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The Cultural Landscape Management Certificate Program

Ethan Carr, Certificate Coordinator

Certificate Advisors
Elizabeth Brabec
Ethan Carr
Flavia Montenegro-Menezes

The interdisciplinary certificate in Cultural Landscape Management allows students to specialize in a growing area of heritage management and historic preservation in the U.S. and abroad: the management, conservation, and interpretation of cultural landscapes. Students will deepen their understanding of the theory and practice of cultural landscape research, documentation, analysis, interpretation, and design. The fifteen-credit requirement has nine credits of required courses within the department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning.

Cultural landscapes may be urban or rural, and they include parks, gardens, historic sites, agricultural landscapes, and ethnographic landscapes. Often cultural landscapes are “protected” landscapes, recognized as World Heritage Sites, National Parks, National Heritage Areas, or bounded and designated in some other way as heritage resources. Other cultural landscapes may not be officially designated but encompass landscapes reflective of a particular culture or interactions of several cultures—often minority cultures—and the patterns they have developed socially and on the land. In either case, cultural landscapes are places with significance and meaning for those who create them, live in them, or experience them as visitors.

Training in Cultural Landscape Management responds to an existing and growing need in the fields of landscape architecture, planning, historic preservation, heritage management, public history, historic site management, and related activities for professionals knowledgeable in the theory and techniques of cultural landscape management. From historic urban centers to rural historic districts, this has been an increasingly important area of heritage management of the last thirty years. Within the professions of landscape architecture and regional planning, the need for better and more specific education and training in this area is pronounced, and this will be the first university certificate program to specifically address the opportunity.

Required Courses (nine credits)

  • LA/RP 661 - Cultural Landscapes: Documentation, Values and Policy, 3 credits, Fall, Brabec
  • LA/RP 662 - Cultural Heritage Policy and International Sustainability Practice, 3 credits, Spring, Montenegro-Menezes
  • LA/RP 663 - Heritage Landscape Management, 3 credits, Fall, Carr

Electives (six credits)

Students may select six credits from the yearly list of approved electives.  We recommend that at least three credits are from a course providing experience in the application of cultural landscape theory to a “real world” site. Options for this include:

  • Studio experiences, such as LA 606:  Heritage Landscape Studio (Spring)
  • Field studies courses, such as LA/RP 691S:  Cultural Landscape Field Study in the Czech Republic (Summer)
  • Practicums and independent studies, including LA/RP 696 Practicum or 698 Independent Study (Fall, Spring, Summer). These are Internships, projects or applied experiences with a specific emphasis on cultural landscape management and taken under the guidance of one of the Certificate Advisors.

Other approved electives include:

Anthropology

  • Anthro 697 Historical Archaeology
  • Anthro 597PP Introduction to International Heritage Studies

Architecture & Design

  • Arch & Des 597D History and Theory of Preservation
  • Arch & Des 597C Building Conservation I

History

  • Hist 659 Public History
  • Hist 662 Museum and Historic Site Interpretation
  • Hist 691N Conservation of Nature & Culture
  • Hist 697U/797U Landscape and Memory

LARP

  • RP 553  Resource Policy and Planning (Spring)

Availability and Admissions Criteria

The Cultural Landscape Management Certificate is available to University of Massachusetts graduate students enrolled in a degree program in any department. The certificate is also available to non-degree students through enrollment in the University of Massachusetts Continuing and Professional Education (for application and enrollment policies, see http://www.umassulearn.net/).

All applicants for the certificate should submit a brief resume and a one-page letter of interest to the certificate program coordinator, Ethan Carr, before May 1 for admission to the program for the following fall (late applications are accepted on a space available basis). The letter of interest should state the candidate’s reasons for interest in the certificate program, including suggestions for specific areas of concentration and interest. Applicants should contact one of the listed program advisors below to discuss their application. The advisors of the program will jointly decide whether to accept applicants based on their educational and professional background and potential.