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Chapter 1
Introduction
Leaping the fence
Ken Taylor and Jane L. Lennon
One of our deepest needs is for a sense of identity and belonging. A common denominator in this is human attachment to landscape and how we find identity in landscape and place. Thirty years or so ago the American geographer, Donald Meinig (1979: 1), proposed that ‘[l]andscape is an attractive, important, and ambiguous term [that] encompasses an ensemble of ordinary features which constitute an extraordinarily rich exhibit of the course and character of any society’ and that ‘[l]andscape is defined by our vision and interpreted by our minds. It is a panorama which continuously changes as we move along any route’ (ibid.: 3). In this interpretative way of seeing we ascribe values to landscape for intangible – often (but not always) spiritual – reasons. Landscape can therefore be seen as a cultural construct in which our sense of place and memories inhere and where we make places in a continuing process of inhabiting and changing the landscape. More recently John Wylie (2007) explores the extraordinary richness of debate over the definitions, meanings and use of the word ‘landscape’.
Critical to ways of viewing landscape has been the increasing attention given internationally to the study of cultural landscapes, including to the extent of recognition in 1992 of World Heritage categories of cultural landscapes of outstanding universal value. It is a point to which authors in this volume consistently turn. It is celebrated in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO 2009) publication World Heritage Papers 26, although we stress at the outset that the book is not only about World Heritage.
Within the parameters of a heritage discourse, the period of the later years of the 1980s and into the 1990s saw a remarkable flowering of interest in, and understanding of, cultural landscapes. As a result of this – and the associated emergence of a different value system inherent in cultural landscapes – there came a challenge to the 1960s and 1970s concept of heritage focusing on heritage sites and monuments with connections to the rich and iconic. Widening interest in public history and understanding that the landscape is an unsurpassed record of social history waiting to be read by ‘those who know how to read it aright’ (Hoskins 1955: 14) informed the emergence of the cultural landscape movement. Interest academically and professionally in the ordinary, the everyday flourished.
This post-late 1980s movement significantly represents, therefore, an extension of the idea of landscape as cultural product, to landscape as cultural process. Inherent also in this is the recognition that to understand ourselves and human identities we need to look searchingly at our landscapes for through their history of being made, they are a clue to culture (Lewis 1979), and our ordinary everyday landscapes at that, not just the national icons. Just as William Kent, the eighteenth-century English landscape designer of the picturesque, was deemed to have ‘leaped the fence to see that all nature was a garden’,1 the fence has been leaped by cultural heritage management theory and practice to take in the entire landscape shaped by people into an expanded scope of theoretical understanding and praxis.
This is not to say that the concept and study of landscape as product are superfluous, but rather they are complementary to understanding landscape as process. Products in the landscape – buildings, structures, patterns of land-use – are the tangible physical components of the landscape, the what, when and where. But these need to be viewed and understood within a cultural context of why they are there, why does the landscape take the shape that it does and who has been involved over time in its shaping. This is articulated by Baker (1992: 3) as the way in which
historical studies of landscapes must be grounded in analysis of material structures: they are properly concerned with tangible, visible expressions of different modes of production … But [that] such material structures are created and creatively destroyed within an ideological context: such studies must therefore acknowledge that landscapes are shaped by mental attitudes and that a proper understanding of landscapes must rest on the historical recovery of ideologies.
Baker takes this further with the view which we acknowledge as influential to our thinking that ‘ideology, then, involves systems and structures of signification and domination: any landscape is likely to contain all manner of ideological representations so that a description of its appearance must also logically be “thickened”2 into an expression of its meaning’ (ibid.: 4). Such a view of landscape corresponds with that of Roland Barthes (1977) who emphasizes landscape as a system of signs and symbols, what he calls ‘signifiers’. In this way landscapes can be read within a cultural context to reveal human values and plurality of meanings.
