CULTURAL PLANNING MEETING was organised in Helsinki on 11–12 June 2026. The organizers would like to warmly thank all the speakers and participants! In this article Maunu Häyrynen, the Professor of Landscape Studies in University of Turku writes about cultural planning and cultural environments. Picture: Chenru Xue
The Cultural Environment Studies Society, together with the University of Turku Landscape Studies and the IN SITU Horizon Europe research project, organised a lunch to lunch meeting in Helsinki on 11 and 12 June 2016 about the current state of cultural mapping and planning. Cultural mapping is originally an anthropological method created for proving land use rights of North American Indigenous peoples, which it did by substantiating claims of traditional land uses and place-based meanings, beliefs or stories of the communities inhabiting landscapes. This was made necessary because the opposite claim was that the disputed land did not have juridical proof of Indigenous ownership and conventionally documented land uses and would thus be free game for different kinds of industrial or urban development.
The use of cultural mapping is still recommended by Unesco in Indigenous contexts. However, in 1980s it was also adopted into use in urban development either by itself or as part of cultural planning processes. Cultural planning, pioneered in Australia by cultural policy researcher and professor Colin Mercer, criticised centralised urban planning for both undemocratic top-down leadership and rigid sectoral thinking, to which he later added criticism of neoliberal creative city development. His solution was a broad definition of culture as materially based way of life, city planner Patrick Geddes’ famous ”Folk – Work – Place” triad. This was operationalised as cultural resources, recognised in participatory cultural mapping ensuring the social acceptance of the interpretations and leading to the setting of goals for cultural planning.
According to this model, cultural planning should combine a commitment to these goals with strategic but openly and equitably negotiated strategic leadership that would force the sectors and layers of administration to work jointly towards them. Such a framing of cultural planning has two kinds of effects: it both allows for different emphases, some processes having been municipally and others communally led. The weight of knowledge production and development may also vary in the equations. The definition of culture has in practice often focused on institutional culture and heritage but occasionally has been widened to include intangible traditions and meanings as well as everyday uses of places, even human-nature encounters.
Most countries have elaborate systems for identifying places, landscapes and – in Finland and Sweden – so called cultural environments to be protected in land use planning and development one way or another. The measures are mainly conservative, meaning that once the values have been detected, usually by inventories led by authorities and validated by experts on related fields, the role of protection is primarily to maintain those values as long as possible, which sometimes involves their reconciliation with new elements or processes. Although Finland is committed to the Florence and Faro Conventions of the European Council, meant to ensure the role of communities in defining both valuable landscapes and heritage, this has so far had little effect to the expert-led conservation system.
Yet heritage, cultural environments and valuable landscapes are parts of everyday life of communities, which now change at an accelerating pace, as does the world of polycrisis surrounding them. While urban centres may expand and transform rapidly, more remote areas are ageing, bleeding population and getting stripped of services or receiving new industrial scale land uses from energy to security infrastructures. The longue durée continuity that created many of today’s designated places is no longer there and also the communities that have inhabited and maintained them may be on their way out or transformed.
To return to cultural mapping and planning, there are a number of ways in which they may relate to the designated places sanctioned by authorities. In principle the latter are included in the broad definition of culture, but only if their recognition is shared between the communities and experts, which is not always the case. First, local communities are not necessarily aware of official designations in their everyday environment, failing to acknowledge those in mappings. Second, a designation may divide the community, one part of it supporting its cultural meaning and another ignoring or opposing it. The third case would be a situation where a designated cultural environment is also tightly vowen into the everyday lifes, interacting with other cultural resources and activities of a place and thus adding to its layers of meaning among different groups.
In my experience, based on the few cultural mappings carried out in Finland and on research literature, the first case may well be the most common. Failure to recognise a valued place is not necessarily a failure of its conservation: it may merely tell about genuine continuity and absence of tensions around it. Conflicts usually rise out of clashing interests and asymmetrical power relations, which both expert-led conservation rulings and insensitive use or development may look like from certain community perspectives. Even in stable situations demographic change can introduce re-evaluations of cultural resources that have formerly been consensual and taken-for-granted. And, finally, even if both the land uses and communities remain relatively similar, environmental change may alter human-nature-relationships that constitute the places on their part.
How exactly the designated cultural environments relate to the cultural maps of overlapping areas is an open question. Everyday culture has rarely formed a part of official conservation processes and cultural mapping or something comparable has been happening in a limited number of locations, both in Finland and internationally. The ELC mentioned above has recommended collecting landscape data and setting up landscape policies based on that to the member states of the Council of Europe; however, in few countries this has really taken place. Truly participatory forms (in the sense of Gertrud Arnstein) of landscape or building conservation are still largely an exception: in Finland only the dozen or so of valuable landscape management areas, located mostly in Lapland, offer an example of a hybrid management system based on participatory processes, not unlike cultural planning.
How is this problematic? At least Finnish landscape and built heritage conservation systems have been devised for a different and less turbulent day and age, where waiting decades before registering major landscape or population changes was a feasible option rather than a recipe of growing discrepancies. Maintaining landmarks has its functions also communally and economically but may eventually leads to stage setting. Cultural mapping and planning point out an alternative way of looking at valued places and environments as cultural resources together with other kinds of cultural objects and activities. They also need them to pass the test of community acceptance, the lack of which would not need to be a veto to the expert-led designations but would be a useful indicator of something having gone amiss or changed in the designated location and its relevance for the local community.
