Development of the Planning Framework of the Conservation for World Heritage Site of Maymand Cultural Landscape

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the conservation of landscapes and cultural landscapes in particular have confronted numerous management challenges. The complexity and extension of the cultural landscape concept are considered to be one of the main reasons for the existing challenges. Within the past few decades, these challenges have been answered by the introduction of the “Landscape approach” in conservation and management. In many cases, particularly those cultures which are rooted deep in their literature, the landscape management approaches have not been implemented properly. In this regard, cultural landscape categorisation and classifications have been introduced in these geographical regions, however, the most appropriate methods for managing these landscapes have been neglected in serious discussions.In the geographical territory of Iran, three world heritage sites of Uramant cultural landscape, the Maymand cultural landscape, and the Bam cultural landscape have been inscribed in the World Heritage List over the past few years. In this paper, the authors will investigate the Maymand World Heritage cultural landscape, as the first case in planning a landscape management framework, to prepare the grounds to discuss the international landscape management frameworks proposed by four pioneer landscape conservation and management organisations. In this research, authors have revised the contemporary landscape management framework of the Maymand cultural landscape based on the introduced planning and management frameworks by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, the International :union: for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the European Landscape Convention by the Council of Europe, and the United States National Park Service (US-NPS). Furthermore, they have also referred to the existing contextual management and planning frameworks of the Maymand cultural landscape to propose their optimised landscape planning and management framework.