Water systems to identify country houses landscapes : a method to organise heritage landscapes based on form, meaning or use

This paper advocates a new approach to group green heritage objects, like country houses and suburban villas, based on landscape features [1]. Since the seventeenth century country houses and suburban villas were designed in relationship to important landscape elements, creating groups of country estates in so called country estates landscapes [2]. Nowadays, country estates landscapes are valued for climatological, ecological and landscape architectural values as well as cultural­historical and identity valuesThese heritage landscapes can be seen as large scale green­blue systems in our urbanised landscapes and are contributing to a sustainable living area and are creating place for enhancing biodiversity and life on earth (SDG 11 and 15). One of the essential structuring elements of country estates landscapes is water, which is to be found on any country estate. Appointing groups of country estates can be used for reading the historic roots of these landscapes, and to create coherent landscapes and identifying a regional narrative, but can function as a starting point to organise cooperation amongst stakeholders to ensure preservation of these large scale heritage landscapes. Due to climate change, these values are under pressure due to weather extremes like the lack or water during summer interspersed with heavy rainfall in fall and winter. Nowadays, country houses are (more or less) dealing with these issues separately [3]. Cooperation between government, owners and stakeholders is needed to enhance environmental issues on topics like water management and regional identity and so on. To bridge the private issues in regional cooperation, groups of esattes should be appointed using similarities in landscape elements. The paper start with a theoretical description on how groups of country estates can be organised and it will be applied to cooperation within the brook system Baakse Beek and its country houses, suffering from severe draught in the summer [4].