Sustainable Management of Cultural Landscape (SUMCULA)
Erasmus+ Programme Key Action 2: Strategic Partnerships
October 2017 – August 2020
From a landscape management viewpoint, the need to preserve natural, cultural and intangible values, and develop them from an evolutionary perspective into sustainable living environments, has always been of great importance. This is true even for particularly sensitive cultural landscapes, which are constantly changing, and need to be developed to meet the requirements of present day society. Furthermore, the fast-growing tourism industry requires sustainable management practices so that the development of cultural landscapes into touristic products avoids the adverse effect of mass tourism and does not compromise sustainability issues.
What is Cultural Landscape?
A cultural landscape is a geographic area, encompassing its cultural and natural resources and the built and intangible heritage therein, continuously shaped by historic and present day evolutionary processes including the adverse or beneficial impacts of human activities, social relations and evolving cultures.
Cultural landscapes are sites associated with a significant event, activity, person or group of people. They can be grand estates, farmlands, public gardens and parks, college campuses, cemeteries, scenic highways, and industrial sites or works of art, narratives of cultures, and expressions of regional identity. Cultural landscapes can range from thousands of hectares of rural tracts of land to a small homestead with a front yard of less than one hectare. Like historic buildings and districts, they reveal aspects of a country’s origins and development through their form, features, and the ways they were used. Cultural landscapes also reveal much about our evolving relationship with the natural world.
The Strategic Partnership
The objective of this partnership is the development of courses and didactic resources on Sustainable Management of Cultural Landscapes, Regional Development and Cultural Heritage to be conducted at a Master’s level. Members of the partnership cover a wide range of competences:
- University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Coordinating institution: built cultural heritage, industrial landscapes, floating heritage, climate change, geomorphology, bio-diversity, remote sensing and GIS
- University of Pécs, Hungary
Cultural heritage studies, regional development, strategic planning, adult education, floating heritage of rivers and lakes, viticultural landscapes, economy of regional planning, environmental law
- University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary
Regional development of disadvantaged regions, sustainable agriculture, agro-economy, bio-energy production, tourism, viticulture, remote sensing and GIS
- Lake Balaton Development Coordination Agency (LBDCA), Siófok, Hungary
Regional infrastructure planning, management of nature reserves and national parks, lake-management (shallow lakes), cultural heritage of rural areas
- European Ecocycles Society (ECyS)
Sustainable ecological cycles, environmental management, international networking and publishing in the journal ECOCYCLES
- University of Palermo (UNIPA), Palermo, Italy
General soil science and soil conservation, water resources management in arid environments, environmental protection, waste management, viticulture and conservation of viticultural landscapes, remote sensing and GIS
- Ecole des Métiers de l’Environnement (EME), Bruz, France
Environmental technologies, environmental chemistry, remediation of polluted landscapes, renewable energy technologies, flu gas cleaning, biogas production, waste management
- Mendel University (MENDELU), Brno, Czech Republic
Forestry, forest ecosystems, conservation of forest landscapes, landscape dynamics, environmental protection, environmental health and epidemiology
- Gaia Education, Findhorn, Scotland, UK
Whole-systems design of ecological settlements, waste management and implementation of zero waste policies, environmental sociology, regenerative economies, adult education for sustainable development, lifelong learning
- Slovak Agricultural University (SPU), Nitra, Slovakia
Agriculture, food safety, bio-energy, environmental law, regional development
- University College of Tourism and Ecology (WSTiE), Sucha Beskidzka, Poland
Sustainable tourism, tourism-informatics, eco-tourism
- Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain
Viticulture and enology, environmental science, cultural heritage
- University of Applied Sciences (HTW), Dresden, Germany
Environmental science, urban agriculture, landscape architecture
Planned Activities
About Gaia Education
Academic Papers & Articles
Read free Academic Papers from our contributors on community-based approaches to Sustainability Education and Community Development from around the globe.
Annual Accounts
Gaia Education is committed to the principle of transparency in its operations. See our Annual Accounts, Trustees’ report and Financial Statements here.
Board of Directors
Meet our Board of Directors: Ross Jackson, Swaraj Kumar (Rajah) Banerjee, Jane Rasbash, Tim Clarke and John Clausen.
Contact Gaia Education
Gaia Education is present in 49 countries. Our main office is in Edinburgh, Scotland. Email: info@gaiaeducation.org Tel: +44 (0)131 2850783
