Water Ways as the Backbones for Country-Houses-and-Suburban- Villas Landscapes: Method to read Heritage Landscapes

This paper is on the understanding of the cultural (historic) coherence in the urban landscape systems in the Netherlands and the use of this knowledge for sustainable landscape transformations. When culture (use, meaning) is hermeneutically read in (historic) landscape features, we can fully understand how the historic landscape functioned as a system in the past. If we understand the historic landscape system, we can find future solutions to spatial problems nowadays maintaining its heritage value. This paper presents a hermeneutic approach to heritage preservation describing the coherence of our culturally formed landscapes or heritage landscapes in a threefold approach based on the parameters form, meaning and use on different scales and in various timeframes The explanation of this approach is given by presenting an example from, the chosen a study of Dutch country houses and suburban villas erected as part of Dutch landscape in the seventeenth century. Nowadays, these individual green monuments are seen as countryhouses-and-suburban-villas landscapes. These landscapes can be defined as large scale landscape structures or even systems. Research learned that water (rivers, brooks, canals et cetera) was the backbone of all Dutch country-houses-and-suburban-villas landscapes and by defining these water systems, we can create country-houses-and-suburban landscapes for spatial, ecological, climatological, cultural and organisational reasons; an example of this application is the story of the Baakse Beek.