The scales of landscape

Cieza, Murcia (España). Fotografía: José Quinteiro

The title of this monographic, The scales of landscape answers to the many lectures that today have landscape, since its conceptual birth or its recognition as a value that must be integrated with the interpretation of a site. There are many and diverse definitions about landscape, including its attributive use as cultural, and including in a single term numerous meanings.

The present issue will offer a kaleidoscopic vision, considering landscape moreover than a simple perception of a geographic fact, rarely natural.  In fact, we assume that today a few places could be considered free of human interventions in one way or another. Historical sites, buildings, water courses transformations, water reservoirs, coastal land extensions, modified sandy areas, or the destruction caused by natural values abuse back up this assessment.

In this way, we have places that have acquired an aesthetic quality, as landscape have always had a beauty connotation related to harmony and balance, but it’s also unquestionable that we can talk about diminished spaces, about places where a building has destroy a view and so on.

But we are not interested in landscape by itself, as an aesthetic place. Instead, we are attracted by its ability to be transformed by a project, with a conscious intervention that turns it into a different place, with new qualities that add value to the existing situation, or improve it, transforming it in what we imagine when we talk about landscape.

All interventions are not the same. Some are born with the aim of creating landscape, with the collaboration of time. Another wants to recover a diminished space, or to design a strategic vision in the long term, from the design of a garden up to the territorial scale. We are interested about all their objectives, the elements that have been used, vegetation, different materials, colours, new or consolidated uses, or the transformation degree of the territory, regardless of its size. Even the economy of means employed in those places with minimal interventions, or their proliferation, which have as result motley spaces, full of contents and beautiful as well.

The content of this issue will allow us to appreciate creativity, trends, or influences, but also new ways to look and how society is changing, improving their culture, and appreciating and asking for new ways of interventions, as places that has not been attended by no one acquire suddenly importance, so they are defended and protected, resulting an intervention as matter of debate.

We will talk about three different scales in the articles that open this number, understood as a dimension. The article that refers to Jordanal, in Altos de María (situated about 1,000 metres high in Panama) is a project that goes from the regional scale to the vegetation habitats, including a residential development program and a river park. It incorporates a great diversity of proposals that put in charge this type of projects of intervention in the territory, with great challenges from the landscape point of view that oscillate between the natural and the artificial as components of the new landscape.

There’s also a landscape construction project in an unirrigated land in Candeleda (Avila, Spain) in which the plantation of trees build a new space, practically without altering the ground. The third article is about Ribeira do Matadouro Park, in Santo Tirso (Portugal). This is a linear park related to a stream in which the protection of natural resources is connected to a proposal of new facilities, whose aim is not only to preserve, but also to promote.

The great interest aroused by our last issue is the reason why the section of miscellany includes again articles about mobility, from analytical topics up to other about projects.