Will the new Common Agricultural Policy improve the management of rural and peri-urban settings and landscaping ?

The aim of this paper is to stimulate a wide discussion about three key topics, which in our vision are changing the meaning of Landscape Planning for the near future: Ruralty, Common Agricultural Policies (CAP) and new the challenges human being is facing to preserve the scarcity of resources. Following this overarching idea a reasoning frame to forward with the concept is above discussed. Agrarian landscape is in fact an artifact built on human activities at farm level, firstly. Each historical period has had its own agricultural model which shaped peculiar agrarian landscapes (the territorial dimension of farms’ landscaping) containing specific sets of elements (e.g. trees, hedgerows, channel networks…). On the other side, plethora of diverse elements other than cultivated lands feature in each contemporary rural area. Small and big cities, industrial and commercial settlements, scattered houses, country roads and highways, forests and parks, wetlands, …. In sum: each contemporary rural area, intended as a whole, is a complex system that includes different systems. We do have some doubts about the capacities of renewed policies in CAP, including rural policy, to be able to manage landscapes in a comprehensive way. As can be seen, CAP is essentially driven by economic arguments still and many curative side-policies (GAEC, rural policy) tends to remain incremental. But there is some hope in the new CAP progress. Then we recognise the complexity of semi-rural areas (peri-urban etc.) for which neither traditional landscape models nor spatial, rural and other policies have sufficient answers for sustainable development. So, what is the “landscape perspective”? It is a “pull” idea: drawing the best from CAP and other policies, be translators and conveyors of such policies to local and regional conditions and with support of stakeholders. And it is a “push” idea: feeding back creative ideas of landscapes the way back to of course local stakeholders and landscapes, to rural and agricultural models and ultimately to CAP itself.