"Approaches to landscape: Background and emerging trends in the scientific debate"

The recent debate on architecture, city and territory is characterized by continued reference to the landscape. This chapter explores the theme analysing background and emerging trends in planning from the point of view of approaches to landscape. Over the last fifteen years, the innovations introduced at the cultural level by the European Landscape Convention seem to be widely shared, systematizing in particular a subject that has raised interest and that, for some years, has been central at the international level in the framework of the cultural and environmental policies. Today, a new contemporary discourse on the landscape is growing, even from the point of view of his verbal and iconic reproduction, becoming central in various disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, archaeology, ecology, and even essential in subjects like philosophy and geography. The reasons for this centrality can be found in a kind of reconsideration of the relationship between man and nature, which search also for a clear and unambiguous definition of landscape.