Perception of rural landscapes in Flanders: Looking beyond aesthetics

More and more, society's expectations of rural landscapes are rising and farmers are increasingly stimulated to incorporate ‘green services’ into their operational management. This assumes matching perceptions of the landscape between farmers, landscape experts and the general public. A method based on a picture enquiry was used to measure landscape perception in the ‘Pajottenland’, a central Belgian, rural area. Additional questions assessed the importance of meanings and functions of the landscape and revealed differences in perception among three target groups (farmers, landscape experts and country-dwellers). The results confirmed that the three groups look at landscapes in a different way, attaching importance to different landscape features and finding different functions appropriate for the considered landscapes. As a consequence, policies concerning landscape servicing by the farming community should incorporate appropriate incentives of communication and generate modes of understanding between different stakeholders.