The Right to Landscape: Contesting Landscape and Human Rights

The recent 60th anniversary of the declaration of human rights has prompted reflections on the past achievements and limitations of the international community's efforts to address profound ethical human dilemmas through charters and legislation. It is also timely to examine future ways of dealing with human rights in the context of the impending climate change crisis that is bound to inflict further hardships and exacerbate pressing issues of human rights. This "perfect storm" scenario generates a rapidly changing world order which must simultaneously contend with heightened and new conflicts and their attendant human rights violations. In order to do so, it will be necessary to design and create holistic frameworks that focus and capitalise on the power and leverage of connections at local, regional, national and global scales. The speed and potential impact of change means it is urgent for intellectuals to build a new interdisciplinary discursive framework and engage in research to undertake visionary, sound and just responses to the anticipated complex humanitarian problems. The material bearings of landscape are the foundation for securing livelihoods and planning for equitable futures and so 'landscape' proposes a pertinent holistic framework to address such challenges as it implies both a conceptual framework for identity construction and a physical context.This book introduces a rich and innovative new discourse which links Landscape with Human Rights. It then serves as a platform to inspire a diversity of ideas and conceptual interpretations. Such investigations test the discourse on a regional scale within the European Landscape Convention, and locally, in terms of indigenous claims and community rights. The case studies discussed are wide in their geographical distribution and interdisciplinary in the theoretical situation of their authors, breaking fresh ground for an emerging dialogue on the convergence of landscape and human rights.