Landscape assessment: a forgotten tool for stimulating student enquiry?

ABSTRACT Approaches to landscape assessment have been widely debated and, despite their usefulness in educational settings, have generally fallen out of favour. Yet, ways to record, monitor and discuss landscape quality are becoming more important as the pace of landscape change increases. The growing prominence of ‘place’ and ‘place-making’ in geography presents an opportunity to reinvigorate landscape assessment in educational contexts. In this article, we present a tool for assessing the visual quality of landscapes, which can be adapted for use in a range of environments. We discuss the results of a pilot study that deployed the approach. We demonstrate how the tool can be used to monitor landscape changes and how the experience of generating data, as well as the results, can be used as a catalyst for discussions about place, land use, development and the contested nature of valued landscapes.