Aesthetically Performed Landscape Criticism

The role of landscape analysis in a professional planning situation is to convey a common, imagined, future landscape. To represent the complexity of qualities of an area acknowledged as landscape, it is necessary to perform an aesthetic landscape criticism. Within this understanding, an aesthetic act of thinking and writing is required to capture landscape qualities adequately. In meeting the European Landscape Convention’s aim to raise landscape awareness, a hermeneutic approach is therefore more appropriate than a positivistic one. However, the aesthetical approach is barely recognized in the Norwegian planning system today. Landscape Observatories introduce apparently neutral mapping systems made to categorize and document areas. Unfortunately, they fail to capture the distinctive qualities that create landscape character and may thus reduce the complexity of a landscape. By offering a positivistic alternative intended to map landscape qualities and raise landscape awareness, these mapping systems will weaken the position of the aesthetical approach even more. In the future, we need to focus on how to convey information provided by mapping systems by performing landscape criticisms aesthetically in order to raise landscape awareness.