Forest Landscape Restoration as Design Strategy for Resilient Heritage Estate Landscapes: The Case of the Baakse Beek Region, Gelderland Province, the Netherlands

Heritage estate landscapes are clusters of historical estates with their gardens and agricultural land. These heritage estate landscapes suffer from climate change (abundance and shortage of water), spatial fragmentation through urbanization, and loss of identity through economic tendencies. These challenges can only be addressed from a regional point of view that takes local differences into account and takes the landscape as the basis for future strategies for further development. This paper addresses an adaptive and multi-scale landscape design approach for developing a more resilient heritage estate landscape, taking the estate landscape in the Baakse Beek region (a region in the East of the Netherlands) as a case study. Deforestation is identified as one of the critical agents of spatial change in the region, causing significant water system problems and loss of biodiversity. Based on a regional analysis of the estate landscape's historical development, forest landscape restoration (FLR) is employed as a contextual design strategy to regain ecological functionality and enhance human wellbeing in the degraded landscape across scales. This paper showcases a multi-scale spatial design approach for developing cultural heritage landscapes.