B 6.2 The increasing mobility of persons, goods and information

"The availability of concentrated forms of energy allowed the generalized use of cars – or public transportation – for daily or weekly trips or journeys. As a consequence, the scale of local communities changes: parishes had to be consolidated in most modern countries so as to cope with the enlarged circles in which life is structured. The local regulation of landscape management is deeply disturbed by this evolution.
The increasing human mobility has had an important impact on land demand: people choose suburban locations because they wish to enjoy larger homes, private gardens as well as parks and playgrounds in the vicinity. This evolution is facilitated by the higher output of farms: it is possible to cope with food demand with less arable land. The increasing mobility is thus responsible for the transformation of many former rural landscapes.
The higher mobility increases the proportion of people living in a place, or visiting it, who have no local roots and did not develop a local consciousness: many of the actors who have an impact on local environments (such as tourists, owners of second homes, recent immigrants, employees of big corporations who keep moving from one of its factories to the other) do not feel responsible for them and the associated landscapes.
With lower transportation costs, goods became more mobile: the size of markets (for raw materials, energy, food, machinerey, etc.) grows rapidly. The time when many of them were national is over. We are living at a time of continental, intercontinental or global markets. This means that competition has become harsher: local decisions are increasingly affected by the performance of firms located in South America, Eastern Asia, India, etc. In order to reduce their production costs, many farmers or industrialists are cutting down on their environmental expenses.
The increased mobility of news and information has transformed the Earth into a global village: people become very quickly acquainted with new fashions, new attitudes. They adopt new consumption habits and mimick the behaviour of the well-to-do people in more developed countries. This is the negative side of the transformation. There is also a positive one: a growing consciousness of the limits of Earth and of the global threats on environment.
The increased mobility of people and information also has important consequences on the territorial organization of modern societies: because of the wider scale of many environmental externalities, larger scale administrative units are now involved in environmental and landscape regulation – regional instead of local, national instead of regional, continental instead of national, etc. The global scale is increasingly significant because of the green house effect and the ozone hole around the South Pole.
Because point to point communication is easier, a deep change in the role of organizations is occurring. Those which were based on a hierarchy of territorial competences – the political, administrative and up to a point religious ones (for the Roman Catholic Church, for instance) – have lost the monopoly they had on territorial information and the settling of territorial problems. They have increasingly to compete with non-terriotorial forms of organization: enterprises, sects, non-governmental organizations. This means that the whole structure of environmental and landscape policies is changing."

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