Landscape Research Trends and Some Insights from Rurban Landscape

Abstract

In the course of present intensive transformations of rural, urban and natural environments new types of dynamic and complex landscapes emerge which possess both rural and urban features. These unseen and problematic types of landscape not only require deeper understanding, new terms, and categorizations, but also represent the concentrated manifestation of the contradictory and complicated processes, affecting the today’s landscapes and the field of landscape research. Thus the aim of the research was to distinguish the significant landscape development and research trends and to illustrate them with the trends and features characteristic to rurban landscapes. The literature review and subsequent analysis allowed us to distinguish several major challenges of landscape development and landscape research relevant to rurban studies: the increasing pace and scale of landscape change, the increasing complexity of landscapes, proliferation and fragmentation of knowledge regarding landscapes, problems related to handling the subjective dimension in landscape valuation, and the landscape aesthetics challenges. We have analyzed these trends and the peculiarities related with rurban landscape – transitional character, multidirectional change, and time depth, tensions and conflicts, diversity, chaos, and uniformity - in greater detail. The research method is the desk-top study including literature review. This analysis has shown that the rurban landscapes not only showcase in the concentrated manner the concerns and opportunities related with ongoing landscape restructuring, but as the landscapes of new complexity require a distinctive approach.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.erem.67.1.5984