The Prospective Vision: Integrating the Farmers’ Point of View into French and Belgian Local Planning

Abstract

The integration of the farmers’ point of view is rarely considered in planning procedures. This chapter presents a participatory method of landscape mediation termed the Prospective Vision, involving graphic and social landscape representations as collaborative learning processes. It is applied in two French-speaking contexts: Urban Local Planning in Billom, France, and the Landscape Charter of Attert, Belgium. The study’s two main findings were that the use of landscape representations reveals specific landscape and territorial features at different scales of observation, and it facilitates the expression of farmers’ points of view and Open image in new window their involvement in planning operations. This heuristic and constructivist approach to sharing local knowledge highlights the challenges of finding new methods for applying the participatory objectives of the European Landscape Convention.