Place values and change

This contribution is concerned with the survival and improvement of the specificities of places, or rather landscapes. Landscape is an expression of how society lives and perceives a given place. Places have their own life: they were born and founded; they change and may die; they are abandoned and can be resurrected. This paper investigates the change in values and meaning given to places by a community over time. The paper analyses the story of two places subject to change, to identify how each began to be a centre of values, how these values were considered and came to find expression in decision-making. Values and decisions interact in two ways: a) values are deleted from the decisions concerning a given place; b) ‘armchair’ values are elaborated without any hands-on experience of a place and therefore produce barriers, blocking transformative action and destroying the old values by preventing the formation of new meanings. In both cases the result is abandonment.ritory; visual perceptions of the material world provide images and manifestations expressed through different modes, such as sounds, light etc.