Implications for Future Landscape Inquiry, Planning, and Design

The landscape undergoes continuous change, much of it by “design,” broadly defined, that shapes the pursuit and consequences of human aims. In the last 50 years we have seen cities and farmland transformed by the expansion of suburbs into a phenomenon now called “sprawl.” The independent family farmer envisioned by Thomas Jefferson appears on the verge of extinction with the rise of national and transnational agricultural corporations. The displacement of locally owned business by national chains continues to attract public attention, awareness, mass patronage, and varying degrees of resistance. For all of the technologies, services, and amenities available in our communities, many still do not have access to them. However, as Nassauer and Wascher show in chapter 8, European landscape policies have begun to address these issues by connecting international political jurisdictions, land uses, ecosystems, and economic systems. They strive to fulfill Boulding’s concept of an “integrative power” that seeks to harmonize the political and economic forces of landscape change on an international scale, as well as on the national, regional, and local scales illustrated by some US and European landscape conservation policies.