Landscape and heritage: ideas from Europe for culturally based solutions in rural environments

Abstract

The impact of globalised trends changing the rural environment is often thought to require environmental and ecology-focused policies and actions. But many of the problems have human (societal) causes, and solutions need also to be primarily culturally based. This essay, drawing on the ‘CHeriScape’ network in western Europe, explores the advantage of seeking a more comprehensive, integrative response to rural change using the twinned concepts of landscape and heritage. It discusses recent developments in conceptualising landscape and heritage, and how these could support effective culturally based approaches that are participatively democratic and also take account of human behaviour. After brief summaries of evolving paradigms for landscape and heritage, and of global challenges, the paper suggests that a landscape–heritage nexus, familiar to the lay public but capable of nuanced and fluid application, offers an effective way ahead. It concludes by identifying some obstacles that hinder the effective implementation of such an approach.

Keywords:

• landscape
• heritage
• commons
• CHeriScape
• global challenges

Acknowledgements

My description and summary in this paper of the work and results of the CHeriScape network between 2014 and 2017 is of course built on the discussions, interactions and inspirations of everyone who was active in the network. My first and strongest thanks therefore go to the core CHeriScape team: Henk Baas, Bolette Bele, Niels Dabaut, Knut Anders Hovstad, Gro Jerpåsen, Kari Larsen, Michel Lascaris, Almudena Orejas, Bas Pedroli, Edwin Raap, Guillermo Reher, Veronique Simon, Sam Turner, Theo van der Sluis, Veerle Van Eetvelde. Additionally, I am also in debt to the several hundred other practitioners and researchers who participated and constrictively contributed to our successful conferences, meeting and workshops. As always in such papers, however, responsibility for the opinions based on CHeriScape and the conclusions I have drawn rests entirely with me. I wish also to thank Jørgen Primdahl and Lone Søderkvist Kristensen for inviting me to participate in their conference session at PECSRL 2016 in Innsbruck, from which presentation this paper has grown, initially as part of a special issue collection. I am also grateful for the constructive comments of three anonymous peer reviewers, which enabled me to improve my first attempt.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The CHeriScape network was funded within the EC Seventh Framework as part of the Joint European Heritage Programme (the Coordination Action in support to the Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) on “Cultural Heritage and Global Change: A New Challenge for Europe”), by five national research councils: Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/L503976/1); Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek; Ministerio de Economıa y Competitividad; Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek; Norges Forskningsra.