B 5.0 Preamble

"Landscapes are humanized realities. Policy makers cannot be indifferent to their form and evolution. They wish to have them settled and exploited, or preserved as testimonies of what nature was like before humanization. Landscapes have an archeological dimension, since a part of the field systems, farms, mansions or castles they offer dates from a more or less distant past and speak about the history of the local and national communities. Landscapes are valued for many reasons: in traditional societies, they constitute a familiar setting that everyone is able to understand, and which contributes to the building of individual and collective identities; in more developed societies, it is through their visual qualities, as objects of consumption, that they are increasingly valued; at a time when the pressure on ecological systems endangers their functioning, those which remain «natural» enough, for still being resilient, have to be protected."

(This is an excerpt from the text by Professor Paul Claval “THE IDEA OF LANDSCAPE”)