ceived and as it has gradually entered into force in most European countries, it is
time to reflect on its effects. What interests me in this chapter is the way in which
the Convention’s mandate to each ratifying country ‘to identify and assess land-
scapes throughout its territory’ (Council of Europe 2000a, article 6c) has resulted
in new landscape assessment methods. The emphasis will be on expert methods to
identify landscapes.
The following reflections ensue from my work with the ‘landscape image’
(landskapsbilde) chapter of the Norwegian Public Roads Administration’s environ-
mental impact assessment method, as well as recent guidelines for landscape analysis
and evaluation, issued by the Norwegian directorates for Nature Management and
Cultural Heritage (Direktoratet for naturforvaltning og Riksantikvaren; 2010,
2011). Another related set of guidelines is under development for the Norwegian
Water Resources and Energy Directorate.The guidelines are strongly influenced by
the British Landscape Character Assessment (LCA) method (Countryside Agency
and Scottish Natural Heritage 2002), which has been influential in several
European countries. In addition, the Norwegian Ministry of the Environment has
started mapping landscape types and areas throughout Norway, based exclusively
on a compilation of existing digitised data (Simensen and Uttakleiv 2011).
While displaying different practical approaches, all these methods also display
some essential commonalities: they continue a practice that predates the advent of
the Convention and that can be traced to countries other than Norway or the
United Kingdom (Zube 1984; Geelmuyden 1989; Fiskevold 2011). They naïvely
employ a natural science methodology to ensure objectivity, within a field where
62 Anne Katrine Geelmuyden

both the subjective and ephemeral are essential ingredients. With the landscape
concept of the Convention, however, a different attitude towards legitimacy is
called for and has been officially endorsed (Brunetta and Voghera 2008).
The question I attempt to answer is how an expert approach to landscape
identification and assessment, adopting the Convention’s concept of landscape, can
bring perceptions in an area into play and thereby engage the public in legitimising
processes. Instead of many current methods’ emphasis on inventorying of predefined
features and elements in an area, I first argue for the need to reinterpret and make
explicit the value tradition which is embedded in the landscape concept and,
second, for a strategy of more inviting representations of areas as landscapes.

Landscape = area + method of representation

Although landscapes are inextricably bound to physical areas, they essentially exist
in people’s minds. An area’s physical properties are only part of a landscape: however
crucial they are for a landscape to acquire its character, cultural preconceptions and
personal biases or intentions will influence and can even predominate over direct
physical experience. People express their perceptions according to various experi-
ential circumstances, but also according to cultural concepts (Ritter 1974; Cosgrove
1989/1998; Geelmuyden 1989, 1993; Groh and Groh 1991; Seel 1996;Trepl 2012;
Fiskevold 2011, 2013; Geelmuyden and Fiskevold 2013, 2015).
Although this ‘social-cultural constructivist’ insight into landscape as a concept
has been widely published for several decades, especially in cultural geography,
professional landscape assessment methods have continued to emphasise the
physical area as its sole object of analysis. They have not acknowledged the role of
the method itself as a crucial factor in forming landscapes.The search for value-free
knowledge about the area has become confused with the attribution of cultural and
contextual meaning or value to the area.
Any method for analysing or evaluating an area as landscape is always only just
one of several potential ways to present it, and different methods may reveal
dramatically different perceptions. The theory and arguments underlying the
method will determine the character of the landscape that it presents, that is, makes
present, to its reader: the method is the means by which an area comes into being
as landscape.Thus, we can say that the LCA-method and similar methods present
a particular type of landscape.
In order to understand landscape(s), we therefore have to give prime interest to
the presentational tools that bring them to light. Fiskevold, (2011, 2013 – and in a
later chapter of this book) has provided a model and a terminology that together
allow us to analyse landscapes as products of language or other media.
Thus, the demarcation criteria for differentiating between landscape types
resides in the cultural-symbolic realm just as much as in the physical. Of the three
dimensions of landscapes that Fiskevold (ibid.) identifies, namely their horizon, their
practiced regularity and their motif, the latter is of special interest here.
 Contemporary pastorals 63

