DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-2046(01)00200-6

Summary
This paper highlights the need for collaboration and transdisciplinary approaches in landscape research to address various environmental and social problems. It provides an overview of the historical development of landscape concepts originating from different cultural and scientific trends, and proposes a new complex concept of landscape that unites dimensions usually the domain of individual disciplines. This new concept is based on five dimensions: the spatial entity, the mental entity, the temporal dimension, the nexus of nature and culture, and the systemic properties of landscapes. It promotes landscape as the combination of the subsystems known as the geo-, bio- and noo-sphere and is illustrated by the people-landscape interaction model. The paper also provides examples of how this concept can be applied to human-landscape-related research, including two studies that have investigated the relationship between landscape and second-home tourism, and landscape and farming, respectively. Overall, this paper offers a new perspective on landscape research that integrates different disciplines and promotes collaboration to address complex problems related to landscapes.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
The paper offers a theoretical paradigm to approach landscape research that embraces the complexity approach. This paradigm should be the benchmark reference for all landscape related teaching classes, independently by the aim of the course (planning, design, natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts). This approach has been embedded in the European Landscape Convention (2000).

Point of Strength
The five dimensions of Landscape identified in the paper:

- Landscape as a spatial entity
- Landscape as a mental entity
- Landscape as a temporal dimension
- Landscape as a nexus of nature and culture
- Landscape as a complex system

Offer a theoretical framework for structuring various didactic paths relating to subjects concerning the landscape, offering a transdisciplinary approach that could have interesting perspectives in structuring entire interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary programs. Every course regarding landscape-related issues approached through the prism of complexity could find interesting matters of discussion starting from the paper's content. Moreover, the theoretical framework here presented could supply the backbone for a complexity-based program geared at sustainable landscape development.