In post-industrial Europe, a political and cultural debate over landscape had developed by the eighties, prompted by agents with interests as diverging as those of the environmental movement at one end, and the artists and theorists of Land Art at the other. The crisis that put an end to that decade changed the political agenda, leaving the debate unresolved; but the consciousness of an altered landscape had emerged, as well as the possibility to actively participate in its transformation as a cultural object.
At present, an equally diverse set of factors urge us to adopt an innovative strategy to make sense of altered landscapes (whether they are rural, urban, industrial or post-industrial landscapes), which in the current economic cycle are undergoing one of the biggest transformations in its history.