From Landscape Atlas to Flemish Heritage Landscapes: Using landscape inventories to formulate landscape quality objectives in a participative process

The European Landscape Convention recommends the realisation of landscape policy, meaning “an expression by the competent public authorities of general principles, strategies and guidelines that permit the taking of specific measures aimed at the protection, management and planning of landscapes”. Landscape quality objectives should be formulated by the competent public authorities, including the aspirations of the public with regard to the landscape features of their surroundings. The responsible authorities in Flanders faced many questions to achieve these tasks. Landscape entities to be management had to be defined, landscape qualities and values formulated, but according to what time horizon, who are the different stakeholders and who is the public to be involved? Only small adjustments were made to the existing legislation on the protection of monuments, sites and landscapes to meet the recommendations of the ELC. Two of the new approaches used today are analysed in this paper. First, there is the designation of heritage landscapes through a long process of spatial planning. Second, there is a faster thematic approach of protecting particular landscape elements as monuments. Two different legal procedures are used with different aspects of public’s participation. Examples of their application so far were analysed as case studies. The Landscape Atlas in Flanders (2000) forms a basic inventory for the current landscape policy, which aims to be more integrated an cover most policy domains. A process was set up to designate selected anchor places from the Atlas, defining specific landscape quality objectives which should be used in the procedure of spatial planning to become managed as heritage landscapes. About 29 anchor places have been subject to the first phase of this procedure, which engages mainly policy makers and administrations to realise the objectives. In this phase participation consists mainly of external expert judgment and the input by different administrations that take care of sector interests. The analysis shows that the landscape quality objectives are defined by the responsible administration and aim at conservation of the existing landscape values and character. The input of the public remains mainly indirect and has little influence on the final formulation of the landscape quality objectives and the decision of designating. The direct influence of landscape policy ends when procedures of spatial planning take over in a second phase. Thus monitoring of the real developments in these heritage landscapes will be essential to evaluate if the landscape quality objectives are realized. The second case consists in the protection of special vegetation forms which are representative for particular cultural practices such as pollarding. Here objects are proposed as protected monuments which engage landowners to maintain them and the participation procedure is more direct. The analysis shows a large indifference by the authorities concerned and some negative responses by the landowners which are mainly based on misinformation.