Mixed heritage operational guidelines and cases(2)

In section eight, part two, I’m going to talk about important issue cultural landscape, its definition, and its origin. Well, that is an example for the Chinese mixed site. And as we know that the criterion seven is very conservation. So now there’s a group of people is considering how to better present the nature and culture value together, not only the separate six culture value and forge natural values. So we are called that this is culture and nature charities and I am one of the Chinese representative in this group. And we proposed civil document is trying to combine the culture and nature together. Now, you know this kind of ideas, the cultural landscape already been discussed the integration of nature and culture.

But the problem is that the criteria still separated. That is why we are organizing the cultural natural journey to provide a better ideas may be included in the cultural landscape criterions. Maybe we provide a better ideas.. So, let me come back to the definition of the cultural landscape The concept of the cultural landscape can be fine in the European tradition of the landscape painting from the sixteenth century onwards. Many European artists painted landscape in favor of people distinguish the people in their paintings. Two figures always border religionary specific landscape. The word “landscape” itself combines land with a verb of Germanic origin. to mean, literally “shaped lands”. Lands were then considered shaped by the natural forces.

And the unique detail of such became themselves subject of landscape paintings. The geographer Otto Schlüter is credited with having first formally used “cultural landscape” as an academic term in the early 20th century. In 1908, Schlüter argued that by defining geography as a landscape science, This would give geography a logical subject matter shared by no other discipline. He defined two forms of landscape. Translation is original landscape and all the landscape that existed before major human included changes and the translation like the cultural landscape, landscape created by human culture. The major task for geography was to trace the changes in these two landscapes.

It was Carl O. Sauer, a human geographer, who was probably the most influential in promoting and developing the idea of cultural landscapes. Sauer was determined to stress the agency of the culture as a force in shaping the visible features of Earth’s surface in delimited areas The idea of the cultural landscape included in the world heritage program is because of the lake district nomination. Lake district nominated in the world holidays in two thousand seventeen, it has a very long history for its nomination.

The recent (July 2017) inscription by the World Heritage Committee of the English Lake District highlights some of the challenges and opportunities of integrating cultural and natural values. Located in northwest England, the English Lake District represents the combined work of nature and human activity, which produced a harmonious landscape in which the mountains are mirrored in the lakes; a region whose valleys were carved by ice age glaciers and then shaped by centuries of agro-pastoral land use; a landscape that has been appreciated from the 18th century onwards by the Picturesque and later Romantic movements, which has been celebrated in paintings, drawings and words.

It also has inspired an awareness of the importance of beautiful places and triggered early efforts to preserve them for future generations.

The idea of a cultural landscapes category within the World Heritage Convention first began to emerge in the 1980s, as the committee debated the issue of how to recognize landscapes that included both cultural and natural resources. This debate was spurred in part by the saga of the United Kingdom’s unsuccessful nomination of the Lake District, as a natural and then as a cultural site, also by uncertainty among many committee members about the relationship between the idea of a lived-in landscape and the concept of a Mixed Sites. It was fitting that in October 1987 an international expert symposium was convened in the Lake District National Park to examine these issues.

The outcome was the Lake District Declaration, the opening lines of which are echoed in the current Lake District nomination, “People in harmonious interaction with nature, have in many parts of the world fashioned landscapes of outstanding value, beauty and interest.” The Lake District Declaration made many recommendations to improve the management and understanding of protected landscapes.

Since that time much progress has been made by the World Heritage Committee in refining the criteria and operational guidelines to better define cultural landscapes as Cultural landscapes are cultural properties and represent “combined works of nature and of man” designated in Article 1 of the Convention. They are illustrative of the evolution of human society and settlement over time, under the influence of the physical constraints and/or opportunities presented by their natural environment and of successive social, economic and cultural forces, both external and internal.