Investigating the Main Challenges of Cultural Landscape Concept by Focusing on Analysis of Eighteen-year Experience of This Concept in UNESCO World Heritage Center

Although nearly a century ago, for emphasizing on interaction between people and nature over time, the term ‘’Cultural Landscape’’ was used for the first time. The first appearance of this term in conservation context was about 18 years ago. In 1992, by adding cultural landscapes representing the “combined works of nature and of man”, the World Heritage Convention became the first international legal institution to recognize and protect cultural landscapes of outstanding universal value. Their inscriptions, on the World Heritage List were important steps toward revealing and sustaining the great diversity of interactions between humans and their environment, protecting living traditional cultures and preserving the traces of those which have disappeared. This paper, following presentation the historical background of cultural landscape concept and its definitions, looks in particular at cultural landscape in UNESCO World Heritage Center between 1992 to 2010. It includes the definitions, the changes that cultural landscape concept brought into the application of the Convention, the strengths and weaknesses, as well as the meetings of experts, where the most important issues were raised and suggested. During the last eighteen years, UNESCO World Heritage Center has attracted many critical issues on cultural landscape. Making attempts to resolve them has load to some positive effects on revising the process of recognition, assessment, and management of world heritage cultural landscape, and consequently a clearer concept for cultural landscape, in World Heritage Convention, came to agreement. However, with a closer look at cultural landscape in the Center some fundamental criticisms could be raise which if the the Convention wants to remain as the most important international legal institution to recognize and protect cultural landscape, it should find worldwide acceptable answers for them. In this paper, the three main challenges are discussed as follows: (a) imbalances in World Heritage List; (b) inefficiency of strict division between the cultural landscapes and the natural ones; and (c) adopting elitist approaches. Investigating the first challenge, imbalance in world heritage list, discovered the weakness of current definitions and categories of cultural landscape as one of the agents of this imbalance. Analyzing the second raised challenge discovered that the strict division between cultural and natural landscape was not applicable to recognition and conservation of heritage. Therefore, the necessity of reviewing the definitions and categories of cultural landscape for purpose of overcoming this challenge was appeared. The final focus of this paper was on elitist and site-oriented approaches of UNESCO World Heritage Center, providing an artificial distinction between such landscapes and the ordinary ones. Analyzing the consequences of this approach discovered a paradox between the definitions and categories of cultural landscapes and World Heritage operational guidelines. Hence, reviewing the definitions and guidelines is required. Therefore, the paper brings three fundamental challenges of cultural landscape concept to light by focusing on analysis of eighteen-year experience of this concept in UNESCO World Heritage Center. In addition to these challenges it explores issues associated with the necessity of reviewing cultural landscape definition, categories, and Operational Guidelines for Implementation of the World Heritage Convention toward answering these challenges as well as ones will be risen in future.