Current Landscape Issues:

Professor Ken Taylor, on Cultural Landscape:

Cultural Landscape: includes not only culture and ecology, natural resources and biodiversity. It also embraces historic events, activities, which occur in relationship to soil, slope, water and fertility, climate, flora and fauna. The range of human responses to placed conditions define the tangible and intangible values inherent in cultural landscapes.

Report from Guiyang, Guizhou Province China
Professor Ken Taylor was one of a small number of invited international speakers at The International Academic Symposium of Conservation  and Sustainable Development of Village Cultural Landscape, in Guiyang, Guizhou Province China which is the home to the Miao ethnic group, a linguistically and culturally related group of people recognized by the Chinese government as one of the country’s 55 official minorities. The symposium was supported by the State Administration for Cultural Heritage (SACH), UNESCO, Guizhou Provincial department of Culture, Peking University and Tongji University.

The context for the symposium (paraphrasing from the program handbook) was that cultural landscapes represent the combined works of nature and man (as designated in Article 1 of the UNESCO )World Heritage Convention. This concept of cultural landscape therefore includes not only culture, natural resources and biodiversity, but also embraces historic events, activities, and relationships with people thereby displaying the cultural and aesthetic value of cultural landscapes. In this way cultural landscape can be seen as a symbol of local identities. Village cultural landscapes are also an expression of common memory.  Participants saw this in vividly memorable site visits to two Miao villages.

For me a fundamental aspect of the idea of landscape and one that underpinned the symposium is that one of our deepest  needs is for a sense of identity and belonging. A common denominator in this is human attachment to landscape and how we find identity in landscape and place. Landscape therefore is not simply what we see, but ‘a way of seeing’ as Denis Cosgrove so aptly put it. We see it with our eye but interpret it with our mind  and ascribe values to landscape for both tangible and intangible – spiritual – reasons. Landscape must therefore be seen as a cultural construct in which our sense of place and memories reside.

The topic of cultural landscapes within the field cultural heritage management is gaining increasing traction and interest. There are now 61 cultural landscapes inscribed on the World Heritage list, but only 13 of these are in the Asia-Pacific region. This, in my view, is unfortunate given that some of the some of the world’s outstanding examples of living history and heritage exist in the region’s cultural landscapes, traditions and representations. One of the difficulties hitherto in the Asia-Pacific area is the view that all landscape is cultural and therefore the term with its European languages background is a tautology. However, China has now made it clear that it proposes to address the anomaly and seems now to have accepted the term.  This was made clear in a presentation by Mr SHAN Jixiang, Director of SACH.

See also Ken Taylor’s forthcoming article ‘Cultural Landscapes and Asia: Reconciling International and Southeast Asian Regional Values’ in the February 2009 issue of Landscape Research.