Michael Conzen (1994: 4) fluently summarizes these ideas with the reflection that
to view the landscape historically is to acknowledge its cumulative character; to acknowledge that nature, symbolism, and design are not static elements of the human record but change with historical experience; and to acknowledge too that the geographically distinct quality of places is a product of selective addition and survival over time of each new set of forms peculiar to that region or locality.
With such thinking in mind the purpose behind the book is fourfold. First is the airing of critical discussion of key issues in cultural landscapes through accessible accounts of how the concept of cultural landscape has universal application with some focus on the Asia-Pacific and North America region, and is inextricably tied to notions of living history where landscape itself is a rich historical record. Nevertheless, we are not just looking at history, but also the present with the idea of landscape subject to the continuous process of being made and made-over by people (Figure 1.1). Landscape is not some historical museum stopped in time. Second is the widening of the notion that landscape only involves rural settings to embrace the inclusion of studies, thinking and work in the area of historic urban landscapes/townscapes. Third, the text examines matters of identity, maintaining traditional skills and knowledge bases in the face of globalization, and new technologies. Fourth, it is intended that the text will foster international debate focusing on the Asia-Pacific and North American region with interdisciplinary appeal to provide a critical text for academics teaching heritage studies and their students, practitioners and informed community organizations.
Figure 1.1 Intensive summer cropping, Deqin Valley, Yunnan.
Source: J.L. Lennon.
Authors with extensive expert knowledge bring together a body of international work on management of heritage values of cultural landscapes covering: Australia, Japan, China, USA, Canada, Thailand, Indonesia, Pacific Islands, India, Philippines and Cambodia; the deepening interest in historic urban landscapes; a review of how and why the cultural landscape setting of Dresden was removed from the World Heritage List; and an exploration of the cultural landscape idea at a former military site in Germany. Accordingly the book is sub-divided into four sections. The first part – Emergence of cultural landscape concepts – traces the development of the theoretical and philosophical background allied to concepts and context for the cultural landscape idea; culture–nature relationships; application by the World Heritage Committee; and associated management imperatives. The second part – Managing Asia-Pacific cultural landscapes – focuses on the Asia-Pacific region with seven chapters critically reviewing concepts and practice within different cultures but bounded by their location in this increasingly important part of the global cultural heritage setting, albeit under-represented in global heritage listings (UNESCO 1994, 2007a; ICOMOS 2005). The third part – New applications – explores emerging ideas on what might be seen as new cultural landscape ideas with an international flavour through the idea of historic urban landscapes, a North American focus and specific commentary on the wider setting of Angkor. The fourth part – Future challenges – addresses the latest work at the rice terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras, an overview of cultural landscape practice in the Asia-Pacific region, the specific and special case of Dresden and its removal from the World Heritage List and culminates in an overview of contemporary management challenges. Whilst appreciation of the cultural landscape construct may have taken time to mature in some Asia-Pacific countries, nevertheless the potential cultural heritage significance of cultural landscapes was recognized over a decade ago in the ASEAN Declaration on Cultural Heritage with the comment that ‘[h]istoric sites, cultural landscapes, areas of scenic beauty and natural monuments shall be identified, recognized and protected’ (ASEAN 2000: para. 2).
Focus on monuments and famous architectural or archaeological ensembles and their fabric conservation – particularly those of classical Europe from a high art/high aesthetic perspective – has historically informed international heritage practice as various commentators have consistently observed (for example Cleere 2001; Taylor and Altenburg 2006; Fengqi Qian 2007). Byrne proposes this is linked to an overriding concern with the tangible where ‘on-ground heritage practice is almost exclusively focused on conserving the physicality of architecture and archaeological sites [which] all too easily leads to monumentalism’ (2009: 243). Part I of this volume, through Chapters 2 and 3 by Taylor and Lennon respectively, take this as a touchstone on which to develop firm ground in advancing an argument for widening international understanding and application of the cultural landscape construct.
