Local elected representatives and landscapes: results of the survey

February 2022

To download : rapport_elus_paysage.pdf (6.4 MiB)

The report commissioned by Barbara Pompili, the French Minister for Ecological Transition, on 15 February 2021 from the CGEDD focuses on ‘raising awareness and training local elected representatives in landscape issues’. It proposes a ‘national action plan’ for this purpose. The commission is based on the observation that the public policy concerned is insufficient or inadequate, despite the fact that ‘it is mayors and presidents of intercommunal bodies who are ultimately responsible for regional planning (both urban and rural)’.

Indeed, ‘a number of examples show that development projects or facilities could be much more coherent and better accepted if they were based on the characteristics of local landscapes […]’.

The key to spreading these good examples lies in increasing the skills or, at the very least, the knowledge, and therefore the ‘training’ of those responsible for planning, i.e. elected representatives, in this field. The European Landscape Convention’s clear definition of landscape as having universal value is often interpreted in a simplistic way (as vegetation or heritage) when it is decided to make it a public policy in addition to the others.

The mission therefore preferred to speak of a landscape approach, as a means of facilitating sectoral technical policies contributing to the ecological transition. In its proposals, the Task Force favoured ‘raising awareness’ of the landscape approach among elected representatives on as broad a basis as possible, a less restricted formula that could lead a significant proportion of those who have followed it to sign up for formal training modules on more specific dimensions or themes of this approach.

To this end, it commissioned an online survey of elected representatives and conducted interviews with around forty of them. The survey questionnaire was drawn up in partnership with the Centre d’études et d’expertise sur les risques, l’environnement, la mobilité et l’aménagement (Cerema) and the Association des maires de France (AMF). The AMF and most of the other associations of elected representatives also helped to distribute the questionnaire within their networks. The Observatoire des territoires of the Agence nationale de la cohésion des territoires (ANCT) provided support to the mission in analysing the results of the survey.

Nearly 1,400 elected representatives responded to the survey, which was conducted in June and July 2021 among all the mayors and chairmen of public establishments for inter-municipal cooperation (EPCIs) in France, with a panel of respondents representative of the national territory (rural, urban, peri-urban). More than three-quarters of respondents were recently elected (2014 and 2020 elections).

The main finding of the survey was that 65% of the elected representatives who responded equated landscape with ‘a pleasant living environment’.

While negative views of the landscape (‘constraint’ or ‘standardisation / trivialisation’) were virtually absent from the responses received, few elected representatives (11%) saw the landscape as a ‘territorial project’.

For the elected representatives interviewed, action on landscape should be taken at very local levels. This request was largely confirmed during the interviews conducted between April and October 2021.

In terms of the skills to be called upon in landscape matters, the elected representatives put the State services in first place, followed by the councils for architecture, town planning and the environment (CAUE), and then their own technical services.

On the other hand, we are struck by the low scores achieved by tools specifically devoted to landscape within public policy: promotion of the title of landscape designer, landscape atlases, photographic landscape observatories and even landscape plans.

In the end, however, more than four-fifths of the elected representatives responding felt the need to strengthen their skills and knowledge of landscape. There was a broad consensus on the need to raise awareness at grassroots level: visits to local areas were the most popular form of awareness-raising/training suggested in the survey.

In terms of desired content, landscape and heritage, biodiversity, agriculture and forestry, and housing are the four most popular topics.

Energy, climate and, above all, the redevelopment of peripheral areas and brownfield sites are at the bottom of the list.

Based on the weaknesses identified in this process, the mission was able to define the priorities for awareness-raising/training that constitute the thematic guidelines of the proposed national plan.

The priority themes for raising the awareness of or training elected representatives concern the strategic and ‘political’ vision of the landscape approach, summarised under the heading of ‘territorial projects’, increased knowledge of specific landscape policy tools, and the landscape approach to the energy transition from the perspective of climate change, as well as the development of urban fringes from the perspective of the fight against soil artificialisation.

Other themes, which seem to be more a part of the ‘acquired knowledge’ of the elected representatives interviewed during the survey, could be used as a basis for the awareness-raising and training initiatives to be put in place.

These mainly concern town planning documents as landscape policy tools and the need for a collective and participative approach to landscape. The mechanism for implementing these priorities in terms of local elected representatives’ knowledge of the issues, tools and themes for applying the landscape approach will be based primarily on the drafting, negotiation and signing of a framework agreement between the State, the Association des maires de France and the Fédération nationale des CAUE, joined, where appropriate, by “Intercommunalités de France”.

The local services proposed, tailored to the issues, priorities and local players involved, would be supported by teams from France’s major sites, regional nature parks and town planning agencies.

The field sessions set up in this way would be supplemented by the introduction of the landscape approach in the training courses recently set up to qualify elected representatives (Académie des territoires de l’ANCT with the support of Sciences Po Paris and the Caisse des dépôts, training set up by the Association des maires ruraux de France and Sciences Po Lyon) as well as by an increased presence of landscape architects within local technical structures or landscape architects advising local authorities.

Awareness-raising and training should also be based on appropriate identification of potential participants in these sessions and on references to successful operations that have been duly listed.

Landscape schools, with their ‘student workshops’ in the field, would play a special role in this process, which would require the question of their incomplete coverage of the country to be addressed.

The proposed action plan includes ten recommendations. It would be coordinated at national level by a project manager identified in direct liaison with the Landscapes Office by a letter of assignment signed by the Director General, with permanent support from one of the State’s landscape consultants assigned to her.

It should be provided with regional relays consisting of the generalisation of the networks of landscape players already in place in four regions.

An initial assessment of this plan, in the form of a new online survey, would measure the progress made over the five years of its duration and provide for new stages in taking account of the landscape.

In addition to elected representatives, these could address the issue of the general public’s ‘landscape culture’.

There are already a number of initiatives along these lines in France and among our European neighbours. A future mission could draw on them to explore new avenues for reflection and action.

Results

The sample is representative of the main types of local authority: rural, peri-urban and urban. The most recently elected councillors (2020 and 2014) accounted for three quarters of the responses. They see it first and foremost as ‘a pleasant living environment’ (65%), and very few (8%) see it as ‘a matter of personal sensitivity’. The landscape of their commune is not perceived as ‘degraded’ by 75% of them.

Town planning tools come out on top as levers for landscape action, ahead of policies specifically dedicated to this issue (atlases, photographic observatories, etc.). The three sources of expertise they turn to are, on a more or less equal footing, government departments, CAUEs and their own technical services.

Finally, they prefer guided field visits (on their own territory or neighbouring territories) as a type of training/awareness-raising (which 80% are prepared to attend), far ahead of ‘practical guides’, conferences or courses. The ‘training plan’ commissioned as part of report 013812-01 by the Minister to the CGEDD on 15 February will now be able to be built on a solid foundation, likely to mobilise a large potential clientele for the programmes to be developed or set up.

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