Conserving Cultural Landscapes

Challenges and New Directions

Ken Taylor, Archer St. Clair, Nora J. Mitchell, Ken Taylor, Archer St. Clair, Nora J. Mitchell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317800897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Géographie historique

New approaches to both cultural landscapes and historic urban landscapes increasingly recognize the need to guide future change, rather than simply protecting the fabric of the past. Challenging traditional notions of historic preservation, Conserving Cultural Landscapes takes a dynamic multifaceted approach to conservation. It builds on the premise that a successful approach to urban and cultural landscape conservation recognizes cultural as well as natural values, sustains traditional connections to place, and engages people in stewardship where they live and work. It brings together academics within the humanities and humanistic social sciences, conservation and preservation professionals, practitioners, and stakeholders to rethink the meaning and practice of cultural heritage conservation, encourage international cooperation, and stimulate collaborative research and scholarship.

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Introduction: Cultural Landscapes

Twenty-First Century Conservation Opportunities and Challenges

Ken Taylor, Archer St Clair, and Nora J. Mitchell

… landscape could perhaps best be thought of as a series of tensions: tensions between distance and proximity, observing and inhabiting, eye and land, culture and nature; these tensions animate the landscape concept, make it cogent and productive.

Wylie (2007:216)

In October 2012, the Program in Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies (CHAPS) at Rutgers University (New Jersey) worked with a wide range of partners to convene an international conference Cultural Landscapes: Preservation Challenges for the 21st Century. This conference was one of many global events marking the fortieth anniversary of the 1972 World Heritage Convention, the twentieth anniversary of the World Heritage Committee’s 1992 recognition of cultural landscape categories for World Heritage purposes, and the approval of the UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL), in November 2011 (see also Postscript ‘The Road from Rutgers’).

This conference was grounded on two premises. The first is that the cultural landscape concept offers a framework that encompasses an integrated view of the processes and relationships essential to a culture-based conservation strategy that respects the complexity and wealth of diverse values in a rapidly changing world. The second is that the key concerns in sustainable cultural heritage conservation and management are comparable around the world. Exchange among countries and sharing of experiences are essential to developing successful theoretical and practical approaches to conservation. A global perspective was, therefore, a critical factor for the conference. As a result, this book consists of twenty-two chapters (including this Introduction) developed from conference presentations by leading professionals and scholars. In total they present a contemporary and evolving international view of the concept of cultural landscape conservation—including urban cultural landscapes—recognizing the cultural landscape as a significant setting for all human activities.

The cultural landscape concept is intended to increase awareness that heritage places are not isolated islands and that there is interdependence between people, their social structures and ecosystems, and landscape conservation. The conference papers and panel discussions focused on new and innovative approaches to conservation in two areas. The first concerns the broadening of the understanding and importance of the spirit and meaning of the cultural landscape idea and the implications for conservation. The second concerns the extension, over the past five years, to embrace the concept of the historic urban landscape (HUL). The UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL), approved by the 17th General Assembly of UNESCO in November 2011, extends an interdisciplinary cultural landscape approach to urban settings as a way to engage with the multiple aspects of urban historic conservation rather than a focus predominantly on architectural elements. The chapters in this book articulate this evolving concept and new directions in conservation of cultural landscapes and illustrate, through many case studies, how landscape meaning and human values are conceived and acted upon in different places across the world.

Cultural Landscape: A Useful and Evolving Concept

Cultural landscapes are the places where human culture is on display where ‘our human landscape is our unwitting biography, reflecting our tastes, our values, our aspirations, and even our fears in tangible visible form’ (Lewis 1979:12). Cultural landscapes consist therefore of tangible physical patterns and elements, but also importantly, reflect intangible values and associations. Cultural landscapes are a window onto our past, our present and our future and our evolving relationship with the natural environment. Inextricably tied to this notion is that of landscape as process, rather than merely as product (Selman 2012; Taylor 2012). It is an understanding of landscape ‘as a process by which identities are formed’ (Mitchell 1994:1). Such a view of landscape—landscape as cultural construct—embraces not only the physical, practical ways in which people shape and structure their landscapes through time, but also seeks to understand the significance of the beliefs, values and ideologies that people bring to the shaping of landscape. In cultural landscape studies there are two consistent questions that the critical mind asks. First, why do our landscapes—the ordinary everyday places as well as the special or protected places—look like they do (not simply what do they look like)? Second, why have our predecessors, and now ourselves and our contemporaries, shaped the landscape in particular ways to give us the contemporary scene?

