Inventories and Regionalization of Historical Cultural Landscapes in Germany in the Context of Cultural Landscape Conservation

At present, various development issues faced by Central European countries has drawn academic attention, such as regional differentiation, increased conflicts in agricultural land areas, soil degradation, and loss of diversity in high density areas. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the concept of “cultural landscape conservation” was established in Germany. It is applied to analyze and study the cultural landscape in the land and regional space with the synthetic approaches of historical geography, archaeology and heritage conservation, and spatial and regional planning. The concept of cultural landscape conservation is embodied in the theoretical model of “infinite loop”, and includes three main steps: analysis and evaluation, protection and interpretation, planning and management. Based on this basic concept, the cultural landscape conservation could be specifically explained as two models of methodology. Model 1: Inventories of historical cultural landscapes. It’s a systematic method of collection and evaluation for the cultural landscape elements and structures within a certain limited area. This model is further divided into two types: the analytical approach of complex “historical cultural landscape” proposed by Gunzelmanns and the “cultural landscape material analysis method” proposed by Burggraaff and Kleefeld. Model 2: Regionalization of cultural landscapes, which is to mark, annotate, classify and briefly characterize historical cultural landscapes from experts’ perspectives. This model is segmented into two analytical methods: typification and individualization, illustrated with cases. Finally, for the application of the two methods, this paper proposes that it is necessary to objectively analyze various factors, and examine the applicability in a particular political context.