Mapping Local Perceptions for the Planning of Cultural Landscapes

Introduction

In the last few decades, a new, more inclusive vision of defining and planning cultural landscapes has developed in the field and practice of cultural heritage studies. It first emerged when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) officially recognised landscape as the result of the combined work of humankind and nature, including both natural and cultural components, as well as tangible and intangible values (UNESCO, 1972, 2003, 2008). As a result, landscape came to be seen as a cultural expression of a long and intimate relationship between people and the natural environment they inhabit (Cosgrove & Cosgrove, 1984).

Since then, the concept of cultural landscape has also come to include ‘unofficial’ definitions of heritage. First, with the European Landscape Convention (Council of Europe, 2000), ordinary landscapes were recognised for their heritage value, in addition to their outstanding counterparts. Before then, the previous category had hardly ever been considered. Second, local communities are increasingly engaged in the processes of defining heritage and identifying strategies for its protection, management and planning, with community participation becoming a key practice for cultural landscape planning and sustainable development (Council of Europe, 2000, 2005; UNESCO, 2011; Rotondo et al., 2016).

Over time, various participatory methods have been developed, and their use has consistently increased (Nanz & Fritsche, 2014; Cooke & Kothari, 2001). In the last two decades, map-based tools have become particularly widespread, as they are very well suited to collecting and processing input from local communities that can be easily translated into planning information (McCall, 2021; Gottwald et al., 2021). Notwithstanding these developments, the integration of local heritage perceptions into the heritage and spatial planning fields is still not nearly common enough in practice (Ryan, 2011; Gottwald et al., 2021; Spanu et al., 2017; Grasseni, 2012; Torquati et al., 2011; Garcia-Martin et al., 2017; Nikula et al., 2020). This paper aims to test the effectiveness of a map-based online questionnaire tool in revealing local heritage perceptions and integrating them into the planning practice.

This study specifically deals with Maptionnaire,¹ an online questionnaire application that was used in a case study in the south-Italian region of Apulia, where planning strategies are being developed for slow tourism in relation to the rural cultural landscape. The authors focused on what Steinitz (2012) refers to as the people of the place, using the online questionnaire tool to discover what these people of the place value in the cultural landscape. It will be argued that this tool makes it possible to collect valuable extra information in addition to well-known, official heritage objects and notions, and that this can contribute to more inclusive planning and management of local cultural landscapes.

The overall question addressed in this paper is:

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  Is a map-based questionnaire an effective tool to map local heritage perceptions and use them for the planning of cultural landscapes?

The following subquestions follow from this main question:

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  Do respondents identify other heritage elements than the official heritage categories?

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  Do respondents pay attention to official heritage elements?

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  What is behind these differences?

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  And how can this information be used from a planning perspective?