ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the contemporary challenge of recognising, protecting and managing intangible values of cultural heritage with specific reference to cultural landscapes. This is not to deny that cultural landscapes have physical, tangible shape. More importantly for this chapter they demonstrate associative intangible values related to the meaning of a landscape for the landscape makers, owners and visitors/users, that is, for the community in its widest sense and their engagement with an active use of the heritage. Such an approach to cultural heritage generally, and cultural landscapes in particular, marks a divergence from the elite connoisseurship approach to cultural heritage - the Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD) (Smith 2006) - focusing on famous archaeological remains and buildings that held singular sway until the mid-1980s. Appreciation of associative values - like a breath of fresh air - presents an opportunity for landscape architecture research to make a distinctive contribution to the field of study and practice of understanding intangible aspects of landscape and to the process of how human meanings and values accumulate.
