Introduction
Culture is generally defined as the totality of
socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs,
institutions, and all other products of human work and thought.
These patterns, traits, and products considered as the expression
of a particular period, class, community, or population:
Edwardian culture; Japanese culture; the culture of poverty.
These patterns, traits, and products considered with respect to a
particular category, such as a field, subject, or mode of
expression: religious culture in the Middle Ages; musical
culture; oral culture. The predominating attitudes and behavior
that characterize the functioning of a group or organization.
Cultural entities are places that are shaped by
their natural and human heritage, and a product of the values and
beliefs of their citizens. Taking this viewpoint
Geddes
and Mumford
believed that planning was more a human than a physical
science, and that to practice it required an holistic local
understanding of culture, economy the workings of the built and
natural environments.
To realize this vision, a system of integrated
cultural planning which is place-based has to be adopted
Cultural planning is a place-based approach to local and regional
cultural development pioneered in Australia in the early 1990s. It
is an approach built on the following principles of systems
thinking:
- The
whole is not only greater, but different, than the sum of the
parts.
- An
understanding of the cultural system must preceed
intervention.
- Systems
knowledge requires understanding connections and interrelationships
among all major elements of the system.
This whole systems perspective on cultural
development runs counter to the discipline-based policy and
planning frameworks (eg., separate attention to visual arts,
performing arts, museums, etc.) that has tended to drive thinking
in the past. Its place-based focus, rather than being discipline-
based, is consistent with the increasing call for place-based
frameworks across all aspects of public policy to do with culture
and community.
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and
implicit, of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted between
individuals and groups. These patterns are created as images
and structures that define a sense of place.
The behavioural patterns constitute the
distinctive achievement of human groups, including their
embodiments in artifacts. In this context, the essential core of
culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached
values, which govern the way the members currently use nature, live
in nature and relate to their historical roots expressed in
traditions of art , technology and landscape. Culture systems may,
on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other
hand, as conditioning value influences upon further action.
Cultural ideas manifest themselves in different
ways and differing levels of depth. Symbols represent the most
superficial values of culture and values represent their deepest
manifestations, with heroes and rituals in between.
- Symbols are words, gestures, pictures, or objects that
carry a particular meaning which is only recognized by those who
share a particular culture. New symbols easily develop, old ones
disappear. Symbols from one particular group are regularly copied
by others. This is why symbols represent the outermost layer of a
culture.
- Heroes are persons, past or present, real or fictitious,
who possess characteristics that are highly prized in a culture.
They also serve as models for behaviour.
- Rituals are collective activities, sometimes superfluous
in reaching desired objectives, but are considered as socially
essential. They are therefore carried out most of the times for
their own sake (ways of greetings, paying respect to others,
religious and social ceremonies, etc.).
- Values form the core of a culture. They are broad
tendencies for preferences of certain state of affairs to others
(good- evil, right- wrong, natural- unnatural). Many values remain
unconscious to those who hold them. Therefore they often cannot be
discussed, nor they can be directly observed by others. Values can
only be inferred from the way people act under different
circumstances.
Symbols, heroes, and rituals are the tangible or
visual aspects of the practices of a culture. The true cultural
meaning of the practices is intangible; this is revealed only when
the practices are interpreted by the insiders.
The ‘human
habitat’ encompasses all those material remains that our
ancestors have left in the landscapes of town and countryside. It
covers the whole spectrum of human creations from the largest
towns, cathedrals, industrial markers or highways - to the very
smallest - signposts, standing stones or buried flint
tools.
These are all
components of the `sense of place’, through which we relate
to and value our local environment. A full appreciation of the
historic dimension can therefore be of the greatest importance to
the development of appropriate and successful schemes of economic
development and community regeneration, rather than the impediment
that is sometimes supposed.
In seeking a reason for conserving cultural
heritage in the form of sites and artifacts, human evolution has to
be seen in the context of the current state of development of the
universe. This is to be seen as a cosmos, possessing meaning
and value as an ordered whole, which is reflected in the earth's
eco- system which includes the human habitat.
Modernity has led to a loss of such a holistic
understanding (as existed previously, for example, in the 19th
century concept of the 'Great Chain of Being' and the holistic
approach to environmental knowledge in
Alexander
von Humboldt’s two volume treatise entitled
Cosmos. Matters of meaning and value have now been expunged from
nature, which has been reduced to simple mechanism. Can this
materialistic determinism and its message of 'cosmic pessimism'
provide an ethical basis for an holistic heritage protection policy
which encompasses both ecosystems and human history?
Some scientific 'pessimists' have argued for such
a policy on fundamentally anthropocentric grounds, of purely human
need and potential - which can equally justify continued
exploitation/ manipulation of nature destroying ecosystems and
cultural heritage. A number, notably in defending
biodiversity, have stressed the preciousness of life more
generally; but even this 'preciousness' depends finally on what
Homo sapiens in its cultural achievements, has created.
A dualistic view of nature, as serving or
subordinate to humanity and without an intrinsic value, will
eventually prove ecologically unsatisfactory. Instead, nature's
worth needs to be seen in its inherent beauty, referring to an
objective aspect of the universe, namely the 'ordering of novelty'
or 'harmony of diversity' or 'unifying of complexity'. These
features point to a dynamic balance in beauty, too much 'order'
leading to a banal even 'dead' homogeneity and too much 'novelty'
to a breakdown of coherence, even to chaos.
This vision is best captured by the idea of
'process humanism' in which the cosmos is not a static condition.
Creation is an ongoing, open process, in which human creativity
enhances the aesthetic intensity of the universe, or can disturb
the balance between order and novelty/diversity.
Humanity can only too readily be seen as being
'in charge' and unconstrained in its immediate material, 'worldly'
inclinations and (hubristic) ambitions. Beauty is then
demoted as a significant or practical consideration. Ecological
degradation is the outcome of this tendency to drive world politics
and economics. Humanity's capabilities require it to assume its
responsibilities in sustaining the cosmic process, recognizing that
it is not just for humans (it can exist without them) or valueless
apart from them. Global order can no longer ignore its long-running
ecological, cosmic basis, which if accepted requires more than
techno- scientific and economic cultural rationality.
Conservation then becomes a human responsibility to sustain and
enhance the ordering of novelty and the unification of complexity
as the essence of the cosmic adventure towards ever more
beauty. In this context, beauty is the objective patterning
of things that gives them their actuality and definiteness as
intrinsic cosmic values.
Much of this comes together in the phenomenon of
environmental friendliness which involves not only the neighbourly
care for the local environment but also adopting domestic
behaviours that conserve natural resources on a day to day basis
and getting invoved in neighbourhood/community action groups to
make the locality safer, cleaner and crime-free.