Cross-cutting theme: Landscape and Democracy

Working group coordination

Anna Szilágyi-Nagy (LE:NOTRE)
Deni Ruggeri (LED Project, NMBU)

>>>Download detailed programme landscape and democracy

The landscape belongs to everyone. We should all have equal access to it and a voice in how it is used, valued and maintained. Planners and designers are therefore required to understand better which narrations, power structures and conflicts are hidden in a landscape. Conflicting interests exist in any landscape. But they also generate dialogue and can lead to better alternatives, if a community-based communication process is designed well and without predefined solutions.

The participants of this cross-cutting workshop will join the forum with a shared idea of how to look at the landscape from a landscape democracy perspective. This knowledge will be built up in advance during the online seminar ‘Landscape Education for Democracy’, starting on 5th of April 2017. The group members will jointly develop a framework for comparing the four forum landscape sections.

Aspects we are going to look at include: power structures and power mapping, inclusion of weak/unheard groups, equal access to landscape assets, exposure to environmental risks and diversity of uses and user groups. We will use exploratory and interactive methods for understanding the landscape democracy layer in the forum landscapes. These are amongst others:

role playing as a method to uncover the diversity of perspective in a community
DPSIR and SWOT analysis to understand specific landscape democracy challenges
sacred structure mapping, an inventory of the community’s landscape assets, seen through the lens of their everyday experiences
nominal group technique as a tool for collective goal setting
strategic landscape change: implementing a coherent and democratic vision for landscape change

The group will come together again for a comparative analysis and envision democratic change scenarios for the landscapes under consideration.

Registration for the LED online seminar needs to be done in addition to the forum registration under the following link: http://www.led-project.org.

The LED online seminar sessions start already on Wednesday, 5th of April 2017.