The dual role of roads in the visual landscape: a case study in the area around Mechelen (Belgium)

Roads dominate our daily surroundings and are essential conditions of the access to the visual landscape. This paper focuses on the dual landscape role of secondary and tertiary roads in a semi-rural setting, to be understood as the access to scenery and as their direct influence to the landscape characteristics. A combination of techniques was used including a radiocentric morphological landscape analysis, a perception study on landscape photographs and a cumulative logit model to assess the factors of landscape appreciation in this kind of environment. The results show that roads do not entirely open up the information content of the visual landscape. Furthermore, roads and built fabric seem to have a negative impact on landscape appreciation. This result does not rely on the structures themselves, but on the artificial materials they are constructed of. The methodology applied proves to be useful and is probably applicable in other geographical contexts. It can be a supporting tool to plan and manage road networks for improvement of landscape quality, especially in parts of the countryside strongly affected by urban sprawl.