Tijdschrift voor Historische Geografie - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2019

In 1992 UNESCO adopted guidelines to include cultural landscapes in the World Heritage List. Cultural Landscapes are defined as ‘combined works of nature and of man’. It is this interaction that has to be of outstanding universal value. It should also be the focus concerning the management of such World Heritage sites. It requires an interdisciplinary approach as it covers different disciplines and in some cases different management systems. The management system is a living document that looks ahead. A holistic approach and monitoring are essential in order to be able to identify possible threats to the OUV early on and to act upon them.

Within the category of cultural landscapes on the UNESCO World Heritage List the ‘continuing urban landscapes’ are a small but interesting group of sites. This group consists of urban and suburban areas (‘urban landscapes’) with outstanding historical and heritage values, while at the same time they are characterized by a high degree of spatial dynamics. Many developments take place that lead to change of the environment. Rio de Janeiro, the mining landscape of Nord-Pas de Calais and the Italian Amalfi coast near Naples are examples of these urban cultural landscapes on the World Heritage List. Next to these sites, there are urban World Heritage sites that formally are no cultural landscapes, but have similar characteristics. Historical city centers of Rome or Bruges, the Amsterdam canal ring or Speicherstadt in Hamburg are comparably stretched out and have comparable values. These sites are confronted with similar challenges with respect to conservation and management of change. The obligation to preserve the outstanding universal value of the site could become under pressure. This surely is the case in some urban and suburban World Heritage sites in the Kingdom of the Netherlands: Amsterdam Canal Ring, Defence Line of Amsterdam and Willemstad, Curaçao. The World Heritage status requires a strict management of the site. UNESCO’S Historic Urban Landscape approach can be helpful to make preservation and development compatible. In this article the opportunities and dilemmas of the HUL and ICOMOS’S role in it are discussed. A stronger emphasize on HUL when reviewing developments in urban World Heritage sites is advocated.

In 2019 the New Dutch Waterline was nominated for the World Heritage List. Recently the chair of the quality team New Dutch Waterline, Eric Luiten, left office. The New Dutch Waterline became one of the key-projects of the Nota Belvedere (1999) of the Dutch government, which promotes the preservation of heritage through development. Luiten, together with others, developed a plan called ‘Line perspective’, in which developments were not seen as a threat, but welcomed. In contrast to the conservative approach towards heritage, in which a historic site or monument is often shielded from change, Luiten’s approach embraces these changes. He hopes this project can serve as an international example for the preservation through development approach, even if the New Dutch Waterline is not inscribed as World Heritage.

The World Heritage Convention was adopted by UNESCO in 1972, in a period of growing awareness of the international dimensions of environment and heritage. However, it was also a period in which European visions of heritage were still dominant, for example on themes such as authenticity and the distinction between nature and culture. The World Heritage List, resulting from the Convention, put the initiative for inscriptions by state parties, leading to a bias towards unproblematic and tourism-oriented objects. In all these aspects, almost half a century of discussions brought changing ideas. The European emphasis on material authenticity and the division between nature and culture were challenged by practices from Asia and Africa. The role of the nation state became less important by global exchanges of ideas and by local and regional initiatives. The protection of cultural landscapes, particularly that of ‘living’ or ‘continuing’ landscapes, was only possible by a movement from protection towards ‘management of change’. The problem of management of such landscapes is illustrated in five case studies of cultural landscapes that are, or prepare to be, World Heritage Sites: Dresden, the rice terraces of the Cordilleras, the Beemster polder, the Altes Land near Hamburg and the Dutch/Belgian Colonies of Benevolence. The conclusion is that change within World Heritage Sites is possible but needs to be done with caution and with a sense of quality, preferably by involving landscape architects. Rather than the authentic remains of an original situation, the argument should be based on ideas such as layeredness of landscapes and path dependency in developments.

Het Midden-Rijndal tussen Mainz en Koblenz, ingeschreven in 2002, is het enige werelderfgoed in Duitsland in de categorie organisch geëvolueerde cultuurlandschappen. Het is een complex gebied dat onder grote druk staat. De druk op het Midden-Rijndal blijkt uit de zeven state of conservation rapporten die tussen 2008 en 2017 naar het Werelderfgoedcomité werden gestuurd over bedreigende ontwikkelingen. Het laat zien voor welke uitdagingen behoud en ontwikkeling van een dergelijk cultuurlandschap staat. Om duidelijkheid te verschaffen hoe met deze uitdagingen om te gaan is in 2013 een Masterplan voor het Midden-Rijndal opgesteld. De ervaringen en uitdagingen bij het beheer van dit gebied kunnen een voorbeeld zijn voor managementplannen voor andere culturele landschappen.

Up until the beginning of the 20th century, the eastern part of the Belgian province of Limburg was a sparsely populated and not very productive part of the country. The dominating heathland was maintained with sheep, which were an essential part of a small-scale extensive farming system.

This all changed when coal was discovered in 1901. Seven large coalmines were established in a few decades, each one employing thousands of coal-miners. This also meant that entire new garden cities were built, to house the coal-miners and their families. The confrontation between the small-scale traditional land-use and the new large-scale industrial developments defines the landscape up to today. The scale and the force of the turnover are considered unprecedented for Western Europe, which is why it is being presented by Belgium for inclusion in the World Heritage List.

On the northwestern part of the Zeeburgereiland, an island in the IJ, the municipality of Amsterdam is developing the Sluisbuurt quarter: a mixed-use neighbourhood with shops, offices, catering and education and no less than 5,500 residential units, some of which are high-rise. The Sluisbuurt soon proved controversial because of the visibility of the towers from the Amsterdam city centre and from the rural area around Waterland. In this article we discuss the planning and the history of the island.