Cultural landscapes: Education and Citizen Participation for Their Recovery and Conservation

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, we have witnessed a profound and accelerated transformation of our landscapes. A transformation caused by antagonistic causes, either by their abandonment and depopulation—as is happening in many rural areas—or as a result of a massive urbanisation process derived from economic, political, or cultural decisions, sometimes not even deliberate by the people who inhabit them. In any case, neither one nor the other represent us, we do not identify with them, they have lost their meaning, and, of course, they do not affect our mood, nor do they arouse feelings, experiences, or diverse emotions, but have become impersonal, unimportant.

As a result of this reality, in the year 2000, the European Landscape Convention was signed in Florence.  This Convention establishes guidelines that affect the different mechanisms of action on the landscape. By virtue of Article 5, each party undertakes to legally recognise its landscapes as expressions of its heritage; to promote measures for their protection, management and planning; to establish procedures for public participation in the landscape; as well as to integrate the landscape into any political measure, of whatever nature, that has a direct or indirect impact on the landscape.

In order to achieve the proposed objectives, a series of specific measures are provided for the following: perception and awareness-raising; training, education, and dissemination; identification and qualification; and, finally, implementation and intervention. One of the main axes is that the participation of the local population is recommended in any of the aforementioned mechanisms. Citizens must be the protagonists of the decisions or determinations related to their landscape, in order to prevent them from not only seeing their signs of identity threatened, but also to ensure that they are the ones who benefit most from these actions.

In short, the landscape is not only a heritage element, which tells us about our past, identifies us as a people, or is exalted as a tourist resource to attract visitors, but it is, above all, a project for the future, built and recognised by the whole human group, and which, in function of this, adopts a social intervention—knowing, thinking, deciding, and acting—that is responsible for the landscape. Therefore, we should not try to fossilise the landscape, but rather, as the inhabited space that it is, we should address its possible changes as the people who inhabit it do so. These changes must depend on the decisions of the community, who must participate actively in an open dialogue together.

This is basically the concern and aim of this monograph: to value, recover, and conserve the cultural landscape as part of our cultural heritage, but also to raise awareness among the population and encouraging their participation in this process.

The aim of this Special Issue is to compile original research articles and review articles that provide knowledge in relation to two questions:

1. One related to the perception of the landscape by the people who inhabit it, how they value and identify with it, whether they are aware of the role that, both individually and as a collective, they have in its construction and protection, not to mention how they transmit it.
2. Provide adequate education and training of the population to act on the landscape with the implications that these entail for its totality, as well as their capacity to reflect on the actions that can be implemented to not only avoid the degradation and deterioration of landscapes, but also to enhance their wellbeing.
3. Promote sustainable tourism that favours the economic development of the territories, while guaranteeing the conservation of landscapes and the integration between tradition and modernity.

This Special Issue will welcome manuscripts that link the following themes:

The protection of the landscape as a cultural asset;

Landscape and its education;

Landscape education;

Examples of sustainable planning and management;

Landscape and citizen participation;

Controversial landscapes;

Heritage education and tourism.

We look forward to receiving your original research articles and reviews.

Prof. Dr. Ana María Hernández Carretero

Prof. Dr. Rebeca Guillén Peñafiel

Prof. Dr. José Manuel Sánchez Martín

Guest Editors

Dr. Ana María Hernández Carrtero
Dr. Rebeca Guillén-Peñafiel
Prof. Dr. J. M. Sánchez-Martín
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• - Cultural landscape - Heritage education - Citizen participation - Sustainability - Landscape education - Planning