Landscape evaluation. a methodological proposal for spatial planning

Landscape has been a special focus of interest and innovation of cultural policies for the international community, especially in the Strategies of the European Landscape Convention (2000). These document promotes a radical shift in perspective away from longestablished approaches to landscape conservation, planning, and management. In fact, the new aim is to extend differentiated forms of safeguarding and enhancement over a whole stretch of territory. In this perspective it is important to define a new governance approach of the landscape based on landscape evaluation in order to make explicit the landscape values and their meaning for the local populations. In the paper we will propose a landscape assessment methodology useful to plays the role of a technical learning process inside the decision-making process whose goal is to make explicit the values and the criteria used for making territorial choices in a social participation process. In the classical paradigm of assessment action ‘assessment defines the values´. This is what the logic behind the type of assessment we propose makes us turn around. We believe instead that ‘the values depend on the assessment´. Thus assessment should take on the role of a stage of technical process within the decision-making process. Assessment should aim to make values and criteria for choices explicit � the ones that lead parties to identify the planning aims for each landscape in a territory. Such a type of logic implies that there is the a-priori methodological assumption that values depend on assessment. Therefore in this type of logic the role of assessment becomes crucial in order to direct and frame the debate over the choices to be made about landscape enhancement in public debates