Terraces: examples of conservation and innovation

All over the world, there are terraced landscapes, which stand as testimony to the work done by local communities to increase the area of their arable land and to stabilise the hillsides. We place a high ethical and aesthetic value on terraced landscapes, but the disappearance of human activity (cultivation and maintenance) from the terraces is leading to their abandonment and their ultimate disappearance. But we have now reached the stage of talking about the conservation, exploitation, and regeneration of terraced landscapes. Rethinking the principles of "landscape construction" should lead us to the definition of a process of regeneration based on a multidisciplinary and multiscalar approach, in which the demands of conservation are necessarily combined with those of innovation.