CHeriScape III

Oslo (Norway), 19th – 20th May 2015

Landscape as Community

One of the strongest ties that binds landscape and heritage is their relationship to people, individually but above all in communities of various sorts, notably of place or of interest and (as in the Faro Convention) heritage communities. Heritage and landscape are key issues in local society. One of the substantive and oldest meanings of landscape is that of community, a shared territory, a body of custom. The third CHeriScape conference therefore took ‘community’ as its starting point and aimed to bring specialists and stakeholders into fruitful discussion about the capacity of landscape to support socially and environmentally sustainable decisions and futures. We discussed how landscape can create a structure within which communities can engage in decision making and participatory processes in planning. Words such as identity, awareness, stewardship, communality and responsibility will be key concepts in this conference. Reconnecting to and through landscape is a live debate these days, perhaps especially in the more intangible areas of heritage and landscape, in relation to social and demographic change and how communities share or reserve their land, goods and services.