Green management plans for European urban and peri-urban Landscapes
EUROSCAPES is a shared vision of 14 partners coming from 13 EU Member States on the necessity to tackle natural and cultural landscapes' management issues in urban and peri-urban areas at an interregional level and in a sustainable way. In dense and contrasting urban environments, tackling the concept of landscapes and its related issues will prevent their loss of specificity and identity, and help to make best use of these areas. In urban and peri-urban areas facing demographic changes, climate change issues, increasing economic constraints, environmental challenges… exchanges of good practices and expertise will help regional and local authorities to be more efficient in protecting, maintaining and enhancing their natural and cultural landscapes in a sustainable way. Partners of EUROSCAPES have the ambitious objective of offering a new management model for these landscapes, as a milestone policy instrument to implement the European Landscape Convention treaty objectives.
Partners of the project have identified complementarities in their tools, practices and policy instruments to deal with landscape management. They will refine these complementarities, exchange and transfer good practices with a scientific support and use these good practices to feed the Landscapes Management Plan (LMP) they will develop: new approach meabt to become a real public policy at the regional/local level. These LMP are based on an environmental, quality and economical approach in the maintenance and management of our natural and cultural landscapes. They will integrate important education and sensitization dimensions and take into account the territorial strategy, urban master plans etc. The Project will produce a Handbook of good practices and a Policy recommendation paper on the LMP approach as main outputs. The main results of the project will be improved local/regional landscapes management practices & policy instruments and a more sustainable living environment.
The project rests on three main innovative aspects. The areas concerned – natural and cultural landscapes in urban and peri-urban areas (green spaces like gardens, parks, squares… but also paths, riversides, deprived landscapes etc.) – are not well taken into account in planning and protecting instruments today and not in a coherent and sustainable way. Secondly the approach is based on a global strategic plan using the differentiated management methodology (to be environmentally responsible, different kinds of management are defined for different kinds of landscapes identified based on their use and quality). Thirdly partners have all committed to jointly develop a Landscapes Management Plan, as a new model of sustainable and integrated management strategy, which will be based on the good practices analysed and exchanged.