PAP 78: landscape plans for a successful ecological transition of territories

Paradoxical but uncertain success for an unidentified legal object

Pierre-Louis Bodet, Frédéric Schaller, Jean-Pierre Thibault, September 2024

Le Collectif Paysages de l’Après-Pétrole (PAP)

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Despite an uncertain definition and a somewhat chaotic history, landscape plans are a potential tool for a contemporary policy of ecological transition through landscape.

Landscape planning?

The public policy tools available to local councillors to intervene in everyday landscapes are still few and far between in France. Landscape atlases and photographic observatories are instruments for taking stock of the landscape through analytical procedures. Landscape plans, the one and only active component of landscape policy in France, are another means by which public authorities can attempt to control, accompany or encourage changes in the living environment. Such a name suggests that the aim is to master, through a plan, a subject whose nature is more in the realm of the felt than the measurable. However, the list of current projects is perplexing: the one hundred and eighty plans listed by the Ministry in charge of landscape concern all scales of project, all kinds of communities and a wide variety of objects. Is this plan, then, a catch-all term identifying a public policy that is well-intentioned (no one is hostile to landscape), but without a truly structured object? The existence of two definitions supports this assessment: - a 1995 circular is the legal text that defines these plans: based on the voluntary participation of inter-municipalities, they consist of a study, a project statement and its operational and regulatory outcomes. Current practice corresponds to this definition. - The second can be found on the Ministry’s “Objectif Paysages” website, which lists the initiatives currently underway. There are two nuances compared with 1995: the initiators are not necessarily inter-municipalities (associations are even listed), and the regulatory outlet is not mentioned ¹. Landscape plans are drawn up with a view to the sustainable development of territories, of which heatwaves and winter floods remind us of the absolute and concrete urgency. The history of the dissemination of these approaches illustrates the way in which, over time, a mode of conduct for local projects has become established, combining the micro-local and territorial scales, the immediacy of results and the long-term nature of strategies. Provided they can be networked to ensure widespread adoption, these approaches could be the key to the success of the ecological transition.

From landscape law to landscape plans

The clear emergence of landscape in public policy dates back to the 1990s, anchored by the 1993 Landscape Act, which recognized everyday landscape as a major issue for people. At the time, landscape plans were being tested in a number of areas, including Decizes (Nièvre), Belle-Ile and Saint-Flour, to accompany the arrival of the A75 freeway. Listed in the brochure “Repères 1993” ², these studies, which had no legal existence, were formalized by the 1995 circular describing them as “operational approaches identifying concrete actions to be undertaken and the resources required for their management and monitoring”. Urban planning became one of their possible outlets. New plans are then put in place. Most often left to the sole initiative of its decentralized departments, they are poorly referenced and little monitored by the Ministry. Knowledge of the landscape was actively pursued during the 2000s, with the development of photographic observatories and landscape atlases covering almost the entire country. However, the action phase was mainly driven by local initiatives ³. Although it began with the publication in 2001 of a “guide to landscape plans” written by Bertrand Folléa, national incentive activity in this field remained rather weak during the decade of 2000.

From the 2013 relaunch to thematic plans

In 2013, the Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable Development vigorously relaunched the approach. The landscapes office issued a national call for projects and created a “landscape plan club” to bring together the winners ⁴. The note launching this call for projects defines plans as “a territorial project approach, drawn up by local authorities, shared and supported by all the players in the territory.” The landscape plans are general in nature, but all the territories that commit to them identify a thematic point of view from which theirs will be drawn up: heritage, water or nature in the city. Notified to successive juries, an important selection criterion is the degree of citizen participation envisaged in the various phases of these plans.

The urgency of climate change will require us to rethink energy production on a national scale. In turn, the reluctance of many local residents to the chaotic or opportunistic installation of the first wind or photovoltaic power plants has prompted experimentation with landscape plans - energy transition with, since 2020, co-financing from ADEME . In 2024, the theme of biodiversity was brought in and supported by the French Biodiversity Office (OFB). It is conceivable that the consequences of climate change will call for other types of plans, such as those for water resources (floods, droughts, etc.), with funding from water agencies.

