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proposals or bringing forward new alternatives. Where environmental impacts
cannot be avoided, it may be possible to limit damage. Mitigation could also be
put into effect through provisions in later plans such as Supplementary Planning
Documents, or planning conditions for particular types of development.
2.4 concLusions
The Action Plans carried out by Enerscapes are intended due to act at an admin-
istrative level intermediate between the provincial one and the municipal one.
Such a “federative” inter-municipality is called upon “to perform together better
and at lesser costs to taxpayers those obligations that each municipality on its
own could not perform or would perform worse and at higher costs”.
In addition to topics relevant to landscape and environment, such as the setting
of renewable sources, other issues are at stake: creation of ecological networks,
management of the waste cycle, location of metropolitan facilities, services and
industrial estates, as a further stimulus to the search for “bottom-up” solutions, in
a positive-sum game between costs and benefits, penalties and rewards.
However, difficulty in making different visions and missions converge cannot be
underestimated; likewise, criticality emerging from the conflict between land-
scape quality objectives and value-in-use has to be processed taking landscape
as the common ground for choices involving different aspects of decision-mak-
ing practices.
Undoubtedly, assessing landscape transformations over time is more than a
technical duty. It implies symbolic values, perceptive aspects, personal consid-
erations, which cannot be reduced to mere calculation. Strong management is
required in the capacity to put together different (quantitative and qualitative)
factors, and to look for a synthesis. From a social point of view, when assessing
