Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Birmingham City University
ELC: A powerful tool to champion the landscape
This chapter, based a presentation at the UNISCAPE conference, Landscape and Imagination (Paris 2013), synthesizes the main premise of Overlooking the Visual (output 1) with further research to understand its implications in respect of international policy, European legislation and major infrastructure development.
The principle aims of this research were to:
1. Apply the interdisciplinary and holistic approach to propose, lead and shape the development of international policy.
2. Demonstrate the power of the idea of landscape to act as a mediator between administrative, technical and social forces.
3. Signal the responsibility the built environment professions have and the ways they can capitalize on this approach, given the global challenges we face.
This work is directing United Nations agencies, UNESCO, and other NGO’s to the wider value of ordinary rather than outstanding landscape and providing rigorously researched reasons for valuing it, as a consequence, agencies are contemplating creating policy/law, etc., to protect it.
The research included:
1. Analysis of the success and potential of the European Landscape Convention, in consultations with the lawyers from the Centre International de Droit Comparé de l'Environement, Limoges, responsible for drafting the ELC.
2. Holding an international seminar in April 2009 in BIAD/BCU, with leading practitioners from across Europe, the documenting and analysis of their responses.
3. Reactions to a multidisciplinary expert seminar curated for UNESCO (2010), presentations to the UNESCO ambassadors (April 2011), to UNESCO IPOGEA and FAO GIAHS (2012) and presentations at a number of interdisciplinary academic conferences.
4. Detailed analysis of legal reports, attendance and presentations at Council of Europe meetings in Strasbourg and Cordoba
5. Synthesis and application to create a spatial, conceptual and visual proposal for HS2LV, exhibited at Rhythm Presence and currently being considered by the UK Government (2012)
