SMC Special Issue N.04 2020 | PREFACE

The European Landscape Convention (ELC) allowed achieving important results through the promotion of approaches oriented to landscapes safeguard and valorization. Nevertheless, in the present context, risks and hazards able to threaten landscapes resources have been increasingly growing: environmental risks intensified by a wild urban development, climate change, excessive landscape exploitation or, on the other hand, landscape abandonment and depopulation. Twenty years on from ELC enactment, this special issue wants to take a stock of how much is still required to cope with all the different form of risk threatening “the significant or characteristic features of a landscape, justified by its heritage value derived from its natural configuration and/or from human activity” (ELC, 2000).
The special issue aims is to deal with all the different reasons that could produce alteration, decay, depletion or loss of material and immaterial assets that mark out landscapes. Therefore, risk is also understood as risk of alteration or interruption of the relationship between community and places, which lead to landscape’s features creation according to ELC. Therefore, the issue “Landscapes at risk” will be addressed considering its multiple meanings, starting from landscapes affected by natural risks, moving to the ones suffering shrinking or gentrification risk or even overexploitation and/or congestion, up to landscape in transition. […]