From vision to action: Framing the Leitbild concept in the context of landscape planning

Reviewing landscape developments in the last decades evidently shows that in the future most pressing changes can be expected for the land surface. This indispensably calls for strategic approaches based on visions and transdisciplinary creativity. Hence, this paper critically reviews the Leitbild concept, an idea on spatial planning which has been widely discussed in the German-speaking planning literature but which has received scant attention elsewhere. Although the term has been translated as a ‘vision’, this paper shows that the concept is far richer in its content than these casual translations suggest. The paper shows that it defines a particular paradigm for landscape planning that embodies a transdisciplinary approach in which lay-people and experts develop both goals and strategies for realising their joint visions. A systematic overview of the key characteristics that make up the Leitbild approach is provided and set in relation to already available approaches for decision makers. Although there are similarities between the Leitbild approach and other planning and decision-support tools, such as Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Strategic Impact Assessment (SEA) and Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA-sust), the paper shows that the particular combination of issues considered when developing a Leitbild makes it distinctive. Through an iterative process, the development of a Leitbild allows new approaches to spatial planning in which space and place can be considered as a social construct, and in which the values and understandings of local actors can be better represented.