PAP 82: New horizon: territories facing the challenge of beauty

Régis Ambroise, Alain Freytet, Sébastien Giorgis, Yves Gorgeu, Fabienne Joliet, Armelle Lagadec, Mathilde Lauret-Kempf, Odile Marcel, Jean-Pierre Thibault, February 2025

Le Collectif Paysages de l’Après-Pétrole (PAP)

To download : article-82-collectif-pap-1.pdf (19 MiB)

For ten years, the Post-Oil Landscapes Collective has been studying different regional experiences. Their innovations in terms of the environment, the social model and the economy have implemented, at different levels, the multiple forms of a transition of our society towards a balance that urgently needs to be established both between people and between people and the environment. The current development model proposes the consumption of material goods and individual success as the foundations of human development. Scientists have sounded the alarm about the consequences of this model, which promotes competition of all against all and the unbridled domination of the success of a few plutocrats, to the detriment of planetary health and any idea of social justice.

The beauty of the post-oil era?

The PAP collective refers to these territorial experiments as ‘post-oil landscapes’. How can the configurations of a landscape convey the message of bifurcation and make it evident?

Our senses and our consciousness apprehend the spaces of our terrestrial environment by immediately associating factual data with the emotional or affective impact they have on us ¹. This is the case with street scenes, every day in the city, whose smells, shapes and sounds are experienced as beautiful, soothing and fascinating, or as banal, disturbing and sometimes ugly when they evoke the shocking or thankless living conditions to which many of our fellow human beings are reduced.

For their part, the natural landscapes that persist in many parts of our modern countries move us with their splendour or their immensity, making us forget our smallness and reviving in us the fundamentals of our philosophical or religious foundation ².

This spontaneously evaluative character of perceptions of our living environment is the basis of the specific political value of the experience of the landscape developed by man. As the standard of social happiness, the way in which we have transformed our living environments bears witness to the good or precarious balances of our social systems.

The Collectif PAP studies the landscapes that today factually embody so many experiences of territorial transitions towards a fairer and more prudent balance between their political forces, their social dynamics, their economy and their ecological substratum. The space left for the wild natural areas around us, the perceptible quality of the streets and public squares in urban areas, or of the paths and hedgerows in the countryside, illustrate a spirit and values. The establishment of these local societies is part of an overall plan that ensures that none of the components of their development takes precedence over another. The result is that the spatial forms, sounds and smells of the urban and rural developments that these societies have installed in the natural environment offer themselves up as landscapes of well-being.

The landscapes of these societies in transition offer a reassuring experience because they respond to the challenges of the day, and the way in which they have shaped the natural environment and balanced its components gives us a specific pleasure due to an element of legibility. The beauty of the landscape emerges:

• when the functioning of this territory is anchored in its geographical and historical foundation;

• when we understand the connections because they simply expose the way of life of the inhabitants;

• when we feel here and not elsewhere because the specificity of the place has been respected as well as the participation of each person in the history and the activity of this place

This legible landscape brings together a wide variety of components in a complex unity. Its beauty is due to the ‘promise of happiness’ to which this beauty gives a sense of reality and presence ³.

In the beauty of a post-oil landscape, we feel the harmony that has been achieved between its components, the harmony to which it gives rise. Thus set in resonance, the human and the non-human form a peaceful unity, the idea of justice is present, a permanence is announced. The density of components to which this beauty bears witness is therefore not the result of a purely stylistic quality but, to use Plato’s expression, the tangible embodiment of the idea of the Good. Born of the art of man, the rural and urban landscape laid out by man induces a momentum that soothes and gives confidence, makes one dream, exalts and can arouse commitment.

