Introduction
Engaging Local Communities
A recent study undertaken in Hampshire[2] indicated that the attitudes of many local residents to the landscape may not accord with the accepted and often unchallenged views expressed through the public participation process in the past. It also demonstrated that there is a very mixed level of understanding of the pressing issues affecting the landscape. In the past there has been greater emphasis in involving organisations, interest groups and representatives of elected bodies. Their contribution remains invaluable but the processes adopted failed to bring out what local people, unaffiliated to interest groups and organisations, felt about the landscape on their doorstep.
The Test Valley Community Landscape Project has sought to put in place a means to engage local people and bring their views, using their own words, into identifying landscape character distinctions within the borough and the important characteristics of each character area. To this end a series of local residents’ focus meetings were held across the borough right at the early stages of the project. With members of the study team attending all these meetings, and a prompt report back to the team by the organisers, Miller Associates, the views of those who attended informed the definition and description of the landscape character types and character areas.
Test Valley Borough Council undertook a wide preliminary consultation exercise in Autumn 2003, distributing a summary of the key aspects of the landscape character types and character areas to organisations, interest groups, representatives of elected bodies, those who commented on rural aspects of the Initial Deposit Draft Borough Local Plan 2004 and a group of the local residents from the first focus group meeting.
A workshop was subsequently held in November attended by representatives from the residents’ focus groups and invited members of local interest groups. The responses from the wider consultation and the workshop led to a refinement of the classification and description of the borough landscape and the strategies and guidelines for the management and planning of the countryside.
The continuing involvement of the local residents throughout the assessment process has demonstrated that the general public do indeed see the landscape in which they live in a very different light to professionals and those with an active interest in the landscape. It also identified the difficulties of communicating the process of Landscape Character Assessment to the general public. However, the participation exercises showed that local people would like to be consulted, can use the techniques of Landscape Character Assessment to better understand and articulate their perceptions of the landscape and wish to contribute to the development of landscape planning and management policies.