Abstract:

The exploration of world cultural landscapes is a process that tries to discover the harmonious relationship between human beings and the environment. Cultural landscapes have always been favorably perceived by society but only in 1992 have been formally acknowledged as world heritage by UNESCO. From 1992 to 2013, 85 cultural landscape heritages belonging to 54 countries have been listed as world cultural landscapes during those 20 years. This paper collects information of cultural landscape heritage sites from UNESCO’s official website, analyzes the spatial and temporal distribution, evaluation criteria and heritage’s type of such sites. The results are as follows: 1) The amount of cultural landscape heritage sites keeps increasing steadily since 1992 and the European growth trend is similar to that of the world, but Asia still has much potential;2) The cultural landscape heritage sites are mainly located in developed countries at mid-Northern latitudes, where appropriate climate provides ideal conditions for living. In the global political and economic culture partition,cultural landscape heritages in European and American area account for more than 50% of the total in the world,and those in Europe countries account for about half of the world, Asia is the second, the main legacy superpowers are Italy (6 items), France (5 items), the UK (4 items) and Germany (4 items), China also have 4 items; 3) The 85 heritages are conformed to the evaluation standard mostly on iii, iv and v. It shows that evaluation of the cultural landscape heritage focuses on the continuous evolution; 4) According to the conception of cultural landscape heritage’s type defined by the UNESCO, 51 heritages with clearly identified types that mention in their nomination paper have been counted, of which the organically evolved landscape types account for 60%, being the most hot types. 5) The world cultural landscape heritage will increase and relatively keep balance in spatial distribution in the future, China will get more opportunity to declare. Re–classification of cultural landscape heritage types will facilitate the submission and protection of them.

Key words: cultural landscape heritage, temporal-spatial distribution, evaluation criteria, heritage types, organically evolved landscape