APPLIED HERITAGE RESEARCH

Outlines of a research agenda

Jan Kolen

VU University Amsterdam/CLUE

Leeuwarden, 8-12- 2010

The academic debate about heritage:

• Heritage versus history

• Heritage is a construction of the past for present-day purposes

Trends in heritage practices and management:

• From a “culture of loss” to a “culture of profit”

• Revitalizing heritage and cultural landscapes

Programs for the Wadden region:

• Applied heritage research

• Heritage and cultural landscape as valuable environmental resources

• Role of heritage and the cultural landscape in spatial transformations, regional developments and spatial issues

HERITAGE AND CULTURAL LANDSCAPES AS ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCES

Applied Heritage Research

Heritage and cultural landscape as valuable social resources:

• Medium for anchoring and storing personal and shared memories

• Identification with the living environment

Oudeschild, Texel: war memorial

Middag-Humsterland (dwelling mounds)

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966)

“Space is a society of named places, just as people are landmarks within the group”

Regional identity (Groningen)

Heritage and cultural landscape as valuable ecological resources:

• Small-scale, human induced biotopes

• Rich in gradients

Texel: “tuunwallen”

Heritage and cultural landscape as valuable economic resources:

• Heritage tourism

• Creative industry (reuse of buildings)

Tourism in the Wadden region

Creative industry

Heritage and cultural landscape as aesthetic values:

• Belvedere policy (1999)

• Conservation through development (architecture, urban planning, landscape design)

Heritage and cultural landscape as technological resources:

• Revitalising old land use systems

• Water management

EXAMPLES FROM OTHER REGIONS IN THE NETHERLANDS: “BEST PRACTICES”

Applied Heritage Research

Drentse A

Fence in the Vechtstreek

Designed fences: Vechtstreek

Strijp S (Eindhoven)

Lankheet (Twente): vloeiweide system

SPATIAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE WADDEN REGION:• Population growth

• Economic growth (tourism; creative industry)• Population decline (“shrinking regions”)

Applied Heritage Research

“Growing regions” in the Netherlands (red brown)

Den Helder

Venice ( heritage): gentrification

“Shrinking regions” in the Netherlands (dark blue)

Shrinking region: Het Bildt

“Shrinking Regions”: Possible scenarios

• Development of leisure landscapes tourism)

• Large-scale farming• Bigger houses in green areas

Blauwe Stad (Winschoten)

Heritage Programs for the Wadden region

• Environment-based (European Landscae Convention)

• Differentiated scenarios• Knowledge-based rather than policy-based• Interdisciplinary• Adopting a “dwelling perspective”

Kurzeme (Latvia): revitalised vineyard

Heritage Programs for the Wadden region

• Environment-based (European Landscae Convention)

• Differentiated scenarios• Knowledge-based rather than policy-based• Interdisciplinary• Adopting a “dwelling perspective”

Tim Ingold

“The landscape unfolds the lives and times of predecessors who, over the generations, have moved around in it and played their part in its formation. To perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past”.

Tim Ingold (2000)