Landscape means that diversity is brought together, and that the encounter of our sensibility with the coherence - or the fruitful dissonances - of what we perceive provokes the stimulation of pleasure in us. Landscape evokes the echo within us of a harmonious whole, its reality soothing or exciting because it is new or disconcerting, and the apprehension of which opens our minds and hearts. The notion of landscape introduces the anthropological dimension of the sensitive, of aesthetics, into the debate on transition. An aesthetic in which the notion of beauty includes the cultural values of justice, prudence and balance. The pleasure experienced is not just a cosmetic or superficial accomplishment, but refers to the now essential criteria and principles of sustainable development and participatory democracy in territories identified and managed as such by their citizen inhabitants. Understood in this way, such a promise of happiness defines the goal of the transition, and its desirability. The landscape is both the objective and the methodological lever. Finally, in terms of persuasive communication, beauty as a ‘promise of happiness’ brings a timely desirability. From its foundation in 2015, the Collectif PAP adopted a manifesto based on five principles of action: local resources, multifunctional territories, cross-disciplinary perspectives, involved inhabitants, and finally ‘daring to talk about beauty’. How can this proposal find its urgent legitimacy today, restoring the political basis for the codes of execution of technical professions and the dignity of liberal art to design professions?

Around beauty, new links to be forged between residents-landscapers, technicians and designers

For thousands of years, urban and rural landscapes did not use the skills of landscape architects to give shape to the spaces whose harmony we appreciate today. Access to cheap energy from coal, oil and then nuclear power has, for some decades now, exempted us from an understanding of places based on simplicity and economy of means, while new techniques have swept away the syntax and style of local cultures. In order to satisfy the primary needs of security and solidarity in a logic of maximum profit, the requirement of beauty in the service of the population had seemingly deserted the objectives set by the developers.

Responding to the emergency with a concern for efficiency, the 1970s saw the emergence of an ‘ugly France’, the sight of which caused a deep emotional shock to some. With some delay, from 1992 onwards, the public authorities enacted laws integrating the notion of landscape into planning ⁴.

Professionals with urban and landscape skills were mobilised to design new territorial projects and sometimes, at the request of farmers, contracts were drawn up to help them reorient their production systems towards greater sustainability by integrating a requirement for shared beauty. To distinguish them from nurserymen, they were eventually called ‘landscape designers’. They had been designing gardens for centuries. They will now bring their ‘landscape’ approach to these everyday spaces, which are increasingly poorly experienced by their inhabitants ⁵.

The landscape approach does not give these professionals exclusive design rights, since it is based on the definition adopted by the European Landscape Convention in Florence in 2000: landscape is a ‘part of territory as perceived by the populations’. While ‘part of the territory’ describes the physical and human characteristics of each landscape, ‘as perceived’ refers to the sensitive perceptions of this landscape ‘by the populations’. What is evoked here, by their very plurality, are our representations, our visions of things, our concerns in terms of principles as well as everyday life.

Designing a landscape project on these foundations is the contemporary way of responding to the need for beauty: through the dialogue established between residents and professionals, a collective project for the sustainable development of our living space will mature from different expressions or representations, which extensive and careful consultations will have brought to light.

In every civilisation, the identity of each individual has been shaped by a set of values. This has given rise to many specific conceptions of beauty that are expressed in works of art: painting, sculpture, music, literature, gardens, as well as in the rural and urban landscapes of these different cultures. The art of planning draws on these values to give spaces the emotional characteristics of landscapes recognised for their quality.

Landscapes and beauty: multiple forms

European landscapes have been shaped at different times by cultural models whose traces can be found. When Saint Bernard and the Cistercians opposed the temptations of power and wealth with the message of simplicity and sharing, they invented concise architectural forms, characterised by sobriety. In the centre of the cloister gardens, a skylight opened meditation to an elevation towards the holy spirit. In the surrounding area, in contrast to the wasteland, haunts of the forces of evil, the fields with their aligned ploughs and the channels to irrigate them provided cereals, vegetables and fish in an orderly landscape anticipating the heavenly Jerusalem ⁶.

The fresco of Good Government in Siena, Tuscany (Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1338) displays a new technical and political model for the organisation of the city and its territory. This fresco depicts innovative constructions, such as the dome of churches. In the countryside, the ‘cultura promiscua’ combined cereals, olive trees and vines on the same plot of land worked by sharecroppers, rather than serfs. Based on perspective, a new principle of representing space, the fresco celebrates the new forms of beauty inspired by the humanist values developed by the Renaissance in Europe.

