ABSTRACT
This Introduction by the book’s editors guides the reader though the book and sets out the logic of the arrangement of the 18 chapters that follow. It places the spread of landscape character-based approaches over the past 30 years into a wider context, principally that of the European Landscape Convention, but also in terms of the variety supported by the word landscape, the integrating power of the landscape concept in its widest sense, and the ability of a landscape approach to enable joined-up thinking in policy and practice. The ways in which an approach developed in Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s has been adopted in many other European countries is examined critically, particularly in relation to the existence in Europe of other long-established approaches to understanding and valuing landscape, notable in France and Germany. The global context is also explored, in relation to the book’s chapters on landscape culture in other parts of the world where Indigenous and European attitudes have met. The introduction ends with a brief look forward.
