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:

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, 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.

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.