Contenu du sommaire

It may be useful to go back over nature of landscape again, especially for geographers : either an object of sensitive perception and therefore, by definition, unsuitable for scientific approach, or an objective and mesurable reality allowing rationnal processes and discourse ? Without any doubt, both of them with manifold attempts to rediscover landscape as a whole.

The paper deals with problems of landscape evaluation : study areas, types of views, and the going over from a subjective appraisal to a numerical assessment, chiefly through the identification of measurable components. It reviews and compares the main points of the existing methods, especially in the United-Kingdom.

Wether fashionable landscape and townscape serveys are nowadays, they remain questionable as far as method questions are concerned. Scouting the approach presented here, based upon the banks of Rhone and Saone rivers throughout their runs accross the Lyon's City Council Territory, proposes first to clear out some useful reflexion tools starting from a wholesale landscape viewpoint and then to point out such concepts as « landscape unit » and « landscape interrelationship ». With the help of analogy, the purpose aims to teach actual motions underleying the townscape features of Lyon's Urban Community. Nevertheless such a dimension as « townscape quality » still remains to take into account.

The limit between objective and subjective approaches of landscape implies the recognition of enough widespread patterns which can be generalized and classified. The study of granitic landscapes in mediterranean countries allows to support this proposition owing to the originality of their morphologic characteristics in the various taxonomie levels. This originality is extending to registers as various as littoral morphology, hydrology and even local architecture.

Modern planning is gradually surimposing itself on traditional landscapes ruined by rural depopulation. An incoherent tangled network of functions, forms and signs has taken over from the harmonious and well ordered areas. Space has lost its previous features without taking on any value of the present time. Because of political reasons and lack of competence, the National Parc des Ecrins and the local administration have failed to stem these anarchic developments.

Nara Basin is typical of a strong spatial and social organisation, which created the archetype of a traditional japanese landscape, in a physical environment very well individualized. Located thirty kilometers from Osaka, it enters the field of High-Growth, of which it constitutes the urban (suburbanisation of residential quarters and « new-towns »/bed towns) and industrial (highway industrial areas) background. There is at once continuity and discontinuity between the new and traditional landscape-construction, without really knowing which of the factors of balance or unbalance will take avantage.