Abstract
Landscape quality assessments provide information for developers, decision-makers and designers as to what is significant about a given landscape. However, assessment methods that rely on disciplinary expertise can fail to identify the qualities of landscapes that are important to those communities for whom landscape is a lived-in experience, particularly indigenous communities. While theories of landscape provide ample scope for understanding the intangible and temporal qualities that might be important to these communities, assessment methodologies still largely focus on landscape's tangible and geographic attributes. Using a New Zealand example to illustrate the problem, and examining a range of approaches across landscape disciplines and indigenous groups, underlying differences are identified in how landscape qualities are expressed and located. The resulting Dimensional Landscape Model offers a set of conceptual structures around which the variety of qualities expressed may have a better fit. It differentiates between static and dynamic expressions of landscape qualities, and in locating those qualities in spatial, temporal or spatio-temporal dimensions. It reveals a tendency for Western disciplines to use static spatial approaches and indigenous groups to use dynamic spatio-temporal approaches. These fundamental differences may help explain why the latter qualities tend to be given less prominence or credibility in formal landscape assessments. The Dimensional Landscape Model offers concepts around which it might be possible to develop more sophisticated and inclusive methods of conveying the multiple qualities of landscapes.