Shaping Positive Landscape Change
The South Downs Local Plan is landscape-led. Landscape is required to be considered first, right at the start and then used as the basis for developing a proposal. Getting pre-application advice is a good way to find out more about this process for your proposal.
Landscapes have changed for millennia, and many act as a physical record of this change. Some landscapes still survive largely unchanged since the Medieval period and others record layers of change, with each change failing to totally rub away the previous, leading to landscapes with ‘time-depth’. But all landscapes are valuable records of our shared history.
Understanding past change can help us to shape positive and sustainable future change whilst retaining character, function and sense of place. So whilst all landscapes have changed, some have more capacity for further change than others.
National Parks are designated in order to ensure change continues to be positive, retaining important characteristics, functions and sense of place that result from all of its elements.
Ensuring each decision delivers multiple benefits and avoids, then minimises negative effects is the overall aim.