Yin, Su; (2025) Towards Chinese Traditional Villages as Cultural Landscapes and Beyond. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Towards Chinese Traditional Villages as Cultural Landscapes and Beyond_sigs_removed.pdf Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 November 2026. Download (85MB)

Abstract

The research started from a consideration of ‘cultural landscape’ as a category of authorised heritage, which was introduced to go beyond previous definitions of cultural heritage as monuments, buildings, and sites. An examination followed in how ‘cultural landscape’ is translated into Chinese heritage management systems. How has Chinese policy and practice reacted to this new heritage category? From this, it explored the application of heritage management cultural landscapes approaches to Traditional Villages, a category of heritage place defined in China. This established the Traditional Village (TV) as a matter of concern (object/entity), as both a cultural landscape, and as part of a cultural landscape. Selected case studies are explored at; Longjing Village within the West Lake Cultural Landscape World Heritage Site (Hangzhou City, Zhejiag Province), and Shaozhuang Village (TV) in Linyi City, Shandong Province. Protecting Traditional Villages as cultural landscapes provides a means to explore how complex system approaches can be applied to heritage management. In order to push heritage management beyond established practice, the lines drawn around the Cultural Landscapes and Traditional Villages need to be expanded. Doing cartography not classification with more-than-human perspectives, New Materialism, Object-oriented Ontology, Actor-network Theory (ANT), multiple temporalities, Anthropocene, Hyperobject, etc., allows an exploration of the complexity of world making entities, and an examination of how ecosocial heritages can be sustained in the more-than-human world. This research ends in advocating for a more-than-human perspective towards heritage management. How people live in Traditional Villages is not just how it seems to humans, and is a complex interaction of a diverse range of human, nonhuman, and inanimate agents, which are both visible and invisible. When morethan-human things become visible, they can be included in discussions about how humans manage heritage places. These are just the first steps towards accommodating the impact of complex more-than-human systems in our understanding of the heritage world. Protecting Traditional Villages as cultural landscapes provides a means to explore how complex system approaches can be applied to heritage management. In order to push heritage management beyond established practice, the lines drawn around the Cultural Landscapes and Traditional Villages need to be expanded. Doing cartography not classification with more-than-human perspectives, New Materialism, Object-oriented Ontology, Actor-network Theory (ANT), multiple temporalities, Anthropocene, Hyperobject, etc., allows an exploration of the complexity of world making entities, and an examination of how ecosocial heritages can be sustained in the more-than-human world. This research ends in advocating for a more-than-human perspective towards heritage management. How people live in Traditional Villages is not just how it seems to humans, and is a complex interaction of a diverse range of human, nonhuman, and inanimate agents, which are both visible and invisible. When more-than-human things become visible, they can be included in discussions about how humans manage heritage places. These are just the first steps towards accommodating the impact of complex more-than-human systems in our understanding of the heritage world.

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