World Heritage and Cultural Landscapes: An Account of the 1992 La Petite Pierre Meeting

ABSTRACT

The Expert Meeting on Cultural Landscapes that took place at La Petite Pierre, France, in October 1992 was a pivotal or key moment in global heritage practice. The meeting is highly regarded by heritage practitioners for having fashioned a document defining cultural landscapes in relation to Article 1 of the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention. Six weeks later the document was adopted at the 16th meeting of the World Heritage Committee. This paper traces how the La Petite Pierre meeting was the culmination of two intersecting historical trajectories: the first a narrative concerning the complex deliberations of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee between 1984 and 1992; and the second a lesser-known story linked to the work of a small, determined group of networked individuals allied via the ICOMOS UK Landscape Working Group established in 1990. Drawing on oral testimony and archival sources, the leading role of selected Working Group members in the construction of the report on cultural landscapes prepared at La Petite Pierre is examined. In addition, the concepts and terminology used to define categories of cultural landscape are explored to illustrate both novel and conservative aspects of the work of the meeting. The paper concludes with the suggestion that these categories, which have been retained unchanged in UNESCO’s Operational Guidelines from 1992, warrant review and amendment.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural landscape categories
• World Heritage
• UNESCO
• ICOMOS
• La Petite Pierre
• IUCN
• Expert Meeting-La Petite Pierre
• culture-nature
• pivotal moment

Acknowledgements

For their willingness to be interviewed, I am grateful to David Jacques and Pierre-Marie Tricaud; and for informal discussions I appreciated the perspectives provided by Sarah Titchen and Mechtild Rössler. I thank Paulette Wallace for providing materials from the private papers of Bing Lucas. The paper also benefitted from discussions with John Carmen, Peter Goodchild, and Paulette Wallace. David Jacques and Nora Mitchell reviewed a draft version of the paper and provided valuable feedback. Any errors of fact or vagaries of meaning remain my own.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Steve Brown is an Honorary Assocaite (Heritage Studies) at The University of Sydney, Australia. His research interests include conceptualizing and operationalizing place-attachment in heritage theory and practice, integrating nature-cultures in the heritage management of protected areas, and the material culture of domestic homes and gardens. Steve is the author of Cultural Landscapes: A Practical Guide for Park Management (2010), a co-editor of Object Stories: Artifacts and Archaeologists (2015), and a co-editor of Cultural and Spiritual Significance of Nature in Protected Areas (2019). He is past President of the ICOMOS/IFLA International Scientific Committee on Cultural Landscapes (2014–2017), a group with 190 members from more than 50 countries.

ORCID

Steve Brown http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6781-8275

Notes

1 Jacques represented ICOMOS UK at the Alliance meeting in Seattle, USA, in June 1990, and drew up the resolutions in conjunction with Susan Buggey (ICOMOS Canada) and Nora Mitchell (ICOMOS/US).

2 The Secretariat comprised employees appointed by the Director General of UNESCO to assist the Committee. In 1991 the Secretariat included Bernd von Droste (Director, Division of Ecological Services) and Anne Raidl (Director, Division of Physical Heritage), the heads of two separate divisions within UNESCO. The two divisions were combined in May 1992 to form the World Heritage Centre with von Droste as the founding Director of World Heritage (Cameron and Rössler 2013, 201–208).

3 The WH Bureau consists of seven States Parties elected annually by the Committee. Its role is to coordinate the work of the Committee and fix the dates and order of business for the meetings.

4 ICOMOS Landscapes Working Group Newsletter (January 1993a, 5–6). The new paragraph recognized the role of people in the protection of biological diversity and the links between landscape conservation and sustainable land use.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a University of Sydney Seed Funding Grant.