Preface to: Routledge Handbook of Cultural Landscape Practice

The idea of cultural landscapes, which in the fields of heritage studies and heritage practice relates to the recognising and safeguarding of heritage landscapes, is a significant concept in con-temporary conservation. Heritage conservation has shifted from a historical focus on buildings, city centres, and archaeological sites to encompass progressively more diverse forms of heritage and increasingly larger geographic areas as represented, for example, by historic gardens and parks, continuing or living rural, urban, and industrial landscapes, and associative landscapes – which collectively are encompassed in the World Heritage categorisation of cultural landscapes. The origin of the idea of cultural landscapes can be traced to the field of human geography in the late 19th century. That discipline, coupled with concepts from landscape architecture, urban planning, horticulture, heritage architecture, anthropology, ethnography, human geog-raphy, archaeology, historical ecology, art history, and others led to the development of cultural landscape conservation practice from the early 1970s and into the 21st century. Today, cultural landscape practice has become increasingly complex given the expansion of the values and meanings of heritage, the influence of environmental challenges such as climate change and species loss, technological advancements, and the need to better understand and interpret human connections to place (a term we use here as inclusive of landscapes). The aim of the handbook is to strike a balance between theory and practice while also seeking to achieve a geographical spread, disciplinary diversity and perspectives, and a mix of authors from academic, practitioner, management, and community backgrounds