Social Ethics of Landscape Change

Understanding stakeholder values is crucial to the development of a community-based model of landscape change. Be that as it may, engagement techniques are still in their infancies, and land-use planners are struggling for tools to facilitate discourse on public values related to landscape change. Accordingly, this article responds to urgent needs to define planning processes that represent the values of stakeholders, empower communities, and lead to landscape changes that maintain and enhance a community's sense of place. It does so by exploring the combination of photo elicitation and narrative as a form of civic science aimed at engaging citizens in the planning process. Findings from a study incorporating these techniques are used to show the merits of this participatory form of inquiry. The authors argue the use of stories, unlike traditional public engagement techniques, allows the landscape-change process to be situated within the social meanings relevant to a community.