Cultural landscape in the World Heritage List: Understanding on the gap and categorisation

The imbalance of the number of sites listed as the cultural landscape in the World Heritage List is one of the major issues since cultural landscape was adopted in the World Heritage Convention in 1992. Though the List is supposed to adequately elicit the heritage diversity in the world, most of cultural landscapes in the List as well as the Tentative List are situated in Europe and North America region. To fill this gap, it would be useful to focus the analysis on the regions other than Europe and North America which would provide insights and understanding for the future strategy. This paper points out that one of the major factors on preparation for the nomination which influences the imbalance in the list is the political and economic stability in each state party. As for the cultural lands cape, this situation calls for attention from international action on heritage safeguarding. Moreover, the imbalance raises the question whether the existing guideline on cultural landscape identification is practical for the state parties. The landscape types proposed in this paper aims to add depth to the understanding on the existing categorisation of cultural landscape in the Convention. It focuses on the landscape setting based on the existing cultural landscapes in the World Heritage List. Seven cultural landscape types in both rural and urban setting landscape are discussed.