Although landscape really bears a new perspective on the land of mankind, always more emcompassing, increasingly more coloured, friendly and always more related to citizenship, it still remains quite confused and ambiguous, hesitant between culture and action. This reinvented landscape passes from pure artistic contemplation to the often abrupt and reducing practices of territorial planning, with no other transition than those of parks and gardens.,While preserving its irrepressible cultural dimension, it changed not only in status but, to some extent, in finality and content. Like the environment in the seventies to the nineties, the landscape turned research and territorial planning upside down. This issue is the core of the "Rencontres d'Athous"; there where a gap between knowledge and action persists; there where today, often following the trend of democratic participation, a highly, but still groping, asserted landscape mediation develops. By intersecting wide-ranging experiments and direct discussions between researchers of all disciplines or interdisciplinary configurations, landscape architects and other planning and environmental experts, elected officials and organizers, associative and administrative, about the diversified landscapes of the country of Orthe, the "Rencontres d' Arthous propose, beyond certain methodological uncertainties, new more day-to-day ways, at the same time more enriching and more human, to conceive and to live the territories. The proceedings are the result of this event. They are organized around field experiences and specialized workshops, prepared, presented and collectively discussed, approaching some of the major contemporary issues of development or environment and where the landscape, while remaining an irrepressible hot issue, has become a better and better asserted dimension.
