Abstract
In a context where social demand increasingly makes the environmental and aesthetic quality of the living conditions an essential element in Western societies, French and European public policies have shown a growing interest towards the concept of the landscape for some twenty years. The scope of the political action on landscape has been extended from the so-called remarkable spaces to the everyday environment. Moreover, the landscape appears in these policies from the angle of a project, which must be socially built with all the actors of the society, in order to organise collectively the land use planning and management. A large diversity of stakeholders, including planning professionals but also lay people, is called upon to act together in a political landscape action that reflects the aspiration of people. However, it implies that the concept is discussed in the public sphere and that the actors agree or at least discuss their representations of the landscape, that is to say beliefs and values assigned to the landscape, which determine behaviour of the stakeholders, and thus the political action on landscape. Research has shown the difficulties involved in this proliferation of actors and the gap between the regulatory objectives and operational reality. Thus, this research mobilises the theory of social representations as it is developed in the field of research in social psychology to question the social context through which the landscape can be the support of a shared, discussed and negotiated action.The thesis focuses on the context of the territory of la Réunion, characterised by a late political action on landscape and the recent emergence of urban policies and projects where the landscape seems to play a significant role in the design of a more sustainable urban planning. Some research works have shown that landscape policies or urban policies are not always in line with the vernacular landscape, imbued with the social and cultural history of Reunionese and the individual experiences of the inhabitants. Thus, the objective of our work is to understand the possible link between the “political landscape”, thought, shaped and managed by the professionals of the planning, and the landscape inhabited by the populations. It is a question of understanding whether and how the social representations of the landscape are shared, negotiated and collectively built by these actors. The methodological protocol is mainly qualitative and structured around semi-structured interviews and go-along methods. During the interviews, an exercise of free association task was given, inspired by the work in social psychology. This exercise highlights the organization of social representations, showing what is at the heart of the representations and the more peripheral and fluctuating elements of them-here. Based on these three methodological materials, we identify the cognitive (beliefs associated with the landscape), normative (values projected on the landscape) and sensitive (emotions and sensations felt by the landscape) aspects of the social representations of the landscape. We discuss from these results the place of the landscape in the public debate and the planning process, and the potential of a participatory landscape action on la Réunion, as it is driven in the public policies of the landscape.