In 1600, at the end of the wars of religion, the Protestant Olivier de Serres wrote ‘The Theatre of Agriculture and the Management of Fields’. Effective agronomy includes principles of spatial organisation that deploy the functionality as well as the beauty of an estate because it ‘is easier to wish for, than to find, a place in the fields that is both good and beautiful’.

This link between the beautiful and the good was abundantly affirmed during the revolutionary period in France. The beautiful magnifies the quality of the effective technical responses (the land of plenty) and the social harmony brought about by the Republic ⁷ . Proactive political projects therefore sought to combine the useful and the pleasant by giving magnificence to prosperity.

For its part, the toponymy, with its centuries-old and vernacular origins, bears witness to the sensitivity of the inhabitants to the landscape, who readily attributed aesthetic qualities to certain places: Bellecombe, Crêt Joli, Le Pré Coquet, Belleville, Beaubourg, Beaufort, Beaulieu, etc.

Sublime landscapes: from domination to dialogue around the notion of beauty

In North America, the discovery by Westerners of a nature that they imagined to be untouched, as far as the eye could see, contributed to the idea of the sublime in landscapes untouched by man. This is how the first national parks were born, territories of wilderness experienced as sanctuaries of original nature. The indigenous populations, also described as savages, were deemed undesirable in these life-size landscapes. This 19th-century heritage has long weighed on environmental ethics and aesthetics.

Challenging the images of beauty promoted by wilderness enthusiasts, indigenous peoples are now gaining recognition for their presence and role in these landscapes. The first peoples do not separate man from nature. Their symbiotic vision of the human and non-human world celebrates in unison the beauty of animal and plant species, earthly elements, and embodied spirits.

The new generation of national parks, Tursujuq in Nunavik (Inuit, Canada) and Glacier Bay (Huna Tlingit, Alaska) currently incorporate the aesthetics of these two cultural traditions, which are necessary components of a territorial project whose design is based on dialogue around the values of a shared landscape.

Beauty, a central dimension of the landscape approach for the sustainable and harmonious development of territories

Human societies develop their spaces according to cultural values that they incorporate into the forms of their development. Breaking with this general principle, the professionals in charge of regional development during the Reconstruction period tended to relegate beauty to the realm of individual private perception. Aiming for growth conceived as the essentially material well-being of the greatest number, the project of post-war European society lacked a clear articulation with the political ambition of sharing the perceptible quality of development. Similarly, from the 1960s and 70s onwards, growth was criticised in the name of the finiteness of the planet’s resources, the damage to living things and then its climatic consequences, without integrating the anthropological dimension of sensitive sharing either. Landscapes, the living spaces of populations, were conceived as the result of technical, economic or ecological orientations or counter-orientations, without taking into account their spatial repercussions in terms of beauty. The sensitive value, however, is that of an experience that can be shared, thereby animating the feeling of our belonging to the social body ⁸.

The emotional experience of the landscape allows us to feel our common earthly condition, our collective history and the desirable orientations of our present. This dimension is fundamental to engaging our democratic societies in a more equitable, realistic and prudent regime of existence.

The demand for beauty is therefore present in each of the principles stated by the PAP Collective. It is not a principle that would have to be added to these criteria.

1. Working on a site requires taking into account its history and geography in order to bring out specific and new forms of perceptible excellence. The beauty of the projects reveals and magnifies the uniqueness of the natural elements and resources specific to each territory. Previous generations have left traces in the space that deserve to be valued in a future without oil.

2. Developing regional diagnoses and projects based on the combined perspectives of specialists, but also of local populations in all their diversity, leads to taking their demands for beauty into account, which encourages everyone to play their part in the following projects. The principle of involving residents reduces the intensity of conflicts, generates enthusiasm and enriches the sensitivity of all.

3. As each person contributes to the development of a project, the project is required to meet several demands at the same time. Rather than dedicating one plot to providing food, another to wood, another to energy, etc., an exchange on the ground makes it possible to combine different requirements in the same space and to imagine new forms of beauty.

