What makes a landscape a cultural landscape?
Cinque Terre is considered a cultural landscape, as it exemplifies centuries of harmonious interaction between humans and the rugged coastal environment through terraced agriculture and traditional settlements. 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’.
Here are some principles that define a cultural landscape:
Historical Significance
The landscape reflects historical events, traditions, or developments. It may have been a setting for significant cultural activities or have associations with important historical figures. Its design and elements may show evidence of the cultural heritage of past societies.
Cultural Expression and Identity
The landscape expresses the beliefs, values, and identity of the people who shaped it. It holds cultural symbolism, embodying traditions, stories, and ways of life that are important to a community or society.
Human-Nature Interaction
Cultural landscapes demonstrate a balance between human activity and the natural environment. They show how communities have adapted to and modified the natural surroundings to meet their needs (e.g., agriculture, settlements, or spiritual practices), while still reflecting ecological principles.
Evolving Character
A cultural landscape is dynamic and evolving, continually shaped by ongoing human activity and natural processes. Its current form might be an accumulation of historical layers, representing different periods of use, adaptation, and change.
Sense of Place
The landscape evokes a strong sense of place, meaning it resonates deeply with the local community and reflects their connection to the land. This emotional and cultural connection is a defining feature, often tied to rituals, ceremonies, and everyday practices.
These principles help to define and preserve cultural landscapes, which often become important cultural heritage sites, protected for their ability to tell the story of human interaction with the environment.
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).