Landscape as Heritage: Towards a Conservation Framework for Scenic Sites in Korea

As concerns about vanishing historical landscapes and new emerging landscapes have increased over recent years, a number of countries have now put in place bureaucratic approaches to safeguarding their own landscapes in a heritage context. Korea is one, which has tried to meet the demands of the age through one type of heritage landscape, scenic sites, implemented under the CPPA passed in 1962. However, an assessment of the conservation of scenic sites in Korea reveals that this is still in a rather rudimentary state; there appears to be a general lack of understanding about scenic sites, about what is important within them and how their value may best be conserved. Therefore, this thesis aims to question practices for conserving scenic sites in Korea with critical analysis of the cultural background and the current legislation system, and to provide recommendations to inform conservation strategies, underpin management and enhance public awareness with a view to keeping landscapes as heritage. In order to re-establish a clear framework for scenic site conservation, this research first reviews international trends of academic and practical approaches to cultural heritage conservation. ‘Value-based’ conservation principles, and ‘cultural landscape’, which have contributed the establishment of a new paradigm for cultural heritage over the past 20 years, are key concepts in this research. To improve the conservation framework for scenic sites, the social and cultural structures underpinning values related to Korean cultural landscapes are identified. A profound analysis of how Koreans read, use and enjoy their surrounding landscape, with an emphasis on political, social, and cultural context, is provided. At a more general level, the thesis constantly asks what the actual and potential values of scenic sites in South Korea have been at different times, which provides new perspectives on the meaning of scenic sites and indicates how this leads to the conservation of these new values. At the practical level, this research follows developments in the conceptual and administrative understandings of scenic sites, particularly in terms of the shifting discourses of values in heritage and landscape as heritage, and in turn provides more sophisticated theoretical frameworks to establish consistent and objective ‘value-based’ principles for the conservation of scenic sites as landscape heritage. Consequently, this thesis identifies five ways of developing a coherent policy and practice framework for landscape conservation: first, the value of scenic sites must be acknowledged based on the interaction between people and their environment, and the focus of management is on this relationship; second, a value-based conservation system is needed to sustainably conserve and utilise scenic sites as public property; third, people associated with scenic sites should be the primary stakeholders for stewardship; fourth, the focus of management is on guiding change to retain the values of the scenic sites; and fifth, successful management of scenic sites should contribute to a sustainable society.