4. The presence of beauty also animates the resonance that must exist between the different scales of intervention, the large territory, a farm or a city district, up to the consideration of invisible elements in the soil or the hydraulic network, or immaterial elements such as what makes up the spirit of a place, its energy or its magnetism.

Each post-oil territory thus expresses the capacity of its inhabitants to imagine together the forms of their future.

To sense the beauty and define its forms, go out into the field and take your time

The participation of elected representatives and inhabitants in a shared rediscovery enabling them to experience the quality of their places is a necessary prerequisite for developing a diagnosis of the territory. Because we are often eager for results, this experience of the senses is dismissed as a naive and useless prerequisite.

However, it is a question of getting participants, especially elected representatives, to step back from their acquired positions and allow a floating attention open to the reality of things to emerge. A state of contemplation shared by all reshapes the consistency of the group and its states of consciousness. A sense of well-being sets in, a sense of wonder revealing the potential of the things in front of us. Going out into the countryside, walking and discovering opens up a time of sharing, thanks to which elected representatives and the population will rediscover their landscape and see the possible evidence of the development to be planned or to be abandoned.

The impressions that follow one another along a route are fleeting and diverse. One person’s gaze is fixed on the detail, another’s on the horizon. For the professional, the work of describing the space will require time and concentration in order to find the most appropriate formulas to express the beauty of a place. The landscape designer seeks to capture in writing, in sketches and in photographs the emotions that we experience when we are immersed in space and nature. This work of formulation gives beauty words. It forms the basis of the work to which one can return, whatever the technical or financial constraints that might make one forget the fundamentals.

Thus, on the sites of the Conservatoire du littoral affected by the evolution of the coastline, the approach adopted by the students and teachers of the Ecole nationale supérieure de paysage to face the drama of rising waters consists of making the observation of beauty a prerequisite for any foreseeable reorganisation. ‘Seeing beauty’ reduces the anxiety in the face of an involuntary evolution. Instead of sea defence works, with their strong visual impact, remaining the exclusive domain of engineers, revisiting these objects of struggle, their locations and their dimensions leads us to consider them as the works of art of our time. Their forms, which attract our attention, clearly outline our new destiny ⁹.

Historical footholds and contemporary approaches to the development of the earth’s landscapes make the sensory perception that we call beauty a foundation and a purpose. This perception embodies the fact that social development aims to bring happiness to the life of each and every one of us. Participating in the development of a project means sharing the awareness of the spirit of the place with all its stakeholders. Involving the entire population in the debate and its gradual implementation, the development of living spaces is based on the rediscovered sense of the human community.

Beauty, that reality which moves and unites us, is thus both the foundation and the object of the bond created by the project, and the condition of its peaceful character. The landscape ‘as perceived by the people’ calls for constructive exchanges, and for taking the time necessary to achieve them. ‘Talking’ means peacefully confronting sensitivities, exchanging views on reality and its constraints, and making choices. The search for a consensus on the harmony of a lived landscape establishes a real democracy, one based on the responsibility and competence of each individual. Each person expresses themselves and feels like a stakeholder in a society of equals when they are involved in defining the future of their environment, both physical and intangible.

Giving everyone the opportunity to speak and act on the beauty of the land is an anthropological and political revolution. The demand for shared beauty is the most radical break with the technicised rationale that prevailed in the oil age during the post-war boom and the dogma of infinite growth of material goods. This requirement also breaks with the counter-model of an ecological transition that would be reduced to tables of figures and standard solutions that, in the absence of a paradigm shift, only elicit constrained and uneasy compliance. Beauty is a breath of fresh air. It reminds us of the reality of things and revives in us the awareness of our nature, that of a sociable species endowed with sensitivity and affectivity, united by incorporeal representations present in the intimacy of each person’s feelings and difficult to reduce to a quantitative evaluation.

This is why beauty can and must form the basis of the landscape approach, a truly effective and democratic method for initiating an ecological shift that will restore social equity by associating everyone with its material and immaterial benefits, and more particularly those who currently lack the means of subsistence, as well as full recognition of their civic dignity.

The aim is to work towards a future of happy ecology through the regained beauty of the earth’s landscapes.

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