Landscape at the crossroads, towards a "geo-economic" analysis of rural landscapes
Le paysage à la croisée des chemins, vers une analyse "géo-économique" de paysages ruraux
Résumé
For the economist, as for the geographer, the term landscape is polysemic and refers to several concepts. For the economist, the landscape is both a good, instrument that satisfies human needs, and a resource, that can contribute to the economic activity in some circumstances. This good and this resource exhibit characteristics from publics goods or common pool resources when they are consumed, depending on whether their consumption implies (or not) a modification of their use. But they are also goods/resources with private good characteristic on their production side. Moreover, because the landscape is an intermediate between a natural resource and a man-made one, beyond its production with private goods, the question comes about the common action that coordinates this private production.The geographer analyses the landscape through several spatiotemporal scales, with different definitions according to the different schools. The important point for our reasoning is the landscape analysis always starts with the identification of the elements that give structure to this landscape: biophysical components, their dynamics and their ecological functions, tracks of past and present human activities, the landscape social, economic and cultural functions, the representations that actors design. This paper will examine the way the two approaches can enrich each other and how they can both provide structured concepts and indicators for a better understanding of the landscape status in a territory and for its developing. The first step consists in splitting the object "landscape" in elements that can be handled by the two disciplines. Landscape production and evolution are the result of the dynamic interaction of natural elements (biotic and abiotic ones), of human activities that do not intend to produce landscape, intentional production of landscape pieces. The economists is interested in the mechanisms that result in landscape production as an externality or as a intended production. The geographer rebuilds a various spatiotemporal scales the multiple processes that produced the landscapes and analyses their potentialities for the future. In return, the landscapes allows the productions of goods, resources and services (economic concepts), through environmental, economic and cultural functions (geographic concepts), that relate the above elements. The second step mobilizes the two disciplines to produce indicators that describe the mechanisms that end in the production of landscape elements and that characterise the functions of these elements. The disciplines are mobilized interactively : the economics describes the monetary effects from the externalities, the intentional supply chains, provides keys to evaluate the landscape policies, but the spatial dimension of the processes is a theoretical difficulty; the geography, that is not especially interested in the monetary fluxes, mobilizes tools to spatialize the activities and aggregate the intentional and non-intentional effects at different scales. The third step aggregates the above indicators, structures the different scales according to geographic methods and considers the dynamics of landscape supply and consumption. We apply this approach to the landscape of one territory: the Vallesina valley, on the centre of Marche region (Ancona, Italy). The valley is interesting because it's an historical rural area that - starting from the first decades of XX century - has be interested by a strong industrial, urban and infrasructural development. This new dynamics have changed the characteristic landscape and its structuring elements: however the traces of the historical landscape are still present and in the last years they have been recupered and integrated as elements of urban context, with new functions. The case study suggests interesting elements both for the geographers and the economists, showing by one side the dynamics of landscape production, and on the other side the centrality of landscape as heritage and element of local identity on new processes of planning.