Guidelines from the heritage field for the integration of landscape and heritage planning: a systematic literature review

Abstract

The landscape, understood as the manifestation of the link that identifies each society with the space where it develops, brings us closer to the territory from a richer and more transversal approach, one that goes beyond its purely formal dimension and embraces its condition of collective space and cultural expression. This view confirms the need to understand landscape as heritage, which has led the heritage field to generate a valuable body of knowledge related to landscape management, focusing on the role it plays in the memory and identity of society and showing how this important legacy can be revalued under the principles of sustainable development. However, these insights have never been analytically synthesized. In order to fill this gap, 226 heritage-related studies have been systematically reviewed to distil the interlinkages of heritage and landscape, thus seeking to foster closer links between landscape planning and the heritage field. Assisted by a qualitative data analysis software and following the approach of meta-synthesis, this study has organized its findings by a representative set of 13 operational guidelines with potential application in landscape planning, including: adopting a holistic landscape policy, developing specific methods for adopting an Historic Urban Landscape approach in urban planning, implementing Historic Landscape Characterization, a closer look at the Landscape Biography paradigm, promoting the use of past-oriented landscape analyses in proactive planning, increasing characterization efforts of intangible landscape features, implementing monitoring systems for understanding landscape’s state of conservation, closing ties between heritage scenario and cultural ecosystem services research, incorporating heritage studies in Geodesign, reshaping static barrier-like planning borders into softer measures, promoting participatory co-management, integrating tourism and heritage into a pluralistic landscape planning and defining new landscape management figures and protocols based on getting “conservation-use” operational balance. These prospects are discussed in relation to their potential contribution to landscape planning, which adds soundness to the role of heritage sphere in this field.