21st Century Challenges facing Cultural Landscapes

Juliet Ramsay, Ken Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317241195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Conservazione e Tutela dell'Ambiente

Through stories of diverse landscapes from around the world, this book captures human cultures and their land use practices in the environments they inhabit. The chapters cover topics from heritage in the 21st Century, appreciating and safeguarding values while facing challenges wrought by change.This title will lead readers through fascinating stories of landscapes and people. We learn of the physical and spiritual structure of rice terraces of the Honghe Mountains in China maintained by following a 1300 year sustainable practice of water allocation, while the colonial tea plantations of the Sri Lankan highlands are managed by Indian Tamils who now seek tourism as a means of additional income. Sustainable agricultural methods in the USA are being introduced to prevent landscape loss while in Australia a challenge confronting family farms is progressing to rural industrialisation. Challenges are further outlined in the mythical story of Finland's Saint Henrik pilgrimage and in the intangible Ui-won gardens of Korea. The huge challenge for Japan's landscapes is the legacy from fierce natural 21st Century disasters while in Australia's Dampier Archipelago, an avoidable yet brutal development on a unique Aboriginal rock sculptured landscape highlights serious concerns about heritage governance. These remarkable stories of landscapes and their management are inseparable from the communities that inhabit them. This book was originally published as a special issue of Landscape Research.

Cultural Landscapes in the 21st Century—Issues and Opportunities

This special issue of Landscape Research comprises papers from Australia, China, Finland, Japan, Korea, Sri Lanka and the United States of America. As the scope of the papers is global, each has a different story but parallels can be drawn to assign the papers to established themes—ancient continuing landscapes, colonial continuing landscapes, landscapes of myths, and landscapes of recent destructive impacts. The papers give a fresh perspective to specific management and tourism issues present at heritage landscapes. As rural landscapes are considered to be a major concern by international organisations, papers that focus on the rural aspects of continuing landscapes provide valuable insights on ancient and modern non-urban activities while explaining the challenges encountered when listing cultural landscapes.

The papers were presented in Australia in 2013 at a symposium organised by the International Scientific Committees on Cultural Landscapes and Cultural Routes titled Issues and opportunities for cultural landscapes and routes in the twenty-first century and also papers presented at the Australia ICOMOS national conference, Imagined pasts, Imagined Futures that followed the symposium. The heritage functions produced substantial papers many of which focused upon the theme of the organically evolved continuing landscape, a category of cultural landscapes defined in the World Heritage Convention Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention (UNESCO, 2011.: Annex 3, para.10). Given the cumbersome nomenclature of this cultural landscape category, the term is generally reduced to ‘continuing’ landscapes. The chief characteristic of landscapes of this category is that they are diverse, particularly dynamic and always challenging.

Several papers in this special issue of Landscape Research also reveal crucial interrelationships of humans and landscapes. Most importantly, many convey the strategic role of humans as part of sustainable nature.

The World Heritage Committee encourages the identification of cultural landscapes in order to broaden the World Heritage List so that people’s homelands or the country of communities—their living landscapes—can bring equilibrium to the heritage demesne of western masterworks so prevalent in early heritage listings. Initially, heritage practitioners were engrossed with understanding the topic and physically defining cultural landscapes of heritage importance. The history of the development and application of the term ‘cultural landscapes’ has been well discussed in ‘Landscape and Meaning’ (Taylor, 2012, pp. 21–28). Now in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the attention given to continuing cultural landscapes by World Heritage has strengthened the awareness and application of the term so that landscapes are well established as a heritage identification tool. Although a challenging concept, in application many continuing cultural landscapes have been inscribed in the World Heritage List in recent years.

The ancient continuing landscape of Hanhi Rice Terraces of the Honghe Region, southern China, is the subject of a paper prepared by Guo Zhan and Zhang Jin (Zhan & Jin, 2015). The terraces are a highly modified extensive landscape of rice agriculture flowing down mountain slopes, presenting a cultivated practice of environmentally sustainable rice growing in extraordinary contoured landscape patterning. The Hani terrace agriculture has been continuous for over 1300 years with 82 associated communities that until recent times were comparatively isolated. The paper describes how the communities are integrated with their landscape economically and traditionally through religions based on nature worship. It further describes the controlled natural watering system and the mud walls that created the terraces resulting in an extensive landscape acclaimed for its great beauty. The Hani Rice Terraces were inscribed in the World Heritage List in 2013 and like the Cordilleras of the Philippines inscribed in 1995, the terraces mark a prodigious physical and technical vernacular achievement.

