Socially Just Planning: Reclaiming Landscape Justice

Socially Just Planning Network is inviting you to an online seminar with Dr Miguel Hincapie Trivino, Lecturer in Birmingham City University.

Local communities’ engagement in conservation is crucial for the sustainability of cultural landscapes. However, top-down planning frameworks can both hinder and facilitate the conditions for this engagement, determining the extent of communities’ participation in conservation actions. This research shows how social resistance to power imbalances, lack of inclusion in decision-making, occupation, and exploitation have triggered actions for redistribution, recognition, and enhanced capabilities in local actors to reclaim landscape justice. Through a multiple-case study of two world heritage cultural landscapes in Colombia – Zone A of the Coffee Cultural Landscape and Mompox – this research shows a sequence in community social action from land and spaces reclamation, control, and agency to find alliances and fulfilling collective goals. Communities have structured programs around organic coffee production, seed nurturing networks, and public space conservation, which also includes narratives of autonomy and sovereignty that show capacities and diversity in local interests and values. The findings suggest that social resistance is a legitimate form of bottom-up landscape development through which justice and conservation are achieved as a continuous process. Increasing awareness of such dynamics might support the debate on more inclusive conservation frameworks that enable local communities’ initiatives development.