Creative landscape futures: making decisions with the arts and humanities

This research network will bring together academics and a range of stakeholders to explore the ways that arts and humanities research can contribute to decision-making about landscapes. Our focus is Scotland, which has its own legal setting and distinctive forms of land ownership - and distinctive landscapes - and we will also make connections with the rest of the UK and beyond. We will hold a series of seminars to share insights, with some hosted by our non-academic stakeholder participants, and carry out further field visits to meet with stakeholders. Our academic participants come from anthropology, art, archaeology, law and others. We also have freelance artists and archaeologists, three arts organisations, Historic Environment Scotland, National Trust for Scotland, Forest Research, and Landscape Institute Scotland.

While Scotland is known for the concentration of large, privately-owned estates in the Highlands, there are in fact a wide diversity of organisations and communities involved in land ownership and management. Many have been supported through the land reform process carried out by successive Scottish governments since devolution. This has led to new directions for landscape management, such as rewilding and ecological restoration, renewable energy initiatives, and sites managed for heritage, which often sit alongside the 'traditional' land uses of farming, forestry and field sports. Using arts and humanities research, our network has the opportunity to explore the history of these diverse landscapes, document current ways of making decisions, and promote new possibilities for their futures.

We use 'creativity' as a key word for our network. By creative landscape, we want to emphasise an alternative to a neutral backdrop or the scenery of mainstream traditions of Western art. Landscape, we argue, is the site and creative activity of dwelling for humans and other beings. Our network will explore how arts and humanities research can recognise the creativity of ordinary relationships with landscape and make this a factor in decision-making too. This is how our 'creative landscape futures' will emerge.

We will articulate the idea of creativity through the first three concrete objectives of our network. First, we will explore the emergence of cultural values in relations with landscape through the various disciplinary perspectives in our network, and directly through field visits and stakeholder engagement. Notions of cultural value that are useful for landscape decision-making, and go beyond economic and environmental rationales (although without denying their significance), will be a key theme for impact.

Second, we will promote models for wider participation and find ways to involve stakeholders, communities and the public in landscape decision-making, drawn from socially-engaged art and community heritage amongst others.

Third, we will develop a broad notion of temporality - by which we mean an understanding of the qualities of time - to connect between past, present and future in landscape decision-making. Our archaeology and heritage participants will show the importance of smaller scale stories of places, as well as the 'grand narratives' of the Scottish landscape.

Our fourth objective is to investigate case studies in Scotland and comparisons to the UK and beyond. We will draw on our network participants' research, but also interrogate and challenge each other to consider the significance of our work specifically for decision-making. To do this we will conduct field visits to meet stakeholders in a range of landscape settings.

Fifth, we will work together to synthesise the findings of the network for audiences including landowners and managers, policy-makers, communities and the wider public. As well as written outputs for academic and stakeholder audiences, we will host an exhibition with arts-led and other contributions from our network. A website will also document and archive our work.