Ecole nationale supérieure du paysage de Versailles
Laboratoire de recherches
Actes des séminaires
«Etapes de recherches en paysage»
Numéro
3, décembre 2000
Nathalie Dumont-Fillon :
«Public politics of countryside and communal heritage : land management.
- The case of the Vernier marshes (Eure) and the slopes of "La Roche-Guyon"
(Val-d'Oise).»
Abstract
In some areas of France that are under public control, public politics of
the countryside and communal heritage have appeared, aimed at reducing the
differences between past or anticipated evolution and the countryside that
which is desired.
These politics depend upon legal judgements and the capabilities of land-architects
to stimulate or discourage devolutionary dynamics and certain supporting
or opposing activists.
This multidisciplinary study analyses the politics from the point of view
of spaces, and the relation of society with these.
By an analysis comparing two French sites, it is shown how landscape classification
(Act of 2nd May 1930) allows the blocking of undesirable land, how the land
charters of the regional nature reserves (Act of 8th January 1993) instigates
good practice, and how the project to classify nature reserves (Act of 16th
July 1976) is imposed on scientists, and also extends to public access.
Artistic and literary representations play a role in these procedures as
eventual reference models : abundant and ancient in one area, and by contrast
infrequent and recent in the second (the marshes), just where the social
practices and representations are the most personal and diverse.
Urbanisation, encroachment, industrialisation, are thrown out in the name
of the not destroying the character of areas menaced by urban expansion.
In the final analysis, this thesis makes evident a change in the relationships
between society and its open spaces with the control or anticipation of
control of evolutions by means of judgements and local laws.
Translated by Arturo Prent, Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda-SAT.