Identity is a recurring theme in heritage discourse as Smith and Akagawa (2009: 7) opine with the comment that ‘heritage is intimately linked with identity’. Chapters 2 and 3 argue as a foundational common denominator the premise that human identity, intangible values and landscape are inseparable. Linked to this is the social context of heritage and heritage places and their plurality of meanings for people, not least in the Asia-Pacific region for local communities who live in and around places identified globally as ‘heritage’. The temples of Angkor, for example, are not simply dead ruins but part of a cultural landscape setting still used daily by local people (Taylor 2010) inhabiting a landscape that (as Chapter 2 suggests) surrounds, permeates and saturates the World Heritage area with meaning. Here intangible values spiritually associated with temples – ruins? – that are regarded as important living everyday places by local communities are where memory and landscape are inextricably intertwined. They speak of a sense of place where memories and identity inhere underpinning the notion that landscape making and ideology are inseparable (Baker 1992). Chapter 2 therefore seeks to explore intellectual foundations for the cultural landscape idea within the context of a global discourse for landscape meaning and explores the idea of landscape as process, not just product.
The World Heritage Committee faces the dilemma of inscribing landscapes to which people have deep attachment and may be managed according to centuries-old practices or beliefs. These cultural places are often memorable landscapes or natural landscapes imbued with meaning for local inhabitants (Figures 1.2, 1.3). With these factors in mind, Chapter 3 traces the development of the cultural landscape concept by the World Heritage Committee, trends in designations of places in the Asia-Pacific region as World Heritage cultural landscapes and a suite of issues arising from that designation process, including identification of all the values, maintaining traditional skills, knowledge, governance and training and the introduction of new infrastructure, land-uses and technologies including tourism into these landscapes. Setting limits of acceptable change and allowing the continuing practice of traditional agricultural methods in the context of global food supplies are key considerations (Lennon 2003). Issues in managing cultural landscapes following World Heritage studies are illustrated with examples from Australia, Japan, the Pacific, Cambodia and montane South East Asia.
Figure 1.2 Val d’Orcia (Italy) World Heritage continuing cultural landscape (2004).
Source: K. Taylor.
Figure 1.3 Uluru (Australia Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park) World Heritage associative cultural landscape (1994).
Source: Nicholas Hall.
A topic of considerable interest to which critical attention is being given is that of the culture–nature relationship and traditional ways of seeing cultural landscapes and, allied to this, traditional management approaches and biodiversity protection. Often these can be, and are, in contest with mainstream internationalized universal heritage values where the heritage resource is viewed as a monument separate from its cultural landscape setting and, similarly, where natural values have been privileged over cultural values leading to removal and dispossession of traditional communities (UNESCO 2006; Pannell 2006; Head 2010; Brown and Kothari 2011; Wei-Chi Chang 2011). These are challenging issues in the Asia-Pacific region suggesting the need for thematic studies to be undertaken. The challenges are the focus of authors’ contributions in Part II and Chapter 13 of Part III of the volume.
Amin (Chapter 4) traces an understanding of the beliefs and concepts of landscape as the ideal worldview of the Javanese and how these concepts disclose meanings in their manifestations in the cultural landscapes. She elucidates how landscape elements such as mountain, tree and water were and still are taken as important symbols that influence how landscapes are made and manifest in form, as at Borobudur temple and the traditional Bali terraced rice field system (subak). Feng Han, in Chapter 5, based on the Chinese traditional understanding of the relationships between human beings and nature, discusses the cross-cultural misunderstandings of World Heritage in China, especially about World Heritage cultural landscapes. She examines potential ways to fill the gaps from theoretical and practice perspectives, especially how China and the international community could complementarily deepen and widen the theory and practice of cultural landscapes. The implications and recommendations for the native landscape to be conserved in China based on Chinese traditions with the international inspirations are presented.
Inaba (Chapter 6) traces the introduction of the concept of cultural landscapes in Japan and how Japan not only introduced the concept of natural monuments, but importantly established a legal process and framework to which the concepts of places of scenic beauty and historic sites were added. As a result nature-rela...
