ABSTRACT

There is a growing awareness in the Netherlands that nature management, heritage management and public participation cannot be seen in isolation and need to be tackled in a more integrated way. This not only has major practical implications, it also has a bearing on the scientific research that underpins future policy, the design and management of nature conservation sites and cultural landscapes. One of the key problems in modern landscape research and modern landscape policy lies in the fact that the ecological and cultural perspectives are far removed from one another. A second problem is that local residents are often insufficiently involved in the research and planning activities of experts. During a five-year research and action programme in the Drentsche Aa National Landscape, geologists, archaeologists, historical geographers, toponymists and ecologists put the theoretical concept of the cultural biography of landscape into practice at a regional level. The results from this exercise include an accessible and richly illustrated book and an online digital cultural atlas. The researchers also worked with residents, designers, policymakers and stakeholder organizations to develop a method of participatory planning that can be applied both regionally and locally. At regional level, an integrated landscape vision has been developed to serve as a guide for future developments. Both the cultural biography and the participatory planning method were tested at a more local level for devising development and management plans for nature conservation areas, water systems and micro-landscapes. Finally, an interactive project in three villages studied the interaction between the physical, social and mental landscape on the basis of toponyms. The interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary methods developed over the past few years in the Drentsche Aa region are now applied on a broad scale in regional environmental and planning policy and nature and landscape management in the Netherlands.

KEYWORDS

Interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity; landscape biography; community planning, participatory planning; landscape architecture, landscape management; field names, local knowledge

INTRODUCTION

The integration of heritage management and nature management poses one of the greatest challenges in Europe's rural areas over the next few years (Plieninger/Hochtl/Spek 2006). This certainly also applies to the Netherlands, whose highly urbanized society and high population density, coupled with the inevitable intensive use of space over the centuries, have meant that cultural and ecological values are closely interlinked in virtually all parts of the country.