Dynamism and proliferation of plans for the 2013-2023 decade

Nearly one hundred and eighty landscape plans were financed by the Ministry of Ecological Transition during this period, to which we must no doubt add many others launched without ministerial subsidy. With landscape plans covering urban (8%), suburban (52%) and rural (40%) areas, these initiatives reflect the diversity of our territories ⁵. From the small rural commune to the metropolis, there is a wide range of supporting structures, with significant differences in terms of population and surface area: communes, intercommunalités, syndicates with a territorial coherence scheme (SCoT), a water development and management scheme (SAGE), national parks, art and history countries, associations or UNESCO perimeters. In the guide mentioned above, Bertrand Folléa identifies three types of outlet for landscape plans: regulatory, operational and educational. Regulatory translations are found in the development and programming guidelines (OAP) of PLUi. Operational translations are concrete actions that implement the territorial project, such as the development of a square or the clearing of a plot of land. For their part, educational translations share landscape quality objectives with institutions, economic players and the general public, as in the case of cultural mediation initiatives for schoolchildren in the Cluny-Tournus art and history region. Although a common methodology can be applied, the landscape approach cannot be applied in the same way everywhere: diversity and representativeness are therefore the hallmarks of landscape plans. The strength of these plans lies in their detailed consideration of the characteristics of an actual area. In fact, landscape plans have shown great inventiveness in the way they involve local populations, through field surveys or graphic or photographic descriptions that take into account local physical or ecological characteristics, and more generally their “societal body”, to use Yves Gorgeu’s expression ⁶. From the arrival of a freeway in Saint-Flour to the harmonious installation of solar power plants, the somewhat turbulent history of landscape plans shows how, quietly and over the last thirty years, these innovative approaches have accompanied the qualitative evolution of territories. As their characteristics are difficult to reconcile with the top-down, framed nature of prescriptive approaches, landscape plans can only be voluntary initiatives ⁷.

An approach with a fragile future

Few of the areas that responded to the first calls for projects are still pursuing their approach today. As landscape plans are neither compulsory nor binding, a landscape-based development project requires two complementary success factors. On the one hand, strong political support is needed to drive the process over the long term, and on the other, cross-functional technical support is provided, in the best of cases, by a position dedicated to monitoring actions. Metropolises and large conurbations have significant technical departments ⁸.

Conversely, once the state subsidy has been exhausted, engineering is often lacking in rural areas, with the exception of regional nature parks or the Grands Sites de France, whose small but dynamic teams are able to monitor these projects. This lack of continuity should not lead to the temptation to impose a mandatory standard for the development of these plans, which would be ill-suited to the fluidity of the approach and its appropriation by the public. In fact, the success of landscape plans is partly due to their nature as unidentified legal objects. However, what is the best way to promote the widespread use of these landscape approaches, which are proving to be a powerful lever for accelerating the ecological transition and its democratic appropriation, as analyzed by the think-tank La Fabrique écologique in its note “Réussir la transition écologique par l’approche paysagère” (April 2024)? For several decades now, the Vosges massif has been developing landscape plans whose characteristics are conducive to such an evolution. From the micro-local to the territorial scale, coherent spatial planning articulates micro-developments and the intercommunal strategic plan. In terms of time, these plans combine short-term efficiency with overall strategic coherence. Immediate results win support for the project, while a long-term approach is essential if development is to take place in line with the ecological transition. Finally, the networking of these initiatives is an important factor in their generalization, by coordinating local initiatives on a larger scale to reinforce the cohesion of the whole.

