Editorial: Law, Polity and the Changing Meaning of Landscape

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Notes

Since 1994 the ‘Council of Europe's Congress of Local and Regional Authorities (CLRAE)’.

Statement attributed to an anonymous student by the geographer Marvin W. Mikesell (pers. comm. nd.).

Besides individual research, the group organized a series of monthly seminars and workshops, concluding with an international conference. During the year 120 papers were presented at these meetings, and some 80 publications were completed or are forthcoming. The seminar topics were: conceptualizations of landscape; custom, law and landscape; justice and just environments; the dialectics of language and landscape; old and new commons; landscape, law and customary rights; cultural and natural heritage; and law and custom in relation to biodiversity and landscape protection. The articles by Anne Whiston Spirn and Gregory Taff, although significantly re-written, had their genesis in the final conference of the group (Jones & Peil, 2005). Don Mitchell was a regular participant in the meetings and I was a fellow in the group, which was directed by Prof. Michael Jones, Department of Geography, University of Trondheim, Norway. Don Mitchell (with Lynn Staeheli) and I, subsequently had the opportunity to develop our work on this subject through presentations at the “Law, Landscape and Ethics” conference held in 2004 at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati, Spain. Alexander Scherr also made a presentation there of his work with Deborah G. Martin. These presentations have subsequently undergone significant revision and change in preparation for this special issue.

This is the subject of another Landscape Research article in which it is suggested, in the concluding sentence, that an important planning goal is to make it possible to “still see Aelbert Cuyp's landscapes in the 21st century” (Lörzing, 2004, p. 369).