Landscape and Cultural Landscape
EVOLUTION OF TERMS
1.1 Art and representation
1.1.1 The word landscape comes into use in the 17th century, as a word to describe a new genre of paintings – paintings of natural scenery, rather than of people and events.
1603 – Sylvester du Bartas
“The cunning Painter … limning a Landscape, various, rich, and rare.”
1683 – Dryden
“Let this part of the landschape be cast into shadows that the heightening of the other may appear more beautiful.”
1.1.2 The word expands to denote not only the paintings, but the scenes being depicted in the paintings.
1742 – Young
“Sumptuous Cities gild our Landscape with their glittering Spires.”
1.1.3 The idea of representation is inherent in the word, right from the beginning – the interplay between the object and the subject, the issue of ways of seeing.
1600 – A. Gibson
“As in a curious Lantschape, oft we see Nature so follow’d, we think it is She.”
1704 –Addison
"To compare the Natural Face of the Country with the Landskips that the Poets have given us of it.”
1.1.4 In the 18th and 19th centuries, the distinction between object and subject – between the scenery itself and the painting of the scenery – is further blurred in the development of the English landscape garden. The Oxford English Dictionary defines landscape gardening as “the art of laying out grounds so as to produce the effect of natural scenery.” Humphrey Repton’s 1805 publication is titled The Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. Nature is transformed into a painting of itself – thus the use of the word picturesque denotes this style.
1.1.5 In the 20th century, the word becomes associated primarily with scenery itself, and less and less with representation. There is still reference in art historical terms to the landscapes of Turner, or Constable, but these are more often termed landscape paintings and the word landscape refers to the physical thing itself.
1.2 Geography and mapping
1.2.1 The physical reality of landscape was further emphasized by geographers. They began to see it as an object for scientific study and to stress relationships and correlations between physical conditions and human activities. A pioneer in this work was the French geographer Paul Vidal de la Bauche who spoke of pays and genre de vie in analyzing landscape differences.
A near-contemporary, the American geographer Carl Sauer, used the term cultural landscapes in The Morphology of Landscape in 1926. The following quote summarizes his central thesis:
A cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a culture group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium. The cultural landscape is the result.
Another early geographical work was Ewald Banse’s exploration of landschaft in his 1924 book Die seele der geographie. His work raises the troubling connection between cultural landscape and tribalism in its darkest forms.
1.2.2 In 1951, the American J.B. Jacksonstarted the magazine Landscape and remained its editor for many years. His editorials in that magazine are considered by many to have been the seminal works in establishing a contemporary view of landscape inNorth America. His statement of purpose in the first issue stated:
Wherever we go, whatever the nature of our work, we adorn the face of the earth with a living design which changes and is eventually replaced by that of a future generation. How can one tire of looking at this variety, or of marvelling at the forces within man and nature that brought it about? A rich and beautiful book is always open before us. We have but to learn to read it.
1.2.3 This view of landscape as not just a single scene but as the patterns of a whole region became the focus of historical and cultural geographers throughout the second half of the 20th century. They were interested in recording and analyzing the inhabited landscapes of different countries, different cultural groups, different time periods.
Typical is W.G. Hoskins pioneering work on the English countryside, The Making of the English Landscape (1955).
1.2.4 This geographical view of landscape often had a rural focus. J.B. Jackson in his original manifesto (1951) had noted:
The city is an essential part of this shifting and growing design, but only a part of it. Beyond the last street light, out where the familiar asphalt ends, a whole country waits to be discovered: villages, farmsteads, and highways, half-hidden valleys of irrigated gardens, and wide landscapes reaching to the horizon.
In French, the word paysage continues to have a rural connotation, more in keeping with the English word countryside, to which it is related.