Landscape strategies at local level

Thirty years ago, the vast inhabited territory of the Parc des Ballons des Vosges⁹ was affected by regressive landscape dynamics, with the end of the worker-peasant model and the closure of textile factories in the southern part of the massif: landscapes were closed due to overgrowth or forestation, the built heritage was suffering, industrial wastelands were numerous, and urban and tourist pressure was growing. At the request of its elected representatives, and in keeping with its role, the park has been experimenting with landscape plans since the passing of the law on landscape in 1993. The main feature of the plans carried out in this area is their concrete results. A case in point. This mountain village was enclosed in a forest covering 85% of its surface area, due to major agricultural and demographic decline. Its heritage buildings were in decline, its orchards abandoned and its living environment dominated by spruce trees. Thirty years on, the village is breathing a new lease of life, with dozens of hectares of restored meadows that have kept the conifers at bay. In the new-found sunshine, a conservatory orchard rich in biodiversity has been replanted. The population, which has doubled, lives in a landscape that is inhabited, cared for and enhanced, as the rehabilitation of the built heritage has supplanted the logic of urban sprawl so common elsewhere. These residents have welcomed a photovoltaic roof for their church, as well as several wind turbines.

The village of La Grande Fosse, to the north of the park, has been committed to an inter-communal landscape plan since 1995, revised in 2011 with remarkable local acceptance.

The most frequently implemented measure in Vosges landscape plans is the pastoral and landscape reclamation of public wastelands and peri-urban areas with often fragmented landholdings, which has been acquired over a total of 4,800 ha. Ambitious local authorities have created pastoral land associations, a highly effective tool for reopening these areas through an agricultural, ecological and landscaping project.

Numerous industrial wastelands have been reclaimed, mobilizing valuable land opportunities while enhancing their heritage. In this way, urban sprawl, which all too often takes its toll on agricultural and natural resources, is limited. Examples include the architectural and landscape requalification program in the Haute Meurthe valley (Vosges), the Wesserling park (Haut-Rhin) and the Ronchamp spinning mill (Haute-Saône).

As a testimony to the uniqueness of each valley, rural built heritage is regularly the focus of dedicated initiatives: knowledge tools, advice to individuals and financial incentives. In sharp decline, traditional and family orchards have also benefited from programmed operations: the improvement of orchards in the Val de Galilée in Déodatie (Vosges), for example, has led to the planting of over a thousand fruit trees in private homes. The actions carried out within the framework of landscape plans must ensure that the scale of the work is appropriate. Ideally, this should be an inter-municipality of sufficient size to offer a coherent landscape approach and the capacity to mobilize the necessary human, technical and financial resources. In Fraize (Vosges), for example, the restoration of the Prés Bazure wet meadows at the bottom of the valley was combined with a global approach, that of the landscape plan, enabling the articulation of regulatory tools and project approaches in a PLU that was able to halt the conurbation of the valley. In the case of buildings that need to be rehabilitated, or whose sprawl needs to be avoided, or of complementary forest-meadow areas that need to be restored step by step, the coherence of small- and large-scale interventions is a major virtue of these approaches.

This articulation overlaps with that concerning the temporality of interventions.

A long-term strategy based on successive gestures

While the non-binding, voluntary nature of a landscape plan is one of its strengths, translating collective ambitions into regulatory documents remains a guarantee of long-term effectiveness. With this in mind, the PLU de la Grande Fosse (Vosges), the PLUi “patrimoine et paysage” de la vallée de Saint-Amarin (Haut-Rhin), afforestation regulations, and the agricultural, forestry and environmental land development plan for Ronchamp (Haute-Saône) have created the necessary conditions for maintaining the dynamics that have been set in motion over the long term. However, a lack of political will and engineering will undermine the sustainability of the project. We must therefore succeed in perpetuating the local political and technical support that was present at the outset. A number of areas in the Vosges have been able to maintain continuous action for thirty years. These include the Bruche valley (Bas-Rhin, bordering the Park), the Grande Fosse commune (Vosges), the Hautes Vosges region (Vosges) and, of course, the Saint-Amarin valley (Haut-Rhin). The latter, which drew up its first landscape plan in 1994, is notable for the coherence and ambition of its achievements over the last thirty years: pastoral and landscape restoration of almost 700 ha, coupled with a significant agricultural dynamic (90 jobs created), development of short circuits, rehabilitation of industrial wasteland, improvement of the area’s attractiveness, approval in 2019 of a “heritage and landscape” PLUi which, well before zero net artificialization (ZAN), reduces buildable areas by 85% and proposes numerous OAPs. At the heart of this valley, the Wesserling park (42 ha around the former textile factory) bears witness to this consistently implemented development logic. A number of one-off projects, carried out as part of a landscape plan, have also been successfully implemented over the long term. In Lusse (Vosges), a couple of goatherds set up business in a municipal building in the heart of a threatened landscape. Twenty-five years later, the farm has been passed on: true to the spirit of the project, a new farming couple now continues to manage open spaces. More generally, actions to reopen landscapes are sustainable thanks to the agricultural and pastoral economy, for which they ensure fodder autonomy, thus enabling the installation of young farmers and the renewal of generations ¹⁰. The Vosges model of the landscape plan thus proposes the multi-decadal, determined development of concrete, local actions which, taken together, take on meaning and coherence on a territorial scale. These initiatives are also anchored in various regulatory frameworks (urban planning, land development, agricultural strategies) and supported by regularly renewed local technical support.