Three papers discuss colonial landscapes of imposed rural practices and relocated people onto foreign lands. All three papers focus on different aspects of new settler landscapes. The paper Valuing the Cultural Landscapes Past and Present: Tea Plantations in Sri Lanka by Chandana Shrinath Wijetunga with Jong Sang Sung (Wijetunga & Sung, 2015), offers a study of the landscapes developed after tea cultivation was introduced in 1839. The history of tea estates as well as the design and management that created the plantation landscapes is described. Interwoven with the cultural landscapes is the human story. The Tamil people brought from India over 100 years ago, remain as communities of comparatively poor workers. They have not assimilated with the indigenous Singhalese and continue an existence of isolated communities positioned within the tea estates with their particular religious and cultural practices. The case studies of the tea estates provide descriptions of common features such as water drainage, and comparisons with the long-standing paddy rice agriculture. The study also includes thoughts on the viability of tea estate while seeking visitor opinions to provide objective views on the tea landscapes as a source of tourism and a means of increasing economic return.

In the paper, Changes to Continuing Landscapes: Industrialisation of Australia’s Productive Rural Lands, Jane Lennon (Lennon, 2015) describes the contemporary status of rural landscapes in Australia elaborating on changes to the Australian farming practice from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The early years of colonial settlement are marked by family-owned rural properties that developed into large stations that pastured sheep for the wool industry. Lennon describes changes to family properties that have been purchased by large agri-business enterprises, often foreign owned that develop vast mechanised systems based on global supply and demand for agricultural produce. Such intensive agriculture places excessive demands on Australia’s limited water resource. Lennon’s paper provides details on agricultural patterns in Australia and discusses how rural heritage has failed to recognise the heritage importance of sustainable farming landscapes and concentrated only on the architecture of the homestead complexes.

Heritage values and agricultural landscapes: Toward a new synthesis by Nora Mitchell and Brenda Barrett (Mitchell & Barrett, 2015), provides readers with a national perspective on the plight of sustainable agriculture in the USA. A settler landscape with colonial origins has developed and changed since European settlement. The paper presents a healthy discussion on the loss of agricultural land, the drivers of change that has been occurring and the need to enhance the sustainability of agricultural systems. A suggestion that encourages reflection is that we need to evaluate agricultural landscapes for their sustainability and also as part of the cultural capital of local communities.

Myths and stories bring forth the evocative and intangible aspects of landscapes. The story of St Hendrik, the patron saint of Finland, by Eeva Ruoff (Ruoff, 2015) is a well-researched history of the fatal journey of the missionary, Hendrik around the 1150s. Ruoff discusses how, in seeking tourism dollars, modern interpreters of Hendrik’s route have distorted historical evidence to create substance for present day pilgrim tourists. The story challenges the principles of heritage practitioners who are committed to maintaining authenticity and integrity of heritage places. How do we respond, knowing that the history has been skewed for economic purposes?

The paper, Ui-won: the 18-19C Joseon Scholar’s Garden of Imagination (Sung, 2015) describes the practice by Korean scholars of creating an idealised imaginary garden, an absolute intangible garden. Although the practice developed in the fifteenth century it gained popularity in the eighteenth century as it provided an expression of imaginary art at a time when scholars were oppressed members of society. As described in the paper, at times artists painted the scholars in their Ui-won and some scholars turned their Ui-won into a physical creation. The concept of an imagined garden is not foreign to designers or artists but the enjoyment of such an imaginary garden demonstrates an eastern practice that Western scholars may find challenging.

The comparatively small country of Japan throughout time has been most violently impacted by natural disasters. Kunie Sugio (Sugio, 2015) presents a brief overview on the severe impacts on world heritage landscapes caused by natural disasters that have occurred in the twenty-first century. The extreme horror of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 and the subsequent tsunami that killed 95 000 people left a legacy of damage to scenic beauty sites and temples from direct topographical damage, uprooting of untold numbers of trees, movement of rock impacts, damage caused by long periods of water submersion and damage from debris to landscapes and water courses. Sugio documents the increasing incidence of climate related destructive events and impacts such as landslips on Japan’s landscape heritage. Included with this paper are mitigation and restoration measures established to address the disaster damage. The suggestion that climate change disaster prevention and mitigation should be pursued for all World Heritage sites along with associated social human concerns is strong advice for cultural landscape practitioners.

