Co-design workshops for cultural landscape planning

In the last twenty years, citizen participation has become a formal requirement in landscape and heritage planning all over Europe. The European Landscape Convention (2000), in particular, encourages public participation in defining landscape heritage values and identifying strategies for its protection, management and planning. However, despite the development of various participatory methods, citizen participation in landscape planning remains rarely applied in practice. With an empirical case study, the research presented in this article tries to bridge the gap between theory and practice, evaluating a methodology in which citizens, stakeholders, planners, and heritage experts are invited to co-design a spatial strategy for local cultural landscape valorisation.