1.2.5 The study of landscape by geographers has also been recognized as having a strong vernacular focus. The Vernacular Architecture Forum, started by geographers and folklorists in 1980, moved away from the architectural historians’ focus on individual structures to the study of architecture as landscape markers. Geographer D.W. Meinig points to the central role of the vernacular in the landscape studies stimulated by J.B. Jackson’s work.
1.2.6 Mapping of landscapes has been a central focus of geographical study of the land.
1.3 Planning and heritage conservation
1.3.1 In the last quarter of the 20th century, landscapes became a concern of both planners and heritage conservation professionals. This was part of a shift in focus from individual buildings and sites to the more complex interrelationships evident across larger areas.
1.3.2 The initial interest in landscape conservation reflected the rural connotations of the word landscape. Robert Melnick’s influential 1984 study entitled Cultural Landscapes: Rural Historic Districts in the National Park System was the first significant heritage publication to address landscapes as a conservation category. The same year,France proposed three rural landscapes for designation by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as World Heritage Sites. A few years later, the English Countryside Commission proposed theLake District as another potential World Heritage Site. Planners were beginning to move beyond heritage planning in an urban setting to heritage planning in rural areas.
1.3.3 The interest in landscapes also grew out of an existing commitment to the identification and protection of historic gardens and sites, through groups such as the International Scientific Committee on HistoricGardensthat is part of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS). Landscapes were both an extension and transformation of the ideas of the historic garden as identified in the Florence Charter onHistoricGardens of 1982. TheAlliance for Historic Landscape Preservation was created by North American conservation professionals in the 1980s.
1.3.4 For heritage professionals at the international level, the interest in landscape conservation came from both natural heritage and cultural heritage perspectives. The World Conservation Union (IUCN), the preeminent international advisory group on natural heritage, began to identify protected landscapes or seascapes of cultural, aesthetic and ecological value. ICOMOS, the preeminent international advisory group on cultural heritage, began to identify heritage landscapes and sites of historical, archaeological, artistic, scientific, social and technical interest. Both groups recognized that their interests were beginning to overlap.
1.3.5 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.
1.3.6 The World Heritage Committee developed three further categories of Cultural Landscape:
- 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.
These categories began to shape the consideration of landscape nominations to UNESCO from member countries around the world, and to inform approaches to landscape conservation.
1.3.7 Other heritage jurisdictions began to reflect the cultural landscape terminology of UNESCO in their own definition of terms. The U.S. Parks Service now uses cultural landscapes as the overall term to represent historic sites, historic designed landscapes, historic vernacular landscapes, and ethnographic landscapes. These last three terms roughly correspond to the designed, evolved, and associative landscapes of the World Heritage Committee. Historic landscape, however, is still the predominant usage in theU.S. for landscapes of heritage value. The overall cultural landscape program is within the Historic Landscape Initiative of the U.S. Parks Service, and they have recently initiated a Historic American Landscapes Survey to parallel the much older Historic American Buildings Survey and the Historic American Engineering Record.
1.3.8 In England, the term cultural landscape is used by English Heritage and ICOMOS U.K., but the term countryside still carries strong connotations for those involved in rural landscape preservation. Similarly, in Quebec, the term paysage carries strong connotations even without the adjective culturel; for some, the term paysage by itself denotes value. As stated in the preamble of La Charte du paysage québécois, produced by le Conseil du paysage québécois, “Le territoire...devient paysage lorsque des individus et des collectivités lui accordent une valeur paysagère.”
1.3.9 Aboriginal communities in different countries have increasingly used the concept of cultural landscapes to denote the overlap of natural and cultural heritage that is intrinsic to their worldview. Some countries such as Canadahave used the term aboriginal cultural landscapes to denote these landscapes (see Susan Buggey’s An Approach to Aboriginal Cultural Landscapes, 1999). The term also been included in the Associative Cultural Landscape category of UNESCO and the Ethnographic Landscape category of the U.S. Parks Service. However, the term cultural landscape is increasingly used by itself to denote these landscapes, as is the case in bothCanada andAustralia.
