Heritage value of the landscapes in an urban context as base for integrated heritage management in Flanders (Belgium)

The landscape scale connects and contextualises the cultural heritage objects in the urban context of settlements and towns and their surroundings. It is important to understand the historic landscape of a settlement in order to make sustainable decisions in spatial planning. To provide this understanding to people who deal with conservation of monuments and landscapes, but also to architects and spatial planners, there is a need for an integrated and holistic approach. This paper outlines a method for characterising the historic, mainly urbanised, landscape of Flanders and how to integrate designated or selected monuments,
within this characterisation. Besides individual monuments also of monuments, sites and their surroundings are taken into consideration. This approach can be part of a toolkit for treating more urbanised landscape as cultural heritage and for preserving, managing and changing this landscape in a comprehensive and sustainable way. The method includes GIS-based research executed using historic maps, aerial photography and satellite imagery, which is supported by field research. Fieldwork tries to combine the presence and the materiality of different features in the landscape (e.g. plot borders) with the visual envelopes that people have in the present day and may have had in the past. These visual envelopes are mapped in order to understand what perception people had of their monuments throughout history. How communities see and saw their monuments and their surrounding landscape is a key question in this paper. This is important to know in order to understand the evolution of a settlement, because change and development is often driven by a change in ‘sense of place’. The paper will include a case study of this methodology on a parish with an urbanised core in Flanders (Belgium)