"2015 Yilan Landscape Forum" International Symposium

"Landscape" and "landscape creation" have often been interpreted in the past as "scenic beautification" or "planting and greening," but this is actually an oversimplification or narrowing of what "landscape" means. Compared with the past, the concept of "landscape" today has increased in both richness and complexity at the same time. The new concept of landscape incorporates sustainability and livelihoods, rather than focusing only on environmental beautification and decoration; it incorporates people's ongoing interaction with the environment, rather than assuming that landscape is a static, fixed physical environment.

In the past, in pursuit of economic growth, Taiwanese society underwent drastic expansion, development and change across its entire landscape. In the face of continuously evolving social development and changes in the natural environment, the development of Yilan's urban and rural landscapes hopes to seek a dynamic management strategy, so that as Yilan's landscape continues to evolve over time and with socioeconomic change, it can still maintain the aesthetic qualities and sustainability of good living, good livelihoods, good ecology and good culture.

The Yilan County Government stated that the purpose of holding the "2015 Yilan Landscape Forum" on the 3rd at National Yilan University (in the International Conference Hall on the 2nd floor of the Library and Information Building) was to take the landscape of the Dezikou River corridor as its theme, specially inviting three international scholars, including professors from the United Kingdom, France and Japan, as well as Professor Wang Guangyu, chief adviser on environmental landscape for Yilan County, and Lin Guomin, deputy director of the Public Works Department, to speak respectively on "River Governance and Ecosystem Services," "Landscape Conservation and Landscape Management Strategies from the French Experience," "Creation of River Waterfront Environments," "Landscape Value and Landscape Management: Promoting the New Yilan Experience," and "Practice and Challenges of Yilan's Urban and Rural Landscape," combining cross-national and cross-disciplinary expertise to communicate environmental values and to read the landscape, diagnose problems and discuss issues, and to seek operational models and operational tools for composite landscape management, as a reference for the future planning, management and policy of the Dezikou River corridor landscape, and through this process to expand international exchange.