Landscape analysis

The analyzes landscape is a method of analysis of surrounding space in three stages, making it possible to include/understand and interpret the operation of a natural Paysage. The three stages are:

to see : it is the reading of the landscape ;
to include/understand : it is the analyzes landscape as such;
to interpret : it is the synthesis of the study.

This analysis is in general carried out at the time of projects of installations having an impact on the studied landscape, in order to determine which are the significant points to preserve or to emphasize.

Reading of the landscape

First stage of the landscape analysis, it is a significant approach landscape, i.e. which utilizes the directions rather than the reasoning. While arriving on a place, it is first of all the sight which guides the individual. It is a natural reflex, an automatism. A general impression will emerge from the landscape which one discovers for the first time: it will seem to us beautiful, calm and resting, ugly, or monotonous, etc

The step becomes active and either passive then: one will list the elements of the landscape, while starting with the general descriptive elements and while going until the detail.

Perception of space

They are all the visual feelings which the study of the landscape gets: textures, colors, the type of line dominant (curve, vertical, horizontal), the opening of the landscape in general or compared to the man, the mode of principal displacement in the landscape and the rate of travel.

Geometry of the landscape

It is the fitting of the various elements between them: plans of sight (the foreground, the intermediate plan, background), effects geometrical (shoulder, framing, effect of window, door, the presence of the points of call, reference mark, escape.

Limits of the reading of the landscape

This phase of reading of the landscape presents three disadvantages which one can circumvent:

the analysis is specific in space: the impressions and the structure of the landscape which one has of this one is different according to the place where one is located. To cure that, it is enough to multiply the sites of observations, to even carry out the reading of the landscape during a route which will cross the landscape. The preliminary use of a chart IGN of the area makes it possible to prepare a route or to locate the points which seem most favourable with the observation (those in height, having a vast field of view for example).
the analysis is also specific in time, whereas a landscape is dynamic. The spaces used by the man are never fixed, since it adapts it according to his needs, and these needs change during time. One will quote the example of modificaitons deep landscape had with the agricultural déprise or the Remembrement of the agricultural pieces. For lack of time to carry out a follow-up would be this only medium-term, one can turn to the many sources of local history: public libraries, faculties of geography or history, historians local, inhabitants or elderly).
finally, the landscape analysis is inevitably subjective, since from one observer to another the reflection will be necessarily influenced by the personal tastes, its age, its experiment, its trade, its interest for the installation or the safeguarding of the natural environments, etc It is in general not materially and/or financially to carry out an analysis with several people, it is then appropriate to at the head keep this subjectivity during the analysis.

Landscape analyzes

The analysis aims to identify and decipher the elements listed during the reading of the landscape, by attaching each one of them to one or more functions quite precise of the landscape as a medium of life. For example:

the cultivated grounds are attached to the problems of agricultural management of space, of control of the Intrant S and Extrant S;
the River is connected to the concepts of stock management of fishing, drinkable water resource, etc
etc

Synthesis

Like all System, the landscape must be considered as such during a landscape analysis, by integrating all its elements: fauna, flora, ground, human activities, history, etc but also relations between these elements. This part of the landscape analysis aims at reconstituting the existing bonds between the elements of the landscape, in order to propose a diagnosis of the actual position, and to propose a Pronostic future state, based on the relations which one succeeded in identifying and the knowledge of the history of the site.

The synthesis of the landscape analysis is in particular the field of action of the ecology of the landscape, which utilizes knowledge of very diverse disciplines like the Botanique, the Zoologie, the ecology of the populations, but also the Sociologie.

See too

External bonds

CRDAP - Regional center of Documentation on the Archeology of the Landscape (Reading of the landscape in the Limousin)

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