The intellectual background to a modern understanding of the term ‘cultural landscape’ arose from the work of German geographers and anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, Otto Schlüter (geographer) who introduced the term ‘kulturlandschaft’ (James and Martin 1981) and Franz Boas (anthropologist and geographer) who ‘argued that it was important to understand the cultural traits of societies— their behaviours, beliefs, and symbols—and the necessity for examining them in their local context. He established the contextualist approach to culture, known as cultural relativism’ (Taylor 2012:26; see also Franz Boas, Wikipedia). Boas ‘understood that as people migrate from one place to another, and as the cultural context changes over time, the elements of a culture, and their meanings, will change, which led him to emphasize the importance of local histories for an analysis of cultures’ (Franz Boas, Wikipedia). Here Boas embraced ‘the historicist mode of conceptualising environment’ (Livingstone 1992:29) and understood that different cultures may adjust to similar environments differently. There are parallels with Schlüter’s view that ‘the essential object of geographical inquiry was landscape morphology as a cultural product’ (Livingstone 1992:264). He studied the settlement patterns in the Unstrut Valley, Germany, and ‘came to see the importance of the different cultures of German and Slav settlers in transforming the landscape’ (Livingstone 1992:264).

While the cultural geographical movement certainly did not invent the idea of landscape and association with people, it did give it an intellectual and practical foundation on which modern interdisciplinary cultural landscape studies have built. Peter Howard, in discussing how landscape study is spread across many disciplines, nevertheless speculates that

there is… a very simple reason for this. Landscape is not very rational. It is intensely personal and reflects our own history and culture, our personal likes and dislikes. It is always about ‘my place’, or at least somebody’s place.

Howard (2011:2)

Inherent in Howard’s comment on personal aspects of landscape—and its conflation with place—reflecting history and culture is the significance of shared community heritage values of landscapes. The idea of shared heritage is a continual theme in many of the cases discussed in this book where the contemporary is as relevant as the historical, but where history informs our contemporary perceptions. Recognition of the significance of the contemporary and not merely the historical landscape was a salutary lesson consistently taught by J. B. Jackson. He had an infectious enthusiasm for the everyday scenes, what he referred to under the rubric of the vernacular landscape as ‘a humbler, less permanent, less conspicuous sort’ (Jackson 1984:xi) as opposed to what he called political spaces created by some form of legislative act. Herein lies the dilemma: how can we pay more attention to the vernacular, the ordinary everyday landscapes that are ubiquitous, and across which human history is written, and also include the continually changing contemporary landscape, the here and now? Chapter 22 by Akobirov and Chapter 17 by Rodriguez-Navarro in this book are singular and poetic reminders of the value that this type of a seemingly unremarkable landscape can have for a community of people. In contrast to the vernacular, we have often focused primarily on landscapes that have some form of official designation and protection, a point to which we return in the section below, ‘Forging a new paradigm for cultural landscape conservation’. In the context of the vernacular, it is notable that the European Landscape Convention (ELC) recognizes the potential value of all landscapes to communities suggesting:

In particular, the ordinary landscapes where most people live are seen as having value to someone, even though the quality may be low in terms of many of the commonly identified indicators such as scenic beauty, biodiversity rating, range of use and accessibility. The emphasis here is very much on the value to someone (communities, cultures and individuals).

(Roe and Taylor 2014:6)

It is worth noting that the developing interest in large landscapes addressed in this book, particularly in Parts I, II, and IV, emphasizes and encourages consideration of the diverse values outlined in the ELC and how they fit within the cultural landscape concept.

The joining of the word ‘cultural’ with ‘landscape’ to make ‘cultural landscape’ invites the question of what do we mean by ‘cultural’? It is, in essence, where culture is the agent that fashions our cultural landscapes from the natural landscape (Sauer 1925). ‘Culture’ as a word has various origins as for example in the Latin word colere (Olwig 1993), with various meanings including inhabit, cultivate as in tillage, protect, honour. Additionally ‘culture’ like the German kultur (and therefore ‘cultural’) is about development of human intellectual achievement, and caring (Oxford English Dictionary). Raymond Williams (1985) sees culture as a general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development; a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, or a group; and works and practices of intellectual and artistic activity. Horne (1986:4) has a more pithy description of culture as ‘the repertoires of collective habits of thinking and acting that give particular meanings to existence’. In these interpretations we are able to see how the twinning of culture with landscape fits our understanding of what we mean by cultural landscape: a process that reflects how our modes of thinking and acting, coupled with our beliefs, and how we perceive and interact with nature are manifested in the landscapes we create through time. They reflect a story of events, people, and place through time. In this context and over the past thirty years or so, there has been, and continues to be, a steady source of literature addressing the topic of landscape, its meanings and values, including perception of landscape, landscape in literature and in travel; the following references are representative of this literature (Drabble 1979; Howard 2011; Howard et al. 2012; Meinig 1979; Olwig 2002; Stilgoe 2005; Tilley 1994; Tuan 1974; Wylie 2007).

