Administration, Landscape and Authorized Heritage Discourse – Contextualising the Nationally Valuable Landscape Areas of Finland

Abstract

In 2010, the Finnish Ministry of the Environment launched a re-evaluation and revision of the 1993 inventory of Nationally Valuable Landscape Areas (NVLAs). While the inventory works for implementation of the National Land Use Guidelines, it also showcases the use of landscapes in Finnish national heritage policy. Based on critical readings of three influential Finnish administrative landscape policy reports, I claim that NVLAs, as tools of heritage policy, are based on the approaches and methodologies that have supported Finland’s development into a modern nation state by providing tools for intellectual governance of the national past and territory. Rather than meeting the diversity of landscape conceptions, as defined in the European Landscape Convention, the NVLAs run a risk of being in conflict with citizens and actors that do not share the administrative assumption of landscapes as public containers of national heritage.

Key words:

• Landscape assessment
• landscape administration
• Finland
• European Landscape Convention
• authorised heritage discourse

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my gratitude for David C. Harvey and Emma Waterton for accepting my paper in this special issue and carefully developing my thoughts. I also thank Salla Jokela, PhD, Antti Vallius, PhD, environment counsellor Tapio Heikkilä and the anonymous reviewers for their useful notions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.