1.4 Postmodernism and the return of representation
1.4.1 In the last ten years, the notion of landscape as both an objective and a subjective reality has once again become a central concern of both theoreticians and practitioners.
1.4.2 This reevaluation of landscape has cut across the many disciplines that have had an interest in the subject, including history, geography, and conservation, and has included contributions from philosophy, sociology, and political science.
1.4.3 Part of this reevaluation of landscape has been an interest in multiple layers of meaning. The intangible values of landscape were recognized in the Associative Landscape category of UNESCO, but this recent move has considered all landscapes to have associative value that are key to their understanding. Among the important earlier works in this development were Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960); Yi-Fu Tuan’s Topophilia (1974); D.W. Meinig’s The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (1979); Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (original French version, 1984; first English translation, 1991); and Denis Cosgrove’s Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (1984) and The Iconography of Landscape (1988). There are also debts to the writing of Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and other intellectuals examining the relationship of subject and object, sign and signification, mental and physical geographies. The impact of this theoretical work has been to put landscape back into the role of being both a reality in itself and a representation of reality.
1.4.4 Multiple readings of landscape lead to fluidity in the definition of the term landscape itself. As suggested by Yves Luginbuhl in 1994:
Le paysage ne recouvre pas une seule signification ni une seule manière de le saisir. De multiples manières de le voir et de le décrire ont été utilisées, depuis celles des peintres, des écrivains, des photographes, des praticiens de l’aménagement à celles des scientifiques, il reste difficile de s’entendre sur une définition unique.
Multiple readings not only resist definition; they can lead to ideas of contested terrains and notions of territoriality, as discussed for example in relation to aboriginal land claims in Jean Manore’s (1998) “Wilderness and Territoriality”.
1.4.5 The intangible and associative quality of landscape leads to emphasis on symbolism, commemoration, and memory. The encyclopaedic three-volume work Les Lieux de mémoire edited by Pierre Nora, released over the period 1984-1992, deals specifically with sites of memory, in the very broadest terms. In fact, in his introductory essay, Nora says that Lieux de mémoire exist because there are no longer any milieux de mémoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience.” Some theorists would claim that it is the milieux de mémoire that are the true cultural landscapes of France, and that are still open to multiple readings as continuing rather than relict landscapes. Lieux de mémoire are the ‘commemorative landscapes’ that become the increasingly static, relict landscapes discussed by authors such as James Young in The Texture of Memory (1993) or John R. Gillis in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (1994).
1.4.6 As landscapes become places of commemoration, their heritage value itself transforms their intrinsic character and role. This transformation is addressed by geographers such as J. E. Tunbridge and G. J. Ashworth in Dissonant Heritage (1996) and David Lowenthal in The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) and Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1996).
1.4.7 At a practical level, conservation of landscapes in this postmodern context requires an increasingly ecological approach. This is an ecology that not only embraces cultural as well as natural systems, but that also puts the physical landscape within a larger cultural, social, economic and political landscape. Drawing from early sources such as Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions (1973), this approach has become part of issues such as the possibility of development and the relationship between ecological integrity and commemorative integrity. Strategic and project-based environmental assessments address both the cultural and natural health of landscapes subject to new initiatives.
1.4.8 Cultural landscapes, as vehicles for cultural identity and social well-being, require more broad-based involvement in conservation decisions than individual sites. The Australians have taken a lead role in making social value an integral part of cultural landscape understanding and intervention, transforming the more traditional Eurocentric emphasis on historical and architectural value. As early as the 1992 discussions at UNESCO, the Australians had suggested that a focus on cultural landscapes would transform the heritage conservation field from a top-down to a bottom-up approach, because of the essentially vernacular reality of landscapes and the fact that their values could only be understood by their inhabitants. In a similar way, the recently adopted European Landscape Convention (2000) says:
Official landscape activities can no longer be allowed to be an exclusive field of study or action monopolised by specialist scientific and technical bodies. Landscape is the concern of all and lends itself to democratic treatment, particularly at the local and regional level.