The book chapters collectively espouse an holistic view of a cultural landscape concept. This is where meaning and values are not tied to immutable historical factors, but reflect change over time, including changing human values, changing views of the natural environment, and changing sense of identity and belonging. Here is the very essence of cultural landscapes reflecting layers and change through time. As illustrated by the diverse range of chapters in this book, cultural landscapes are now seen as embracing everything from urban to associative landscapes. These chapters also reveal that there has been a shift of focus to living, evolving sociocultural ecosystems, valuing both tangible and intangible heritage and integrating this concept within society. These shifts in the cultural landscape concept are a major underlying theme of the book. Landscapes and associated human values are not static, leading to dilemmas on how we define conservation strategies and often how—and how often—we need to redefine them. New approaches to both cultural landscapes and historic urban landscapes have increasingly recognized that the goal is guiding future change through management processes and governance systems, rather than simply the protection of the fabric of the past. Nevertheless the latter is often an important part of conservation where aspects from the past—representing tangible forms and associative intangible values—embody significance. The importance of associative values cannot be stressed enough when thinking of cultural landscapes. Here we are thinking of intangible values as the mirror of cultural diversity, where diversity

comprises the living expressions and traditions that communities, groups, and individuals receive from their ancestors and pass on to their descendants. Constantly recreated and providing its bearers with a sense of identity and continuity, this heritage is particularly vulnerable.

(UNESCO 2007:19)

Given the complexity of addressing associative values of cultural landscapes and describing the attributes that carry their values, this aspect of landscape conservation continues to present challenges.

Forging a New Paradigm for Cultural Landscape Conservation

The late 1980s and early 1990s were particularly fruitful for the cultural heritage conservation discipline in terms of critical debate and understanding— and expanding—the concept of heritage. It is particularly relevant to understand how many landscapes—whether World Heritage–listed or not— face major conservation challenges when seen through the lenses of whose values are represented in cultural landscapes, questions of indigenous and local community values, considerations of human rights, and what are, or should be, conservation priorities. Such an approach also raises questions of interaction between people and nature, biodiversity protection, customary laws and community engagement vis-à-vis official legal protection. It also raises the issue of what are acceptable levels of change in these landscapes and examination of the intended and unintended consequences of heritage listing and the relationship to sustainability (Taylor 2013).

Today, there are also major emerging challenges for cultural heritage management and conservation worldwide. These include threats of terrorism, war, and religious and ethnic conflict combining with the challenges of climate change, population growth and migrations, the explosion of domestic and international tourism, and unsustainable consumption of resources. Rapid urbanization, socioeconomic change, and the difficulties of continuing traditional forms of use within rural or urban settings threaten the sense of place and identity of communities. Those involved in cultural heritage management conservation are challenged to devise strategies that move beyond interaction to collaboration, emphasizing the role of community-based decision makers and governance structures that are essential to the sustainability and resilience of cultural landscapes, rural and urban. In this context, heritage management can be taken to mean ‘a process of maintaining (and sometimes enhancing) the significance of a particular heritage and making it available for relevant groups of people to engage with it’ (Chapagain 2013:9). While acknowledging that heritage, by its very nature, is relevant to people, often there is a need to deconstruct it and interpret significance and engage and, in some cases, reconnect people in considering its value, for it is not always self-evident. This is particularly so in the case of the everyday (vernacular) landscape. It is what Lewis (1979) in his essay on ‘Axioms for Reading the Landscape’ calls ‘the axiom of landscape obscurity [where] most objects in the landscape—although they convey all kinds of “messages”—do not convey those messages in an obvious way’ (Lewis 1979:26). It is fundamentally important, therefore, to acknowledge that conservation of cultural landscapes relies on engagement and collaboration with people from communities associated with a landscape, as well as those that are not as closely linked. This is important for a range of landscapes from those desig...