Imagining desirable landscape futures

We live in a period of rapid environmental change with potentially great impact on the landscapes where people develop their livelihoods, interact, and shape their cultures. Today’s actions to protect the environment are based on perceptions of what could be good or bad in future, beneficial or detrimental, necessary, or excessive. Our visions of future landscapes are inevitably based on past and current experiences, and today’s solutions may not have an enduring effect. This talk by Dr Eirini Saratsi considers how our imaginative futures reflect values of care for specific places and considerations of potential challenges and opportunities for the landscapes we would like to live in in the future. The insights come from a project based on public dialogue, carried out in 2014, where people were asked to craft and visualise their desirable vision of the future in 2060 and consider the types of actions necessary to achieve this. These visions compare and, to some degree, validate current policies and social actions for tackling environmental challenges and can provide suggestions for landscape planning and management in the future.

Dr Saratsi is a human geographer with longstanding interests in landscape and environmental studies and works in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, University of Reading. Eirini has collaborated with colleagues in the UK and internationally to deliver a range of research projects concerned with integrating cultural and social values in landscape management and the role of arts and participatory approaches in environmental decision making and the protection of nature.