Geoscience Reference
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ecology (
Stadtökologie
) focused on specific ecological features of town landscapes
in relation to societal pressures and needs (Sukkop & Wittig, 1993). And thus while
geographers often used the terms landscape and environment when they were trying
to argue for a unity of geography by means of the integrated (but in reality often
missing) scientific approach, it was rather the experts from related fields who con-
tributed to the more complex understanding of the urban landscape (e.g. Gibbs &
Healey, 1997; Haken & Portugali, 2003; Williams, 1994; Longley, 2006). When
we say more complex, we mean heterogeneity of approaches applied to the uni-
fied type of geographic object/process but not to its concrete representation (i.e.
a concrete place). The large extent of the studied cities often prevented integra-
tion of various methods of study and thus one or more approaches were preferred,
which is summarised at the historic and scientific level by Hall (2006), i.e. from the
study of the physical environment and morphology of towns, from the positivistic
and behaviouristic approach to the structural and urban sociologic approach. In this
particular case it is also quite unsuitable to use methods of multi-temporal land-use
analyses, which are otherwise beneficial. This is because the changes of land-use are
conditioned by many inseparable and often non-identifiable factors (driving forces),
which can be interpreted only with difficulty within the scope of cities, resp. towns.
For this reason, the majority of such works also focus their attention on complex,
rural and possibly also suburban areas (Bicík, Jelecek, & Štepánek, 2001; Bicík &
Kupková, 2006). In this respect it is more suitable to study small towns for instance
by works concerning regional development and environment (Andel et al., 1992;
Vaishar et al., 2001).
In the last decades, the complex study of towns has been assisted by infor-
mation technology, which exponentially increase its performance reflected in the
possibilities of visualisation of past, contemporary and possible future landscapes.
The necessity of such continuity of past - recent - future landscape development
in regional and landscape planning was well explained by Antrop (2005). These
visualisations of landscape development have various forms and they are based on
the use of various data sources. For example, for the purposes of historic landscape
visualisation, military maps from the mid-eighteenth to mid-twentieth century, and
photographs and aerial photographs from the mid-Nineteenth century are used.
Various paintings, drawings and engravings depict the landscape even before the
use of photographs began but their usability as regards authenticity is disputable.
The condition of the contemporary landscape can already be reflected and depicted
with a significantly higher degree of credibility, thanks to regular taking of aerial
photographs and significantly more exact data concerning the landscape as such.
Construction of the potential future landscape condition or rather scenarios of land-
scape development can be a suitable tool for community/participatory planning
(Tress & Tress, 2003; Buchecker, Hunziker, & Kienast, 2003) including the mod-
elling issues (Walz et al., 2007), but at the same time it runs up against various
problems that can be partially overcome by means of objective and fixed points the
most important of which - in the Czech planning community - undoubtedly is a
territorial plan. On the other hand we can ask: who creates the territorial plan? Are
these politicians or planners? Can we forecast any decisions concerning changes
to the territorial plan? Can we guess the time in which the planned changes will
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