A műemlékek sokszínűsége (A 28. Egri Nyári Egyetem előadásai 1998 Eger, 1998)

Előadások / Presentations - SZILASSY Zoltán: Cultural landscapes: a borderline discipline betwen monument protection and nature protection

ZOLTÁN SZILASSY CULTURAL LANDSCAPES: A BORDERLINE DISCIPLINE BETWEEN MONUMENT PROTECTION AND NATURE PROTECTION INTRODUCTION The title may be misleading: what is at stake is much more than a borderline discipline, both professionally and geographically speaking. A better wording would be to say the two disciplines deeply extend over one another these days, in a certain sense they overlap. While before this overlap affected only smaller, well delimited areas, a couple of hundred hectares, like Hollókő and its surrounding landscape on the World Heritage List, now it concerns much larger areas, sometimes whole regions. Because cultural landscapes have now become a category of historic monuments in their own right. Just think of Hortobágy or the Fertő region: both are applying for inscription on the above mentioned World Heritage List in the category of cultural landscapes, on the basis of ICOMOS's expertise and recommendation. But what is a cultural landscape then? Few terms are as popular these days, with both professionals and lay people, as cultural landscapes. „Cultural landscape" is a fashionable, often used combination of two notions, they themselves difficult to define in the first place. Landscape itself is a basic geographic category, broadly used in other theoretical and practical disciplines as well. The geographic definition of landscapes may be considered as the most general and neutral, and therefore represents a possible compromise for most of those concerned. The landscape is a system of landscape constiuants (topography, soil, waters, vegetation etc.) it reads. It is an open, highly organised, total system. A notion of landscape as an aesthetic category comes from the Netherlands and was introduced into geography, a unique discipline at the time, by the Anglo-Saxon in the 18th century. It embraced then what we still logically attribute it to: reality around us, together with human activity. Then, as sciences differentiated, and geography split (natural, economic etc geography) it was referred to the realm of natural geography, then to ecology, and finally to the architectural concept of landscape planning and landscape gardening. Hence, the notion of landscape now covers much more, but its use is made difficult by the confusion about what it really implies. Debates about this are often academic, and often ignore the essence of landscapes, failing to analyse the complex system of interactions. Natural landscapes have been pushed to the background due to increasing human activity affecting the landscapes, and landscapes characterised by anthropogenic attributes have come to the focus, referred to as cultural landscapes since the 1920s (Sauer). Then the concept of natural landscapes was addressed by ecology and the notion of cultural landscapes became a concern for landscape planning, landscape gardening and monument protection. (Attempts were made at replacing them with the concept of /geographic/ environment, which in principle was a good idea aimed at uniformity, but difficult to implement.) At the same time, new research methods and practical applications in the 1980s brought about a sharp improvement of landscape theory, with increased emphasis on the issue of cultural landscapes. It has become particularly valid today, with the new approach virtually dominating. According to the Dobris Declaration (1995), one of the most characteristic features of Europe is the great variety of its landscapes that has not dissappeared despite of the social and economic changes accompanying industrialization and urbanization.