Experiencing Landscapes: capturing the cultural services and experiential qualities of landscape

Natural England "commissioned extensive qualitative social research to provide baseline evidence of the cultural services and experiential qualities that landscapes provide. It is generally recognised that England’s landscapes provide a range of ‘services’ which contribute to people’s quality of life, including spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, reflection, recreation and aesthetic enjoyment.

A key aim was to understand whether such services correlate to particular landscape characteristics or particular landscape features. The detailed objectives for the study were to:

• Establish and refine evidence from national/regional public surveys and research through more focused work with the public in a selection of England’s National Character Areas.

• Make judgements about whether and how the findings correlate to particular landscape characteristics and relate to particular landscape features.

• Make recommendations on whether the outcomes could provide a sufficiently representative baseline that could be used either at national, regional or a National Character Area scale.

• Provide qualitative material that will aid in the updating of National Character Area descriptions and associated strategic objectives for the future."

The report is available to download as a pdf from Natural England.

There is also an interesting piece in Landscape Character Network Newsletter Issue 33 Autumn 2009 (pdf).

Salzburg Declaration on the Conservation and Preservation of Cultural Heritage

59 cultural heritage leaders from 32 countries, including representatives of Africa, the Middle East, South America, and Asia, unanimously passed the Salzburg Declaration on the Conservation and Preservation of Cultural Heritage.

The declaration came during the Connecting to the World's Collections: Making the Case for Conservation and Preservation of our Cultural Heritage Seminar held October 28 - November 1, 2009.

The seminar built on the findings of the The Institute of Museum and Library Services Connecting to Collections: A Call to Action, putting them into a global context. It combined presentations by experts in conservation and preservation throughout the world with small working groups tasked with making practical recommendations for future action on specific topics, including:

• emergency preparedness
• education and training
• public awareness
• new preservation approaches
• assessment and planning.

One evening was devoted to what is quaintly (bizarrely!) called a 'fireside chat' on Conservation in the developing world, with a panel of participants from Benin, Iraq, Mexico, Singapore, and Trinidad and Tobago.

Links:
Salzburg Declaration (pdf)
The Institute of Museum and Library Services section on the Salzburg global seminar including videos of some of the speeches.

ONLINE SEARCH ENGINE - MAKING OUR CITIES SUSTAINABLE

A new customized search engine has been created to open up results from the UK research programme on Sustainable Urban Environments (SUE).

This single gateway allows access to over £38 million worth of government-funded research. It will "enable practitioners, policy-makers and the third sector to search for the precise research, tools and evidence that they need in making decisions about cities, investment for communities, planning, buildings, transport, regeneration and other aspects of urban sustainability."

The SUE Search engine is part of the Urban Sustainability Exchange, which is being developed to provide a gateway to all SUE research.

Getting to policy impact

Getting to policy impact: Lessons from 20 years of bridging science and policy with sustainability knowledge

Interesting study published by the Stockholm Environment Institute.It looks at the role and impact that SEI has had in a number of different policy arenas in the past decade.

"Organizations such as SEI, that has an important audience in the public policy sphere from subnational to global levels, should be evaluated on the basis of what types of public policy impacts the knowledge it generates is having at different levels of governance. However, such evaluations are inherently tricky. Despite its strong presence in nearly all research funding descriptions, ‘policy impact’ is an ambiguous term, and there is very little consensus about what it really means or how to measure it.

The report also includes ten suggestions on how SEI and similar organizations can better serve its mandate to ‘bridge science and policy’ by bringing sustainability knowledge into the policy domain."

Available as a pdf via SEI website.

Heritage at heart

Interesting short article by Dave Chetwyn "Heritage at heart (draft PPS15 on the historic environment)", in Planning No 1836 18 Sep 2009, 17

Explores the initial response of stakeholders to the publication of the draft planning policy statement on the historic environment (PPS15). Highlights the key features of the draft PPS15 and what the government hopes will be achieved by the new guidance. Looks at the debate over the effectiveness of the changes and especially the possible negative impact of the implicit separation of heritage management from the wider place-making context. Highlights concerns within the built environment professions about the draft's lack of recognition of the role of historic buildings in the social regeneration of towns and cities and in the creation of sustainable communities.