Landscapes as conceptions, guided by a motif

Any perception and ensuing articulation of it as landscape can be characterised as
guided by a motif. The decisive function of the motif for landscape analysis is
similar to that of the metaphor in common language. The motif, just as the meta-
phor, offers an immediate conceptualisation, a guiding perspective on a complex
situation. With metaphors, we use the structure of one area of life, most often that
of bodily experience (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), in order to get a grip on another,
more complex area of life. Likewise, the motif of a landscape narration symbolically
transfers the intentions and discursive contexts embedded in a societal practice to the
way that an area is perceived.
Even our sense impressions play in tune with the motif: we sense only what we
are predisposed to sense. The German psychologist Kurt Lewin’s (2006) account
from his time as a soldier in World War I may serve as an example: the difference
between Lewin’s perception at the front and then, only a short time afterwards, as
a civilian, was so dramatic that the area became unrecognisable. When a soldier, his
perception took form according to the motif, ‘search for shelter’, whereas, as a
civilian, he again became attuned to the general motif of ‘nature-seen-as-landscape’
(Seel 1996). Similarly, in the context of professional landscape assessments, the
motif ‘conservation of natural diversity’ guides landscape ecologists, whereas
landscape architects’ quest for improvement accords to certain aesthetic ideals;
finally, cultural historians strive to detect and preserve traces of the past.
It is only when a landscape narrative, under the auspices of a ruling motif has
assembled the selected parts of an area into a meaningful whole that a landscape
can emerge, as an identifiable entity. The same thing happens when we visualise or
re-collect a landscape in our mind. A landscape depends on a horizon of meaning, as
Fiskevold shows in this same volume.
Therefore, we should see landscape as a dynamic phenomenon: it may take on
different characters even in the same area. Furthermore, a particular landscape can
only be sustained as long as the describing method-narrative can be communicated
and perceived as relevant in the actual context or situation.

The Convention’s landscape motif: cultural welfare, visually

symbolised
Now, turning back to the Convention and its call for identification of landscapes
in every territory, what is it actually calling for? As suggested above, ‘landscape’ is
in itself a motif (Trepl 2012; Seel 1996). It is necessary to be aware of this, if one
wants to understand the ambiguity in the Convention’s landscape concept and
mandate (Geelmuyden and Fiskevold 2013, 2015 in publ.).
Landscape has a long history in Western society. We can frame a concept of
landscape that has developed from being a pre-modern term, connoting a regional
entity with certain legal and customary commonalities (Olwig 1996), to becoming
a modern term for a particular way of seeing (Cosgrove 1989/1998) an area,
64 Anne Katrine Geelmuyden

notably ‘nature-seen-as-landscape’ (Seel 1996; Trepl 2012). In this latter sense,

landscape is the result of an attitude towards land as aesthetic resource and asset,
originally a way of demonstrating taste and conspicuous wealth for the few, as well
as, more recently, a way of marketing scenic places within the real estate business
and tourism.
On the other hand, the modern concept of landscape also has a critical meaning:
it has become a medium for negotiating culture’s relationship with land, the rural
countryside and, more recently, the ‘environment’. Essential to this critical landscape
concept is a productive aesthetic (poetic) dimension on and, closely connected to
that, a reference to an ideal: a promise of, or search for a better life. (Geelmuyden
1989, 1993; Groh and Groh 1991; Andrews 1999; Seel 1996; Benediktsson 2007;
Trepl 2012). Aesthetics, in its most basic sense, is an essential aspect of the concept
of landscape in Western industrialised societies, because landscapes include personal
emotions and bodily experiences in confrontation with environments. Landscape is
one of the media that hold together as a whole what science analytically must hold
apart (Ritter 1974; Geelmuyden 1989, 1993; Seel 1996).
With its demand for ‘a forward-looking attitude on the part of all those whose
decisions affect the protection, management or planning of landscapes’ (Council of
Europe 2000b, point 28), the Convention represents a recent reinforcement of that
critical modern concept of landscape. Not only does it emphasise the changing
nature of landscapes. It also, though more implicitly, assumes a perspective where
landscapes reflect what people see and feel as well as what they hope for on a
personal, as well as collective level.
According to the Convention (Council of Europe 2000b, point 21)

Europe’s populations want policies and instruments affecting national

territory to take account of their wishes regarding the quality of their
surroundings. In their view, this quality to some extent has to do with the
feelings aroused in them by contemplating the landscape.

The role of the visual is emphasised in the explanatory report’s (Council of Europe
2000b, point 38) elaboration of the Convention’s landscape definition:

‘Landscape’ is defined as a zone or area as perceived by people or visitors,

whose visual features [my emphasis] and character are the result of the action
of natural and/or cultural (that is, human) factors.

