Increasingly heritage conservation around the globe is turning to cultural landscape models which recognize that places are characterized by dynamic processes and a need to incorporate both natural as well as cultural values. These approaches offer enormous opportunities for the United States via international examples of research, scholarship and real world cases studies that connect the academy, conservation and historic preservation professional and community to the best ideas in the field from around the globe. At the same time evaluating and managing change in both designed and vernacular landscapes challenge many of the US traditional historic preservation practices. This Knowledge Community will focus on exploring particularly innovative and well-defined efforts abroad that can be utilized to develop practical solutions to landscape scale approaches in the US, including the following areas:
- Incorporating intangible cultural values into historic preservation regimes with the engagement of the indigenous community or traditional knowledge bearers.
- Developing a community of practice around similar landscape types and identifying cross-cutting issues and adaptive strategies such as the global Rural Landscapes Atlas that focuses on large, productive landscapes.
- Designing and implementing large regional initiatives to conserve landscapes of significance to World Heritage sites, indigenous peoples, and other nationally important resources especially as it regards protection, change management and presentation.
- Incorporating UNESCO Historic Urban Landscapes guidelines into every day historic preservation and cultural management.