This project explores the role of landscape planning in dealing with complex environmental and societal problems - both historically and in the present. The aim is to develop a theoretical framework for reviewing landscape planning.
Landscape planning has been (re)introduced and reinvented several times in Swedish planning history. This has been done to cope with new, complex and interdisciplinary environmental problems. Given the unprecedented socio-environmental challenges of today, and the dire need to rethink spatial and environmental planning beyond the troubled silos of modern categories and administration, we need to learn from this history. Also, this history is important as it has partly shaped the contemporary landscape and planning.
This project explores what landscape planning can, and has, contributed by:
- studying the history of Swedish landscape planning;
- offering an international outlook;
- developing a theoretical framework for examining landscape planning
(supported by a unique combination of landscape- and planning theory and relational ontology);
- testing the research's relevance to today's planning together with a group of experts.
The history and theory of landscape planning are strikingly under-researched, both nationally and internationally. Here the project will make an important contribution. At the national level, the project aims to initiate a discussion about the possibilities for, and the value of, landscape planning, through:
- popular science publication;
- dialogues and collaborations with an expert group around the environmental challenges they work with and what a landscape perspective can contribute with;
- a critical review of an ongoing plan or investigation.
