"Just as the Brisbane wicket after rain used to be said to reduce all batsmen to an equal level of incompetence, so this absence of aesthetic theory brings the professional down to the same plane as the man in the street. It is true that the theory underlying the judging of a fine wine or a good piece of sculpture is probably as obscure as that which underlies the evaluation of landscape. In those arts, however, we still have some faith - possibly misplaced - in the ability of the expert to recognise excellence, however defined (Appleton, 1975)."
Britain's finest cultural landscapes often exist where mainstream
economic practices have serendipitously created iconic scenery. Ecology as an inadvertent side effect,
which first produced hedgerows teeming with life as an inadvertent outcome of
the Enclosure Acts across the English countryside during the eighteenth century.
The economic practices that produced them (perhaps during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries) are increasingly obsolescent and their archaic farming
methods can now only be shored up with taxpayer subsidy. Here, a structured method of landscape
assessment, linking description, classification, analysis and evaluation, will
provide an integrated framework within which decisions on land use management
and advice can be debated.
One of the biggest
problems in developing quantitative assessment methods for scenic impacts is
that of measuring the contributions of specific landscape elements to overall
preference. This to a large extent
rests on determining scenic beauty.
Both similarities and differences have been observed when comparing
scenic beauty evaluations of rural landscapes made by persons from different
cultures and educational background. This implies scenic beauty is dependent
upon meanings assigned to landscape features, which in turn implies that scenic
beauty is, to some extent, learned. Particular concerns
are:
* a concern for the
participant's purpose for evaluating a landscape;
* a concern for the
participant's familiarity with a landscape;
* and a concern for
the criterion's appropriateness to all
participants.
Numerous techniques of landscape evaluation have been devised in recent years. They form a spectrum in which the extremes are represented on the one hand by techniques based unequivocally on the subjective assessments of landscape quality by individuals or groups and on the other by techniques using physical attributes of landscape as surrogates for personal perception.
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