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Imagining a new future for cultural landscapes

Version 2 2024-06-03, 16:18
Version 1 2016-02-08, 17:40
journal contribution
posted on 2024-06-03, 16:18 authored by P Wallace, Kristal BuckleyKristal Buckley
The 1992 adoption of ‘cultural landscape’ as an additional type of recognition on the World Heritage List was supposed to be a ground-breaking moment for heritage management in Australia and New Zealand, as both countries had pushed for continuing and associative landscapes to change the perceptions and practices of heritage management. Yet fast-forward to 2015, and one might be left wondering what happened? While there is no longer a need to convince people of the value of cultural landscapes for heritage management, the incorporation of cultural landscape ideas into our property-based 'heritage frame' with its preoccupation with land use and development controls appears to have stalled. At the same time, a growing community of heritage studies scholars are critical of heritage practice, and position cultural landscapes as an initiative that the World Heritage system was forced to adopt in order ‘to incorporate a broader range of values around heritage’ (Harrison 2013: 115). This critique of the under-theorised heritage field has had some stimulating effects, but falls short of providing guidance for practitioners. To consider the aspirations and directions for the future for cultural landscapes, this paper suggests that we need to look at heritage theory and practice together, focussing on innovation wherever we find it, and develop further theorisation through our experiences. We suggest that innovation can come from local settings away from more formalised heritage processes, where communities, practitioners, managers and researchers are trying new things as a result of their encounters with cultural landscapes, and where they are learning and ‘knowing-by-doing’.

History

Journal

Historic environment

Volume

28

Pagination

42-56

Location

Melbourne, Vic.

ISSN

0726-6715

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Copyright notice

2015, Australian ICOMOS

Issue

2

Publisher

Australia ICOMOS