The Agricultural Landscape – Spatial Characterizations

The agricultural landscape is a subject of analysis as a special kind of heritage, its multifunctionality generating individual and social welfare, as resource and asset for sustainable development. The dynamics of the agricultural landscape is the materialization of the land and economic policies and inherently of a social dynamics characteristic for the agrarian society over time; in other terms, we can consider that the agricultural landscape represents a social and juridical history of the rural area. The agricultural landscape is a social construction, tributary to the natural environment, determined by a series of political and social processes. Within the agricultural landscape, the members of a rural community can meet their economic needs through the establishment of (resourcerelated) productivist relations or existential relations (related to the identity construction within the parameters provided by the collective memory). The agricultural landscape can be also decoded through the political dimension: it reflects the economic/agricultural/land governance effects; it is a real lesson of the way in which the territory is politically managed and a concrete representation of the type of relationships that prevail in a certain period.