Manuscript Topics

The concept of Heritage Landscape implies both natural and cultural components combined over time to produce a phenomenon that is clearly located somewhere and can be considered for identification and protection by contemporary nations and the IUCN 2014. Field based research studies are especially welcome in this special issue.

This special issue is focused on Heritage Landscapes as this concept has evolved and been recognized by the IUCN (2014).

According to the IUCN (2014) Cultural landscapes are seen as ‘cultural heritage’ in the framework of the World Heritage Convention, yet they have considerable overlap with one of the heartland issues of nature conservation, the global coverage of protected areas. Recent research reveals the overlaps and synergies between World Heritage cultural landscapes and IUCN’s global category system for recognizing protected areas, and some of the possible implications.    

The early German geographer Otto Schluter in 1908 defined two forms of landscape: the Urlandschaft (original landscape) or landscape that existed before major human induced changes and the Kulturlandschaft (cultural landscape) a landscape created by human culture. Schlüter argued that the major task of geography was to trace the changes in these two landscapes.

Carl Sauer in 1925 wrote that cultural landscapes are made up of human forms and actions superimposed on physical landscapes. He was probably the most influential in promoting and developing the idea of culture as a force in shaping the visible features of the Earth's surface in delimited areas. Within his definition, the physical environment retains a central significance, as the medium with and through which human cultures act (Sauer 1925). He maintained that objects which exist together in the landscape exist in interrelation. His classic definition of a 'cultural landscape' reads as follows: "The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result."

Since Schlüter first formally use the term, and Sauer's effective promotion of the idea, the concept of cultural landscapes has been variously used, applied, debated, developed and refined within academia. During the ensuing 100 years the concept of natural or physical landscape continued to be debated, refined and incorporated into national heritage preservation (Smith 2013). The physical reality of landscape was emphasized by geographers who specialized in mapping (Smith 2013: 51).  The development of the concept of cultural landscape was more controversial because it often involved intangible components and was thus difficult or impossible to map. Early cultural landscape discussions focused on real human features like the organization of villages in a countryside and historic gardens. Discussion with traditional, native, and aboriginal people gave rise to the concepts of evolved and culturally associated landscapes (Smith 2013: 53). Research on both landscape categories involved researching local people or people who had lived in the landscape under study.

By 1992, the World Heritage Committee elected to convene a meeting of landscape specialists to advise and assist redrafting the Committee's Operational Guidelines to include 'cultural landscapes' as an option for heritage listing properties that were neither purely natural nor purely cultural in form (i.e., mixed' heritage) (Fowler 2003). At this meeting according to Smith 2013: 53):

The French and English requests for designating landscapes as World Heritage sites exposed weaknesses in the separation of natural and cultural heritage in the designation process. Because of the legal and financial implications of UNESCO designation, terminology became an important issue. The ICOMOS Landscapes Working Group, at its critical meeting in 1992 in France, adopted the term cultural landscape or paysage culturel to describe those “combined works of nature and of man” that are illustrative of the evolution of human society and settlement over time.

Building on international heritage preservation pressures for further conceptual clarification, according to Smith (2012:53) in 2009, the World Heritage Committee developed three sub-categories of cultural landscape (Mitchell, Rössler, Tricaud 2009):

• designed cultural landscapes, often gardens or parks that are the work of a single designer or period, and that have clear aesthetic intent.
• evolved cultural landscapes, which are the result of a gradual adaptation of a community to an environment, often through many generations, and that may be continuing (if still active) or relict (if no longer inhabited or active).
• associative cultural landscapes, which have powerful religious, artistic or cultural associations and which may have little material culture evidence.

As local, native, and aboriginal people became directly involved in landscape studies they insisted on the landscape studies and heritage denotation to reflect an overlap of natural and cultural heritage. In Canada and elsewhere the term aboriginal cultural landscape came into use (Smith 2013: 54). The concept of cultural landscapes, according to Smith (2013: 57), cultural landscapes are not inherently physical in the observable sense – they exist in the cultural imagination. They are physical to the extent that they are experienced and that this experience becomes culturally shared. They are intangible as well as tangible, kept alive by a continual process of re-imagination and cultural practice. A cultural landscape that is healthy is not necessarily static, but rather in a state of equilibrium – a place with a healthy ecology. And a healthy ecology is not so much about the visual appearance of a place but rather about its internal sense of balance. This analysis contributes to the on-going discussion of living cultural landscapes.

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