B 7.1 The study of rural landscapes

"(i) Rural landscapes attracted much attention from the beginning. The main features of many of them resulted from policies developed by central governments. They imposed geometric grid patterns in order to facilitate settlement in undeveloped areas, to distribute their lands in an efficient way to farmers, and to build an efficient system for levying land taxes. The best examples were provided by the early Chinese or Japanese geometric systems of land division, the Roman cadastration, the American grid pattern as developped from 1784 onwards, or the policies of land consolidation as practiced from the forteenth century, and mainly in the eighteeenth and nineteenth centuries in England, in the 1700s in Scotland and about the same time in Sweden.

Instead of a geometric model centrally planned, there were many cases when local authorities were responsible for the policies of land development. They also often relied on geometric solutions: the same models were reproduced from place to place, but without any spatial continuity between them – as in the Waldehuffendörfer of Early modern central Europe or the French Canadian rang.
(ii) Agricultural and pastoral activities were in many cases organized and managed by local communities which enjoyed some measure of autonomy and tried to be as self-sufficient as possible.
The problem was to capitalize on the different land capabillities and to organize land uses in order to cover most of the needs of the group, and take advantage of some of the local capabilities in order to export some productions and buy elsewhere what could not be locally obtained. Roman agronoms reflected in this way on the complementary of silva, which produced game and timber, saltus, which offered firewood and charcoal, and was used as rough pasture for the herds and flocks of the community, and ager which was mainly specialized in the production of the Mediterranean trilogy of wheat, olives and wine.
In many cases, an ecological and socio-economic system was planned in each locality. Two main types of structures were imagined: (i) the infield/outfield system, in which the arable land (infield, or ager) occupied only a small part of the territory, protected from the herds and flocks which wandered in the moors of the outfield (or saltus) by fences; (ii) the openfield system, in which crop rotation was organized between the three fields devoted to winter cereals, spring cereals or legumes and fallow; in this way, ager and saltus were almost completely integrated, since fallows and stubble fields served as temporary forms of saltus.
The evolution of infield/outfield systems led to another type of rural landscape. With a growing population, an intensification of land use was necessary. It relied on the transformation of a growing part of the moors into farm land. The evolution was generally a piecemeal one: in order to protect the new plough-fields from the teeths of herds and flocks, they had to be protected by fences or walls: hence the development of farmland criss-crossed by hedges and trees (bocage in French) (Claval, 2007). The process was no longer a structural one. It was rather based on a generative grammar, which led to the progressive extension of a new type of farmland.
In systems of swidden cultivation, the relation of ager and saltus was based on long term rotations.
(iii) Agricultural and pastoral activities were not always aimed at the satisfaction of local demand and local needs. They produced for exterior markets, often faraway ones. The aim was not to organize self-sufficient social cells, but to export local productions.
In such systems, farming is subject to many forms of hazards: natural ones, as elsewhere, caused by frosts, droughts, floods, etc., and economic ones, linked to the variations of demand and the ensuing fluctuations of prices. Hence the vulnerability of small farms and the predominance of large ones – latifundias.
The rural landscapes of latifundias differed widely from those of self-sufficient agriculture because of their larger fields. Whenever exportations failed, big farms tended to divide their land among small sharecroppers, in more self-sufficient systems.
(iv) The logic behind land uses is changing rapidly all over the wide areas subject to suburbanization or rurbanization. Agricultural production is no longer the dominant concern, even if there are still farmers and if farming is the most important form of land use. For many, the rural scenery is appreciated as far as it is harmonious and pleasant; they fight for the conservation of features more attuned to traditional agricultural techniques than to contemporary ones. At the same time they wish find places to practice the sports they like: hence the growing extension of golf links, tennis courts, swimming pools, etc. At the same time, they are fond of truly natural environments: hence their efforts to preserve the natural flora and fauna, even when the presence of wild animals is not welcomed by the farmers.
The result is a patchwork with no dominant logic – and often dubious results both on the aesthetic and the ecological sides."

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