Networking approaches, political leaders and technical coordinators

For the past thirty years, the Parc des Ballons has pursued a policy of sharing and transferring experience between elected officials and community technicians in the different valleys, thereby ensuring positive contamination between the players involved. Today, the Park’s territory boasts thirty landscape initiatives covering almost all of its intercommunities. Proposed to the territories by the successive charters of the park itself, these approaches have often been revised when local ambitions were renewed after ten or fifteen years of implementation, or when the inter-municipal map changed. Valuable public support has ensured the continuity of these landscape policies: the Vosges departmental council’s landscape policy, the Lorraine State-region regional landscape policy, the Haut-Rhin departmental council’s “Gerplan” policy, the Vosges massif commissioner’s policy, etc. Nevertheless, at times, supporting these plans has been a struggle against the odds, due to the successive priorities of national public action in which landscape has suffered eclipses (for example, as seen above, the virtual disappearance of incentives for active local approaches during the 2000s). The capitalization of hundreds of actions and experiences resulting from landscape initiatives, and the networking of one hundred and sixty-five technicians contributing to the implementation of landscape plans, were both initiated by the park. They were maintained for around ten years, during which time the favorable regional and departmental ecosystem mentioned above offered genuine synergy around the landscape plan tool, before the national relaunch in 2013 finally sent a positive signal for its promotion. Forest dieback, unpredictable snow cover in ski resorts, dwindling water resources: the Vosges landscapes and the local economy that generates them are marked by the accelerated changes brought about by the climate crisis. Like the closing of the landscape thirty years ago, this new situation now calls for a collective (re)mobilization and planning around the three principles mentioned above: articulation of spatial scales, coherence of temporalities, networking of territories and their stakeholders. The park’s new charter for 2027-2042 provides an opportunity to renew this dynamic and take up the challenge of landscapes that are now sober and carbon-free. With the urgent need for transition in mind, the landscape will be understood as a method, and climate change as an opportunity.

After thirty years of local successes, and despite the fact that its development has been difficult to gauge over time on a national scale, it would appear that, thanks to its flexibility, adaptability and ability to mobilize the population, the landscape plan as understood and implemented in the Vosges model is the tool that can ensure an ecological transition through landscape. How can such an approach become a model for larger and larger territories? How can voluntary action be made more widespread, so that a critical mass of plans can trigger the global requalification of our living spaces? This process will get underway if a national signal is given, at the same time as regional and then national networks are set up. National recognition could come in the form of a very short circular replacing the 1995 circular, with a maximum of openness and flexibility and a minimum of implementation details. A network of procedures, technicians and political leaders will be set up around a core content and method. At the same time, an ambitious proposal will be formulated for departmental, regional and national financial incentives to support action programs and local engineering. Finally, to reinforce each of these initiatives and multiply the whole, we need to provide resolute support for the pooling of approaches, along the lines of what exists for regional nature parks and major French sites. In this way, while retaining its character as a procedural UFO, the landscape plan will gradually cover the entire territory. The gamble of voluntary, unregulated adherence is likely to succeed, because landscape is a positive, concrete reality, the reality of everyone’s living environment. Appreciated in a sensitive, non-technical way, it thus constitutes one of the rare potential vectors of a chosen transition.

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