The Rome Centre (ICCROM) provides courses in cultural landscape conservation under their program for Integrated Approaches to Urban and Rural Conservation, with this emphasis on integration reflecting an ecological bias.
1.4.9 Postmodern understandings of landscape have allowed the terms landscape and cultural landscape to be applied equally well to urban as well as rural landscapes, and to landscapes at many different scales. Dolores Hayden has been a pioneer in the application of cultural landscape theory to urban contexts, and she traces her influences directly to theorists such as Lefebvre and Lynch who understood the political and cognitive dimensions of landscape.
1.4.10 An examination of mapping and cartography in relation to landscapes becomes an important aspect of reassessing questions of reality and representation in a postmodern context. A number of recent books such as Brian Jarvis’ Postmodern Cartographies (1998) have examined traditions of both literal and figurative mapping within the geographical tradition.
1.4.11 Questions of authenticity and integrity also get reexamined in a postmodern context. The traditional eurocentric emphasis on a physical or material basis for judging authenticity was challenged by the international conservation community at the same time that cultural landscape theory was being developed. The critical UNESCO meeting in 1992 on cultural landscapes recommended that structures be required to meet the existing Test of Authenticity with regard to design, materials, workmanship or setting, while cultural landscapes should instead be required to have the potential to maintain their integrity. This idea of evolutionary integrity reflected an appreciation for the dynamic rather than static quality of cultural landscapes, a quality sustained by the same living traditions that had shaped the landscapes to begin with. Within a few years, the ICOMOS Nara Conference on Authenticity (1994) had fundamentally altered the Test of Authenticity to reflect what the conference organizers called a move from a eurocentric approach to a postmodern position characterized by recognition of cultural diversity and relativism. It adopted the following approach to judgements of authenticity:
Depending on the nature of the cultural heritage, its cultural context, and its evolution through time, authenticity judgements may be linked to...form and design, materials and substance, use and function, traditions and techniques, location and setting, and spirit and feeling, and other internal and external factors.
This definition, much broader in scope, recognizes the spirit of place and other intangible qualities that could contribute as much to the meaning of place as the material and substance of its physical elements.
1.5 Current Trends
1.5.1 Landscape is still a term with multiple meanings and connotations. The term cultural landscape has become widely used in the last few years, across many disciplines, partly because the adjective cultural conveys the idea of the cultural reading and representation of physical place. However, the terms landscape in English and paysage in French may yet be considered rich enough words in their own right.
1.5.2 Whether the term cultural implies a landscape with heritage value to a particular culture is unclear. The term landscape itself has a variety of connotations.
1.5.3 In some jurisdictions, the term cultural heritage landscape has been used to denote a culture landscape of heritage value. This term tends to be used in a context where the legal designation of heritage properties is important.
1.5.4 Whether several cultural landscapes can coexist in the same place, or whether a place is a single cultural landscape with multiple readings is unclear. In the modifications to the World Heritage criteria in 1992, criteria (v) was changed from “be an outstanding examples of traditional human settlement or land use which is representative of a culture...” to “…representative of a culture or cultures.” The plural form was added to emphasize the existence at times of multilayered landscapes where several cultures are superimposed. However, this comment does not in fact address the question of whether these various layers would be contained within the same boundaries or have different boundaries.
1.5.5 The role of ritual in the cognitive mapping and social dynamics of cultural landscapes is only beginning to be addressed. J.B. Jackson mentions the interplay of ritual and place in his last book Sense of Place, Sense of Time (1994). The topic has also been looked at in relation to aboriginal landscapes, but not in a systematic way.
1.5.6 Cultural landscape theory as a tool for integrating heritage concerns into larger planning and development exercises has not been examined in any detail. There is beginning to be a body of case work, but the theoretical framework is still being developed.