Urban Cultural Landscapes: challenges and advantages of identifying cultural landscapes in urban areas.

Ref.: 72
Key theme: 01 Physical integrity of historic urban landscapes
Date of reception: 14/11/2008

AUTHORS (*Main author)

TRUDEAU, Thomas * (Australia) - Weir Phillips Architects

ABSTRACT

Urban Cultural Landscapes: challenges and advantages of identifying cultural landscapes in urban areas.
Preamble
This article considers various arguments in favour of approaching urban environments as cultural landscapes as developed in the author's Master thesis, made at the Raymond Lemaire International Centre for Conservation, Belgium. It argues that a conception of the urban environment as a type of cultural landscape would facilitate the recognition of the complex relations between people and place, by providing a conceptual framework in which these relations can be defined and discussed. On this basis, the article recommends an exploration of a concept of cultural landscapes as the first step in the development of a methodological tool that may, with further development, assist in the decision-making processes associated with the sustainable planning, development, and conservation of the urban environment, by espousing a holistic approach that considers the `total human environment' of urban centres.
Abstract
A disjunction exists between the complexity of the urban environment as a lived space, and the reductive simplicity of the developmental frameworks ­ legislative, linguistic, and visual ­ that are used to describe and shape this environment. The city as a lived space is one of experience, an environment of infinite complexity and constant dynamism, with each part affecting, relying, and impacting on others. It is an environment from which we, as people, are inseparable, for we are both its agents and its foundation. As an experiential environment, our perceptions of urban space ­ and the cultural conditions that underlie those perceptions ­ are as important as its physical characteristics, for we shape our environment as much as it contains and prompts our own behaviour.
On the other hand, the standards, perceptions and legislation that guide the actions of conservation and development authorities effectively reduce the dynamic complexity of the human environment to the diagrammatic simplicity of a `built' environment ­ a compilation of elements whose very perception as a collection denies them their organic character, replacing it instead with a static one. Such a perception permits the alteration, addition or destruction of parts with little regard to the complex, supportive relationships that bind one part to another in their actual, living context.
Disciplines such as cultural geography and anthropology have long considered the human environment in holistic terms. Only recently, however, has cultural heritage conservation (as a theoretical discipline and as a profession) begun to consider the benefits and necessities of doing similarly ­ and nowhere is this brought into sharper focus than in historic urban centres. The disjunction becomes clear: as the agencies responsible for the built environment become increasingly aware of the inextricable relationships that exists between people and place, it also becomes apparent that there are few, if any, established methodologies capable of, or designed to, analyse the urban environment to account for these relationships in terms and results that are meaningful both for conservation and development agencies.
In this context, this article suggests a conception of `place' that builds upon cultural landscape models already in play as an ideal vehicle to define and identify the two fundamental aspects of an environment (its physical form and its human character), as a means:
· to provide better representation of the values of a place as the focal point of community identity and way of life;
· to maintain and promote the authenticity of historic urban centres, by preserving the culturally generative relationships associated with those centres; and
· to determine the appropriateness and value of a proposed intervention to a specific area.
This article presumes neither to comprehensively examine, nor resolve, issues of great complexity. Its intent, rather, is to highlight the potential benefits of a new method of environmental value analysis (for urban spaces in particular), in response to certain key challenges to contemporary heritage conservation and planning.

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