Lifestyle and Landscape

Different lifestyles influence consumption patterns and living habits. For instance: digitalisation encourages lifestyles involving decentralised living and working. Instead of choosing to reside near their place of work, working people can therefore opt for a home in a more distant area where building land is comparatively cheap and rents are low. In this way, digitalisation promotes decentralised living. But factors such as what we eat, which means of transport we choose, and how we take our holidays, relax and generally organise our everyday lives all leave their mark on the landscape too.

Conversely, the way we experience and perceive landscapes can also influence our lifestyles and thus have repercussions for them. Lifestyles and prevailing trends therefore entail social demands on the landscape, which actually changes as a result. This may be reflected in the availability of new types of local recreation and changes in agriculture or settlement structures, but also in the large-scale use of holiday destinations by tourists.

Climate change is also unlikely to remain without consequences and is set to influence several of our daily routines as well as our leisure behaviour – and this, again, will indirectly shape the development of the landscape.

Well-founded speculations may of course be made about the relationships between lifestyle and landscape. However, little scientifically justified specialist knowledge is available as yet. This is why FoLAP places this core topic at the very top of its list of priorities so as to set research in motion.

Together with actors from practice, FoLAP aims to identify possible ways to incorporate the population's requirements and wishes into future landscape planning and usage. Negotiations of this sort with directly involved parties are important. In their absence, there is a risk that people will become increasingly alienated from their everyday landscape. Landscapes would then lose their relationship to lifestyles over time, or they would take too little account of public and higher-level interests, ultimately running counter to the principle that landscape is a common good.

Given the many – sometimes contradictory – trends that are emerging at present, a compilation and characterisation of socially relevant lifestyles would be of great benefit. A further step would then be to clarify how the trends impact landscapes in Switzerland (and other parts of the world), and how the experience of landscape – in turn – has repercussions for lifestyle.

It would be equally important to explore the economic opportunities and risks that the identified trends are likely to entail. Another objective is to discover the traits that characterise sustainable landscape development. Lifestyles that support sustainable landscape development should also be identified.

Finally, instruments should be designed and tested that could lead to a shared understanding in cases where divergent lifestyles and thus different demands on the landscape coincide.

How lifestyles and landscape influence each other is important not only for planning, but also for market and residential research, which gives this question high priority. Various think tanks and university institutes also focus on this issue, although none of them can claim a leading position in this field of research.

Various political initiatives underline the importance of addressing lifestyles and how they influence landscape. Mention could be made, for example, of the revision of the Federal Act on Spatial Planning

(Spatial Planning Act, SPA 2), the 2030 Sustainable Development Strategy, and others.

FoLAP supports the research community in taking a transdisciplinary approach to investigating how lifestyles influence landscape and its sustainable development – i.e. together with actors from business, politics and practice. Ways should also be found to involve the general public in the debate. The Federal government's Landscape Concept 2020 can serve as a prime example of this.