Landscape research in Greece: An overview

Abstract

Though both academics and practitioners have been showing increasing interest in the Greek landscape, so far progress in related fields has been minimal and slow. Specifically, in the 1990s, landscape science in Greece underwent a shift from the fragmentary, peripheral and haphazard preoccupation of the design sciences with practical landscape issues as they developed out of physical interventions in urban space to a more concerted, focused and systematic landscape approach by several more disciplines and practitioners. This has, so far at least, remained mainly a qualitative shift characterized by its very limited extent and impact on actual landscape problems and issues in Greece, largely suffering from disciplinary limits and from the lack of communication and cooperation between academics, practitioners and administrators as well as from effective application in landscape policy, Clearly, what is required in the case of the Greek landscape is much further interdisciplinary engagement in landscape theory, methodology and development of techniques, as well as practical application and implementation of theoretical and research findings.