The new development is profitable, sanitary, and popular with middle-class tourists. But is it a cultural landscape? Most scholars say no. It is a simulacrum —an image of heritage without its substance. The intangible practices (the laundry hung in alleys, the communal well, the seasonal rituals) are gone. Between the fortress mentality (preserve at all costs) and the bulldozer (develop at all costs), a third practice is emerging. It is called adaptive conservation or managed evolution .
An indigenous leader from Canada’s Gwaii Haanas (where the Haida Nation co-manages a landscape with Parks Canada) once put it bluntly: “You want to conserve our totem poles. But you don’t want to conserve our right to cut down a cedar to carve a new one. That’s not conservation. That’s a cemetery.” The practice of cultural landscape management has thus moved beyond a simple binary. It is no longer Conservation vs. Development , but Conservation through Development . Cultural Landscape in Practice- Conservation vs...
However, practice reveals the strain. Vineyard owners face immense pressure to mechanize. Traditional manual harvesting preserves the terraces but is unprofitable against global wine markets. To survive, the community created a “Heritage Contract”—subsidies paid to vintners not just for wine, but for maintaining the landscape as a work of art . Development is allowed (new cellars, tourism facilities), but only if it enhances, not erodes, the historic agricultural logic. The new development is profitable, sanitary, and popular
Conservation wins on the skyline. Development wins in the bank account—but only through constant subsidy. Case Study B: The Daming Lake Area, Jinan, China Here, the scales tip toward development. The historic urban landscape around Jinan’s famous spring-fed lake featured centuries-old shiku (stone-paneled houses) and narrow hutong alleys. In 2018, a massive redevelopment plan was approved. It is a simulacrum —an image of heritage
In the misty rice terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras, an Ifugao farmer repairs a stone wall by hand, using techniques passed down from his ancestors 2,000 years ago. Fifty miles away, a government planner reviews blueprints for a new hydroelectric dam designed to power a million homes.
Conservation tends to freeze time. It looks backward at the moment of “outstanding universal value.” Development looks forward toward higher GDP and living standards. But the people living in a cultural landscape live in the eternal present .