Cultural Landscape

This book introduces a ten-year-long design research project in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), China, based on international cooperation studios, design workshops, a Ph.D. thesis, and concrete practice in China, Germany, and the Netherlands. This research adapts the existing methods of Landscape Character Assessment (UK), Historic Cultural Landscape Elements (Germany), and Dutch Polder Typology to mapping, describing, and classifying landscape character areas and types at the three scales of regional, municipal, and local. Furthermore, to connect research with design, we developed a typological approach of generating specific measures for the networked polder landscape. This research bridges the gap of a missing landscape characterization method for the conservation, transformation, and critical reconstruction of historic cultural landscapes in a metropolitan context.

Cultural landscapes, which in the field of heritage studies and practice relates to caring for and safeguarding heritage landscapes, is a concept embedded in contemporary conservation. Heritage conservation has shifted from an historical focus on buildings, city centres, and archaeological sites to encompass progressively more diverse forms of heritage and increasingly larger geographic areas, embracing both rural and urban landscapes. While the origin of the idea of cultural landscapes can be traced to the late-19th century Euro-American scholarship, it came to global attention after 1992 following its adoption as a category of ‘site’ by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. Today, cultural landscape practice has become increasingly complex given the expansion of the values and meanings of heritage, the influence of environmental challenges such as human induced climate change, technological advancements, and the need to better understand and interpret human connections to place and landscapes.