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Abstract
This collaborative Working Paper is the final and re-elaborated product of a workshop held at the EUI, organised in the framework of a working group on Cultural Heritage. It is meant as a document of ongoing debate and research around the theme of landscape, and of a redefinition of the theme itself as an object of inquiry and policy of which the recent European Landscape Convention (ELC, Council of Europe, 2000) is at the same time a cause, an effect, and a symbol. The approach and ambition of this working paper is to draw together different disciplinary approaches to landscape, conceived as heritage and therefore connected to the construction and meaning of cultural identities. Vice versa, the perspective is that of unveiling the consequences for identity construction of conceiving heritage as landscape. This overall objective has been articulated in three sections, in which the contributors have both offered their specific disciplinary expertise, and tried to explore different approaches. The first part addresses the definition of landscape as heritage by drawing on both recent theorising and current institutional developments at the European level. The second part tries to expose the relationship of identity and landscapes, both constructed and contested, focusing on the relationship of territory to the collective imagining of communities in Europe. The third part, the most disciplinary oriented, considers how landscape became a legal object. Conclusive remarks by one of the fathers of the ELC stress both the institutional perspective of the COE and the need for a constant dialogue between disciplines and between academics and policy makers with regard to landscape.
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