The IN SITU Horizon Europe research project, now about to finish, looked among other things into the possibility of cultural mapping in non-urban areas, which are not typical target areas for this approach. The mapping, conducted in Finland and five more or less rural EU locations, comprised valuable heritage areas and landscapes as well as nature conservation areas both in inventories produced as desk studies and as locally recognised cultural assets. The results pointed out to the enmeshing of many such areas within local cultural ecosystems and to the deep emotional bonds between the former and the communities, important for rural art and other kinds of place-based meaning making including tourism. However, not all of these sites were collectively recognised in terms of place-based meanings, while other areas with weaker or no institutional status could on the contrary stand out culturally. Related results from IN SITU were discussed in the seminar and are available in the presentations, together with several highly interesting Finnish, other Nordic and Scottish case studies that also dealt with cultural environments from different perspectives.
Designated and protected landscapes can work as anchors of local meaning making and do so in many places of Finland and elsewhere. Ensuring their social acceptance and wide cultural connectedness would in my opinion not work against their conservation goals but strengthen these by connecting the places more strongly with other aspects of local life, rather than leaving them as isolated spots on a map either easily forgotten or almost as easily erased by development if lacking strong community support. Whose responsibility should this be, is a matter for another blog.
Maunu Häyrynen
Professor of Landscape Studies
University of Turku
SEMINAR PRESENTATIONS (PDF)
Lia Ghilardi, founder of Noema: In an age of disruption, can cultural mapping help reconnect and rebuild communities?
Erica Månsson, founder of the Swedish network for cultural planning and Director of Nilsson & Månsson: Is a crisis required for cross-policy collaboration? Perspectives on cultural planning from some Swedish municipalities
Liz Gardiner, Director of Fablevision: Implementing Cultural Planning in Practice: Celebrating Success and Analysing the Problems, Issues and Barriers from a Scotland based perspective
Simon Roos, Development Officer for Municipal Cooperation Region Skåne: Where Culture Shapes Place: Lessons from Small Municipalities in Skåne
Nancy Duxbury, Principal Researcher, Centre for Social Studies at the U of Coimbra, PI of IN SITU Horizon Europe project: Cultural mapping and planning in view of cultural and creative industries and place-based innovation in European non-urban areas
Patrick Collins, Head of Geography, U of Galway: Creative Ecosystem Change: Mapping the expected and unexpected
Oleksandra Nenko, U of Turku: Cultural and emotional mapping in non-urban landscape: Insights from IN SITU Finland
Hanna Mattila and Tiina-Riitta Lappi, U of Turku: Designing mobility hubs for shared mobility culture
Simo Häyrynen, U of Eastern Finland: Expanding natural capital through cultural planning: Experienes from the JTF project in Ilomantsi, Finland
Monika Lüthje, U of Lapland & Kendra Turnbull, University of the Highlands and Islands: Heritage-based
counter-narrative place-making in rural peripheries
Anna-Maija Halme, Finnish Local Heritage Association: ”Masters and Apprentices in Participation”, an European project aimed at strengthening democracy, citizen participation, youth engagement, and community-based cultural heritage activities
Erna Guðrún Kaaber, Bifröst U: Cultural Mapping: Why we need to keep the gap open
Links
Rural Pact
IN SITU Resources
CONTEXT OF THE SEMINAR
Cultural planning and cultural mapping became an active area of urban development in Sweden in 2000s and started to gain ground in Finland in 2010s, besides other Nordic Countries. This development was marked by the pioneering work of Kerstin Lundberg & Christina Hjorth (2011) and others, in the building of the Swedish-Nordic Cultural Planning Network and in several development and research projects, relating to cultural mapping and planning exercises in Nordic cities and regions. The activities were inspired by prolific international research and
publishing, parallel to other corresponding forms of urban collaborative planning and knowledge co-production.
The core ideas of cultural planning have been debated from the start and have gone under several revisions. The intricate balance between strategic planning and engagement has sometimes worked, sometimes not. The emphases of different projects have varied between enrichment and empowerment of communities and boosting of local economic viability. The role of culture may have primarily been seen in terms of an expression of local ways of life or as a leverage for development and branding.
Also the roles of cultural planning processes in local governance have proved ambiguous. When initiated by municipal organisations, the processes have been prone to entangle in sectoral politics and hierarchies
especially true in Nordic cities with deep and layered administration. Political pressures have tended to stress quick wins. Processes carried out by external facilitators have often lacked in long-term continuity and truly iterative approaches have been rare. Principal goals of promoting deliberation and cross-sectorality have not necessarily been reached. The communities may have felt let down by the slowness of processes and scant impacts perceived in everyday lives.
The criticisms of cultural planning have led to suggested alternatives: less cumbersome cultural planning ”light” or nimble and versatile forms of placemaking on the one hand, holistic transdisciplinary transformational
processes addressing widely questions of sustainability on the other. At the same time, cultural mapping and planning have found uses in wholly new development contexts ranging from urban nature to non-urban or rural areas as in the IN SITU project. The cases of Sweden and Finland show different paths recently: in Finland research, publishing and academic teaching about cultural planning has continued but actual cultural planning or mapping processes have become scarce, whereas in Sweden the opposite holds true.
The purpose of the symposium is to bring together researchers and practitioners of cultural mapping and planning from Sweden, Finland and elsewhere in order to take stock and explore possible futures. Have the
original goals of cultural planning, or some of them, still traction? Does the wide definition of culture still hold and how should it best inform planning and development? Is the scope of culture altogether too narrow,
maintaining a dichotomous ontology and excluding ecological considerations? Is the negotiated approach of cultural planning too idealistic and if yes, who should have the last say in the processes: communities, experts, the administrators, politicians? Lastly, should cultural mapping and cultural planning be seen as two sides of a
coin or would cultural mapping be better off developed independently as a method for participatory research and co-creative development?