Integrated landscape management and the complicating issue of temporality

Abstract

Landscape has become widely accepted as a concept for embracing the natural sphere as well as human society. There are, however, challenges in implementing the somewhat overarching rhetoric. This article takes a conceptual and deconstructive approach and elucidates complications in integrated landscape management, with a certain focus on landscape and time. Cases from some European areas, where integrative planning instruments are applied, serve as examples. The drawing of borders and the categorisation of areas are central aspects in understanding what constitutes integration, implying that negotiations and the weighing of different values are vital elements in integrated landscape management. Landscape management is inevitably an activity in the present, which is why landscape management needs to be based on good knowledge about the present conditions. In order to retain landscape qualities it is necessary to continuously reveal contemporary processes and reconsider and elaborate on functions and contexts that connect humans and their physical environment.