What makes a landscape a cultural landscape?
Image by Kookay from Pixabay
The rice terraces of Philippine Cordilleras, the Ligurian coast between Cinque Terre and Portovenere, the Champagne Hillsides with their houses and cellars. What do they have in common? They are cultural landscapes revealing much about our evolving relationship with the natural world.
Cultural landscapes are sites associated with a significant event, activity, or group of people. They can be grand estates, farmlands, public gardens and parks, college campuses, cemeteries, scenic highways, and industrial sites or works of art, narratives of cultures, and expressions of regional identity. Cultural landscapes can range from thousands of hectares of rural tracts of land to a small homestead with a front yard of less than one hectare. Like historic buildings and districts, they reveal aspects of a country’s origins and development through their form, features, and the ways they were used.
The concept of cultural landscape has evolved over time. Its first use dates back to German authors Ritter (1832), Vogel (1851) and Ratzel (1893) who mainly defined Cultur-landschaft as ‘landscape modified by human activity’.
A recently published paper Design for sustainable cultural landscapes - A whole-systems framework contributes to the debates led by a consortium of European academic institutions leading the project Sustainable Management of Cultural Landscapes – SUMCULA-, funded by the EU.
SUMCULA consortium defines a cultural landscape
as a geographic area, encompassing its cultural and natural resources and the built and intangible heritage therein, continuously shaped by historic and present day evolutionary processes including the adverse or beneficial impacts of human activities, social relations and evolving cultures.
Co-authored with Tara Pinheiro Gibsone and Bernard Combes the paper explores how Education for Sustainable Development could be used as a guidance framework for the capacity development of those engaged in the process of identifying, protecting, conserving, presenting and transmitting cultural landscapes. It does so under regenerative conceptual premises which argue that even in an unpredictable world, we can enable the places where we live and work to thrive, going well beyond merely sustaining a precarious balance (Regenesis Group, 2017).
Image by Kookay from Pixabay