Introduction: The European Urban Landscape Partnership

The creation of a new, long-term, partnership for Europe’s urban landscape is one of the key initiatives of the LE:NOTRE PLUS Thematic Network Dissemination Project.

The network which has been created through the LE:NOTRE Project now links more than one hundred European universities as well as a significant number of stakeholder organisations with interests in landscape architecture teaching and research as the European level. The European Urban Landscape Partnership will extend this network to involve European municipal authorities, while at the same time linking them with universities, NGOs and national, local and European government organisations concerned with the urban landscape.

Central to the goals of European Urban Landscape Partnership are the aims of the European Landscape Convention: “to promote landscape protection, management and planning and to organise European cooperation on landscape issues”. The Convention not only raises the landscape to a matter of European cultural and environmental policy, but for the first time places urban and peri-urban landscapes on an equal footing with natural and rural landscapes.

The bottom-up philosophy which has been developed within the context of the LE:NOTRE Network, which has focussed on the creation and strengthening of the academic community through an emphasis on a combination of sharing information and personal communication, is also seen as the key to ensuring the long-term viability of the European Urban Landscape Partnership. The LE:NOTRE website, with its tools for communication between Network members and for the sharing of information between all involved provides much of the necessary mechanisms for fulfilling the aims of the European Landscape Convention, and it will form the model for the new European Urban Landscape Partnership website.

As a result of the LE:NOTRE Project website, academics from Iceland to Turkey and from Finland to Portugal have been provided with a tool, not just for the exchange of information and experience, but also one which enables and facilitates for person to person communication between specialists, thereby making the European academic community both self-aware internally and visible externally. The transfer of this experience beyond the academic field to professionals and specialists within local authorities is one of the key goals for the European Urban Landscape Partnership.