Furthermore, the following quotation from a later addition to the Convention

(Council of Europe 2008, point 1.2) states that the quality of people’s everyday
environments should be

recognized as a precondition for individual and social well-being (under-

stood in the physical, psychological and intellectual sense).
 Contemporary pastorals 65

Thus, the idea of cultural welfare is crucial to the Convention’s landscape motif and
it hints at the great complexity of landscape as a cultural phenomenon. However,
whilst the general ethos of the Convention seems to adopt the specifically modern
critical connotations of the term, landscape simultaneously seems to be understood
very widely, as inclusive of a variety of practices and ensuing perceptions-of-areas.
It is unclear whether it also includes perceptions-of-areas that do not have aesthetic
connotations, such as Lewin’s wartime landscape above or, for instance, that of a
lorry driver on an icy road whose motif is ‘keeping the time schedule’.
This ambiguity can be resolved, however, if one thinks of the aesthetic (mostly
visual) ingredient of the landscape concept in terms of a process of image-making or
imagination rather than only in terms of perceived images. Being forward-looking,
then, could mean to acknowledge landscape as a dynamic symbol, with the potential
to incite personal engagement in the environment. This means an acknowl-
edgement of the crucial role of imagination in people’s perception of areas as
landscapes and, consequently, the need to address it in assessments.

The Convention: an implicit pastoral?

Geelmuyden and Fiskevold (2013, 2015 in publ.), have suggested that both the
Convention and the landscape architecture/planning profession are guided not
only by the general cultural motif of nature-seen-as-landscape (Seel 1996; Trepl
2012), but more specifically by a pastoral motif. The pastoral is a mode in Western
art (Alpers 1996) which has had and still has a powerful influence on environ-
mentalism’s attitude and understanding towards land, rural life and nature (Marx
1964; Andrews 1999; Hiltner 2011). Gifford (1999, p. 15) has characterised the
pastoral as follows:

From the beginning of its long history the pastoral was written for an urban
audience and therefore exploited a tension between the town by the sea and
the mountain country of the shepherd, between the life of the court and the
life of the shepherd, between people and nature, between retreat and return.

As Malcolm Andrews (1999, p. 67) has noted, there is a historical connection

between a landscape architecture tradition, the pastoral motif in the arts and
modern environmental concerns:

The close connections found in renaissance Italy between literary pastoral,

landscape painting, gardening, the locus amoenus, and planned landscape
vistas, the promotion of land as aesthetic asset, and the mediation between
domestic and wilder areas of a country estate – all these became central
concerns in Enlightenment thinking about nature.

In the tradition of pastorals, a particular kind of landscape has made up the scene,
typically a clearing in the woods, an open pasture with a spring and grazing sheep,
66 Anne Katrine Geelmuyden

etc. But understanding landscape concerns as an instance of the pastoral mode does
not necessarily mean advocating a nostalgic perspective on the waning qualities of
the rural countryside or unspoiled nature. Rather, acknowledging landscape as
symbol, I suggest looking at pastorals according to Alpers (1996), for whom the
classical pastoral does not have the idyll as its main theme. According to his reading,
shepherds or other persons of low rank represent the lives of common people.
Alpers (ibid.) argues that the core of the literary pastoral is its representation of
shepherds’ coming together in a public and open space to speak about their
vulnerable and dependent existence in the world. According to him (ibid., back
cover), pastorals are

not a vehicle of nostalgia for some Golden Age, nor of escape to idyllic
landscapes, but a means of dealing with loss, decline, and limitation, and
maintaining a sense of human community.

It is tempting to draw a parallel from this citation to the Convention’s emphasis on

cultural welfare and people’s right to participate in decisions concerning landscape.
What else is, in fact, Alpers’s interpretation of the pastoral motif in literature, than
a description of the core of the European Landscape Convention? The Convention
explicitly calls for the people of Europe to convene and discuss their concerns for
a common existence and a better interaction in and with the land.
Landscape as pastoral symbolically expresses a tension between, for instance,
distance (the horizon as visual limit or limit of knowing) and proximity (immediate
reality), between periphery (powerlessness) and centre (seat of power), between the
image as representation of reality as opposed to an imagined/imaginable ideal and
between landscape as product and process (Gifford 1999; Andrews 1999). The
mental movement between these opposites is the essential condition for a
landscape pastoral to have effect. The perceived version of reality is a prerequisite
for the imagined ideal and vice versa. This movement is also a physical one, histor-
ically rooted in the move from the main farm to the summer pastures in rural
societies, or from the city home to the country estate in the case of affluent urban
families. The practice continues in contemporary society, when tourists, weekend
cottage owners and others choose to commute between their everyday work life
in the city and a holiday life in the countryside or other exotic retreats.
With reference to the planning ethos of post-depression USA, as documented
by Marx (1964) and Black (2000), the landscape-planning version of the pastoral
can be seen in the tension between modern exploitative technology and progress
on the one hand, and an aesthetic and protective attitude towards nature as scenery,
on the other. This tension or dialectic has become a stifling dichotomy in today’s
environmental impact assessments for various development projects. As shown
above, guidelines for landscape assessment and evaluation seem to assume that
images and physical components of ‘just-past’ (Gifford 1999; Trepl 2012) land use
practices are a goal for planning in an area. This is an attitude which, more often
than not, is truly Utopian and unsustainable.
 Contemporary pastorals 67

