The Production of Local Landscape Heritage: A Case Study in The Netherlands

In their daily surroundings, people perpetually produce heritage, as they experience, assign meaning to and act upon local historical landscape features. We conducted a case study in a peat district in the Netherlands to investigate heritage construction in various local landscape practices. These practices reflected distinctive patterns of routinised activities, motives to engage with these activities, historical landscape artefacts that are deemed valuable and meanings assigned to these artefacts. Across these landscape practices, we identified different modes of producing heritage meanings: (a) driven by landscape aesthetics, (b) framed by potential spatial threats, (c) structured by family roots, and (d) generated by the desire to belong to the community. Our study demonstrates that heritage production can vary a lot even within a relatively homogenous local culture. In addition, our results suggest that heritage is sometimes produced implicitly, rather than explicitly.