CCL - Communicating Cultural Landscape

Dialogues on cultural landscape - supporting expertise exchanges

"Communicating Cultural Landscapes" is a project idea, brought forth from the network of partners involved in the EU Project "Pathways to Cultural Landscapes". Partners from all over Europe wish to join forces in focusing on developing and realising ways of mediating cultural landscapes, teaching their unique importance to a broad audience. Within this frame, CCL aims at promoting social, cultural and territorial co-operations, with an emphasis on managing and supporting cultural heritage in areas beyond the major tourist centres. In March 2003 a first preparatory workshop was held in Lohr on the Main.

The partners are both from EU Member States and EU Neighbours, namely Belgium, Germany, England, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. Local, regional and national institutions will have a chance to gather and exchange experiences on a European scale and countries create strategies, products and services to sustainably use our cultural landscape in close co-operation with partners from other countries and different cultural backgrounds. Every region involved, will receive further support from local partners, mainly in implementing a variety of pilot projects. The responsible ministries in France and Ukraine also announced their interest in collaborating with the joint venture project. The Community of Albersdorf, leading partner in the EU Project "Pathways to Cultural Landscapes", will join the Archaeological Spessart Project in coordinating the CCL project.

Together with all participants we are presently already looking for signs in today's landscape, which man left behind during the last millennia, throughout which he consistently altered his surrounds to suit his needs and desires. Now it is time to present these groundbreaking results to a broad public and apply them. In close collaboration with the both citizens and officials, we can now go on to develop integrated and sustainable management plans and coordinated evaluation tools.

At the same time, the European course of evaluating landscape in monetary and idealistic terms is promoted through:

• Evaluating cultural landscape through innovative visualisation
• Setting up and expanding information centres
• Tying bottom-up initiatives together in a larger framework

Conferences, workshops, exchanges, studies and pilot projects are the tools through and with which CCL aims at developing a European wide instrument for dealing with the wide variety of European cultural landscapes by the year 2006.

The project will continue to keep the cultural landscape discussion alive at the European level, will uphold its advisory function to the Council of Europe. The results will be summarised and published in the accompanying web site.