IFLA Global Landscape Initiative Charters

The International Federation of Landscape Architects is a federation of national landscape architecture associations. Since 2010, through what it calls its Global Landscape Initiative, its regional councils have produced a family of landscape charters: the Charter of the Landscape of the Americas, the African Landscape Convention, the IFLA Asia-Pacific Landscape Charter and the IFLA Middle East Declaration on Landscape Approach. The federation presents them as one initiative with regional expressions, aligning their voices with the European Landscape Convention of 2000, and that is why they are held here as one record rather than several.

One distinction must not be blurred. The European Landscape Convention is a treaty of the Council of Europe, open to ratification by states and binding on those that ratify it. It is not a federation charter. The federation lists it as the earlier instrument its own regional charters align with, and nothing in that alignment gives the charters the convention's legal standing.

The Charter of the Landscape of the Americas was approved in its original Spanish in September 2018, at the regional council held at the Seminary of Mexican Culture in Mexico City. It defines landscape as a portion of a territory apprehended by the sensory and intelligible experience of individual and collective perception, revealed in a unicum and continuum of living, natural and cultural systems, as a synthetic and interdependent totality in space and in time. That definition does two things at once: it refuses to separate the natural from the cultural, and it refuses to separate the object from the perceiving community.

The charter describes itself as an instrument guiding the conservation, planning, design and management of the landscape of the Americas, in coherence with international law, sustainable development, the enhancement of socio-cultural diversity, and social participation as a necessary condition for public policy planning, while recognising the right to the landscape as a commons. Its five guiding principles open from the statement that diversity is a value unit that distinguishes and identifies the continent. First, landscape is to be comprehended as part of a living whole, a condition that explicitly precedes all the others. Second, recover the cosmovision and the vision of sacredness. Third, consider the singularities of the palimpsest of the territory across scales of space and time in order to reduce social inequalities and maintain the identity of the Americas. Fourth, take up again ethics understood in its relationship with aesthetics. Fifth, rediscover the roots of Americanity as a condition for the future.

The second and fifth principles are the ones with the fewest parallels in the other documents in this bank. A charter written by a professional body that begins by asking practitioners to recover cosmovision and the vision of sacredness is making a claim about what counts as knowledge, not only about what counts as good practice.

None of these charters is law. The federation is a professional body and its charters guide practice and advocacy without obliging any state. A limit on this record should also be stated plainly: only the Americas charter has been read for this bank, and only at the level of the federation's own published summary. The African, Asia-Pacific and Middle East documents are named here on the federation's authority, and nothing is claimed about their contents.