Ken Mulvaney in his paper (Mulvaney, 2015) describes a landscape like none other. It is a panorama of ancient rock carvings originating tens of thousands of years before the present. The unique cultural landscape is known as the Dampier Archipelago (including the Burrup Peninsula) in Western Australia and apart from the art, the history and the intrinsic beauty, the landscape has been cared for by Indigenous communities since its creation, a caring that is still maintained today. An excerpt from Mulvaney’s paper enshrines the significance as:

a living landscape, not just in terms of the natural environment but in the cultural law of the Aboriginal people. … It is a sacred landscape imbued with meaning and responsibility. … Petroglyphs are not only created by and in the Dreaming, they act as mnemonics for law and culture. Mythological narratives and sacred sites link the Burrup to places and people far inland and along the coast. Care and maintenance are part of Aboriginal responsibility, for a healthy country ensures a healthy community. The ceremony songs and peoples’ action keep the country alive, the Dreaming Beings in harmony and the Aboriginal custodians are the beneficiaries.

The place has been entered in Australia’s National Heritage List (Australian Government, 2007). However, the national heritage recognition came after the Western Australia (WA) State Government had allocated sites for an industrial hub and the area is now Australia’s largest bulk handling port for petrochemical processing and transportation of iron ore. The industrialisation has meant that high furnace stacks belching fire impact the visual catchment of the rock art landscape while the waste noxious gases are accused of damaging the rock art and the natural features.

An evaluation of the Burrup area for World Heritage potential was undertaken by the Australian Heritage Council in 2012 and the resulting report describes aspects of potential outstanding heritage value (Australian Heritage Council, 2012). However, entry on the Tentative World Heritage List has not advanced and there are local concerns that industrial activities will continue. Geoffrey Togo, a Ngarluma Elder of Burrup and Senior Culture Ranger for Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, who participated in the ICOMOS heritage symposium and conference, spoke of his frustrations in a short, powerful and painful comment.

Our songlines are destroyed. The Western Australian government has not given native title to us. We wanted an agreement, but they (the government) want the land. What hope we got if you heritage mob and government doesn’t want to look after it.

Throughout Australia the conservation and management of cultural landscapes should be guided by the Indigenous communities who belong to those landscapes. The Indigenous communities of the Dampier Archipelago, the Murujuga group have already experienced a sizable percentage of their country that is renowned for its rock art treasures, being callously impacted by relatively recent industrial activity.

Emerging from the papers are common interests and worrying apprehensions. A priority mitigation activity for heritage practitioners is to investigate the integrity and authenticity of concerns and lobby appropriate government bodies to ensure that conservation measures, particularly those anchored in legislation, are being adequately addressed.

A technical matter arising from a review is the failure to include aesthetic value as a component of a World Heritage assessment of cultural landscapes. Landscapes such as the Hani Rice Terraces, like nature, were not created for aesthetic purposes but are earth-sculptured masterworks of humanity, of breathtaking scale and effect. The National Heritage listing of Dampier Peninsula (including Burrup Peninsula) does not address the aesthetic value of the rock art as integral elements of a landscape but as objects. Indeed, the World Heritage listings of Mount Fuji, Japan and the Philippine’s Cordilleras (UNESCO World Heritage List, 1995, 2013) although not discussed in this publication, comprise a group of cultural landscapes not acknowledged for aesthetic heritage significance yet highly valued throughout the world for their beauty. Achieving aesthetic value recognition for cultura...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Cultural Landscapes in the 21st Century—Issues and Opportunities
• 2. Hani Rice Terraces of Honghe - The Harmonious Landscape of Nature and Humans
• 3. Valuing the Cultural Landscapes Past and Present: Tea Plantations in Sri Lanka
• 4. Changes to Continuing Landscapes: Industrialisation of Australia’s Productive Rural Lands
• 5. Heritage Values and Agricultural Landscapes: Towards a New Synthesis
• 6. Old Roads and Memories of St Henrik of Finland
• 7. Ui-won: The 18-19C Joseon Scholar’s Garden of Imagination
• 8. Large-scale Disasters on World Heritage and Cultural Heritage in Japan: Significant Impacts and Sustainable Management Cases
• 9. Burrup Peninsula: Cultural Landscape and Industrial Hub, a 21st Century Conundrum
• Index