Landscape Heritage Conservation Jim Wescoat Landscape is a powerful concept in design, planning, and geographic inquiry. Landscape and urban heritage inquiry goes beyond monuments and combines exploration of conservation theory and practice with evaluation of active urban environmental design projects. Landscape planning critically examines the changing historical concepts and historiography of landscapes, gardens, and associated ideas about space and place. It surveys the varieties of landscape inquiry— from cultural geography to landscape architecture and landscape science.
This design workshop and planning practicum introduced students to the field of landscape heritage conservation. Landscape heritage encompasses natural and cultural dimensions of place, frequently charged with environmental problems and cultural tensions. It entails multiple methods of inquiry and associated challenges of synthesis, analogy, and judgment. During their fieldwork in India, the students met with faculty and graduate students at the Architectural Conservation Department at the School of Planning and Architecture and the Conservation Department of the Archaeological Survey of India. They also took short trips to conservation projects in sites including Agra, Fathpur Sikri, Jodhpur, and Nagaur for comparison with their own work.
“Landscape and urban heritage inquiry goes beyond monuments and combines study of conservation theory and practice with exploration of active urban environmental design projects.”
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Collaboration with local organizations took different forms and changed in response to community concerns. When the students met villagers in summer 2013 as part of a larger MIT Tata Community Water Systems study, for example, three independent participatory rural appraisal groups mentioned their desire to pursue a more holistic landscape approach to community water planning.
More specifically, they expressed interest in landscape design ideas for an intermittent nallah that runs along the village, which was depleted and degraded. AKPBSI invited the students to collaborate with their Rural Habitat Development Program toward finding a way to rehabilitate this water source, as they do not have landscape architects or planners on staff. In regional terms, the classes assessed the encounters among Islamic, Indian, and EuroAmerican ideas and methods—from painting to maps, prints, photographs, and travel accounts. They explored the ways in which and to what extent landscape synthesis was possible, asking how it informed landscape heritage conservation and what new intellectual challenges conservation posed for landscape research. Students were responsible for grappling with these questions through the lens of the burgeoning field of landscape heritage conservation, in order to devise a holistic understanding of this shifting area of research.
“Theoretically, heritage conservation is charged with issues of cultural identity, conflict, and creativity. It entails multiple methods of inquiry and associated challenges of synthesis and judgment.”
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