INTRODUCTION

Traces of the past, either visible or invisible, play an important part in the appreciation of present-day landscapes. In almost all urban areas traces of human activities from the past are threatened by housing, road construction, drainage etc. There is increasing pressure to take into account the qualities of the place (genius loci) when expanding urban areas or developing new nature. Respect for archaeological and historical-geographical values is demanded when intervening in landscapes. Managing the heritage of the past in the present-day landscape is a topic of growing concern all over the world. Both the United Nations (ICOMOS) and the European Union have implemented international treaties and started intensive research programmes for international heritage management.

Knowledge on matters of prospection, valuation, selection, conservation, management and organization of cultural-historical values is much needed. Conducting solid research in the field of analysis of landscape genesis, historical settlement patterns, historical ecology and geography and building history may satisfy this demand. An extra effort is required to articulate the interest of archaeological-historical landscape in planning and politics. This means that the archaeological c.q. historical-cultural landscape is increasingly becoming a subject of research and of debate. To help facilitate this debate and make it more accessible a workshop will be organized. The workshop intends to stimulate debate and discuss the place the archaeological-historical landscape is given within the environmental planning in Europe and the United States.

Objectives

The objective of the workshop is to bring together leading experts to discuss the contribution of archaeological-historical knowledge to environmental planning. A further aim of the workshop is to identify future research questions. This workshop will provide an opportunity to debate and share information with researchers and others active in the field of archaeology, historical geography, landscape ecology and environmental planning and design from Europe and the United States.

The central issue addressed in the workshop is the challenge of integrating the landscape of the past with that of the present and the future. It focuses particularly on the challenges facing the conservation of archaeological monuments in the metropolitan landscape. The main themes of the workshop are 'the Cultural Biography of the Landscape' and 'the Knowledge-Action Nexus', two fundamental notions of the programme 'Protecting and Developing the Dutch Archaeological-Historical Landscape' (NWO). The two main themes apply to several aspects related to protecting and developing the metropolitan landscape: the historical development of metropolitan landscape, the integration of archaeological and historical-geographical values in environmental planning and, finally, the formulation of an interdisciplinary view on the cultural-historical landscape.

The concept of 'Cultural Biography' is a metaphor pointing at the notion of the readability of complex and stratified landscapes. The crux of this concept is an emerging unified perspective in the domain of archaeology, historical geography and the history of architecture. The concept integrates the cultural-historical values in the landscape with environmental planning and development. The 'Knowledge-Action Nexus' focuses on the interaction between the process of generating scientific knowledge and the process of environmental decision-making. The core question is how to make archaeological and cultural-historical knowledge available to planners and politicians in a meaningful and useful way. Other questions addressed in the workshop are: - Which archaeological and historical geographical values can determined? - How can archaeological, cultural-historical values contribute to spatial quality and identity? - Which techniques, strategies and methods are best suited to use in environmental policy-making and planning? - How can knowledge of the cultural landscape be integrated into social debate and political decision-making? - Which best practices are worth studying in more detail?