Isn’t the very purpose of landscape identification and assessment to anticipate

and make us competent to cope rationally with change? The question to address
through landscape assessments and evaluations should therefore be ‘How can an
area be imaged, as landscape, at each given time and place, in a way that offers an
alternative to a practical-economical attitude towards people and the environ-
ment?’ We need landscapes that visualise the relationship between culture and
nature as it really is, offering knowledge of the processes that shape the environ-
ment and, at the same time, potential ways of dealing with these as culturally
reflecting and emotional beings.

Contemporary landscape pastorals: imaginative and poetic

narratives
‘Identifying landscapes’, then, could mean telling professionally informed stories
about areas which have the potential of becoming meaningful and inspiring to as
many people as possible, by appealing to their own aspirations and imaginative
powers.
In her story, The Blank Page, Karen Blixen (1957) celebrates imagination as an
essential ingredient in narrative.The blank page acts as a symbol for the ‘open space’
in a story where the listener or the reader must fill in his or her own associations,
images and reflections. Blixen bids us to follow two narrative strategies in story-
telling (ibid. p. 90): The first one is:

Be loyal to the story …. Where the story-teller has been eternally and
unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where
the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness.

Being true to the ‘story’ can mean being true to ‘history’.1 This is a way of saying
that a story will not be good unless it somehow appeals to a commonly shared
(traditional) value. The pastoral motif is as old as our culture itself and could be a
narrative medium for expressing man’s relationship with nature.
However, being true to the story can also mean that this relationship must be
addressed as what it is: landscapes gain presence in the mind of each person as
sensory events, emerging and retained as symbolic images. Therefore, at the same
time as landscape assessments must adhere to recognisable motifs in public dis-
course, they must also appeal to the perceptual faculties of individuals for
recognition and approval. In other words, they must refrain from overly abstract and
specialised disciplinary analyses of the status quo.
Blixen (ibid. p. 92) presents the second imperative ingredient of a good story
with the following words:

Diligence, dear Master and Mistress, is a good thing, and religion is a good
thing, but the very first germ of a story will come from some mystical place
outside the story itself.
68 Anne Katrine Geelmuyden

This passage is more difficult to interpret. It could be hinting at some kind of

divine inspiration, or incident in nature resulting in a novel insight. Maybe the
landscape designer Bernard Lassus (1981, p. 50), advocating landscape as cultural
reading, could be saying something similar:

To say, to show, to make heard, means to propose other readings of what

surrounds us, without modifying the physical presence. … To develop a site is
also to substitute landscapes we did not know how to perceive, imagined
landscapes ….
To reinvent the existing is to rediscover what has been obscured by habit,
perhaps still present but in the process of disappearing.

It is along this same vein, a well-established way of working within design, that I
propose to look at landscape assessments.

Conclusion
The validity of presented landscapes lies in the reader’s willingness to corroborate
the intrinsic values and legitimising strategies of the narrative method used. It is,
therefore, necessary for the landscape expert to understand the tension and inter-
action between the need for a collective set of values, each individual’s perceptive
faculties and the planner’s ability to express landscapes. Landscape assessments must
address all these aspects in an explicit and, thus, disputable way.
With the European Landscape Convention, we have an agenda and a conceptual
platform for the development of such a strategy. However, despite an increased
interest in people’s relationship to landscapes, the methodological debate on land-
scape assessment, even when concerned with people’s participation or questions of
identity, often treats the relationship as static. An examination of the values and
motifs ensuing from the history of the landscape concept reveals a resilient concept, but
hardly static perceptions.
I have suggested the pastoral motif in Western culture as a legacy that it may
prove rewarding to examine closer in order to understand the common value
base of landscapes better. However, it needs continuing reinterpretation to
remain relevant and sustainable. We therefore need to experiment with new
landscape pastorals in planning: through a poetic (productively visualising) and
inviting language, these should link everyday environments to contemporary
ways of living.They might then provide an insight into landscapes that will raise
our individual awareness of ways to deal with perceived challenges in an active
way.

Note
1 The Danish original’s word, historie, implies both ‘story’ and ‘history’.
 Contemporary pastorals 69

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