By Steven Shuttleworth

The EU-funded HERCULES research project on cultural landscapes is shortly coming to an end. LRG is a partner in the research consortium. The project started in December 2013 for three years, so the final ‘deliverables’ are due to be presented to the EU by the end of November, with a more formal ‘final report’ by the end of January 2017. The Final Conference and Workshop was held in Brussels on 4 October, with a large number of attendees from the various EU directorates, some member state governments, universities, research institutes and professional organisations, as well as from the HERCULES team. The LRG representatives were Paul Tabbush, Laurence le Du-Blayo, Chris Dalglish, Graham Fairclough and Steven Shuttleworth.

The final conference was titled ‘Sustainable Futures for Europe’s Heritage in Cultural Landscapes: Applying a landscape approach to land-use science and policy’. It consisted of a presentation and discussion session on ‘Understanding the Dynamics of Cultural Landscapes in Europe’, followed by a series of nine Organised Group Discussions facilitated by LRG and colleagues involved in some of the case study landscapes, and a final presentation and discussion session on ‘How to Apply the Landscape Approach to Policies?’, moderated by Graham Fairclough.

The workshop was on the theme of ‘Managing Cultural Landscapes for Multiple Societal Values: Insights from the European HERCULES Project’. The opening session focused on ‘Multi-Functional Landscapes for Sustainable Development’, with series of 5 minute presentations about key findings from the project followed by an open discussion. The second session, in the same format, focused on ‘The Science, Policy and Practice of Managing Landscape Change’ .The concluding remarks were given by Emanuela de Manna, who is the policy officer in the EU’s Directorate of Research & Innovation responsible for the HERCULES project.

A fuller summary of the proceedings will appear shortly in Landscape Research Extra. In the meantime, the agenda and various papers are available at the HERCULES website at http://www.hercules-landscapes.eu/stakeholder_workshops.php?final_conference. The brochure on ‘The Landscape Approach’ can be found at: http://www.hercules-landscapes.eu/tartalom/publications/articles_5.pdf and is supplemented by an entry on the project’s Cultural Landscapes Blog, which can be found here, which was written by Jurgen Tack, Julianna Nagy, Sarah McCarthy and Paul Tabbush.