Making good use of landscapes' pasts : landscape narratives and sustainability in three European wine world heritage sites (Tokaj, Saint-Emilion, Cinque Terre)

This contribution is focused on landscape narratives associated with the listing policy of "cultural landscapes" at the World Heritage Site, implemented by the UNESCO since 1992. At a time when the greening of local spaces becomes one of the main vectors of the (re) construction of collective identities, can these narratives woven around the landscape be used as a symbolic matrix and foundation for new visions of the nature/society relationship in the areas concerned? Is this registration process really likely to generate the construction of landscape narratives capable to create a symbolic foundation of projects based on sustainability, that is to say, based on a management of socio-ecological temporalities? These questions are at the heart of the comparative analysis which we carried out for three European ‘cultural landscapes”, listed between 1997 and 2003 and whose economy is strongly centered on vine growing and wine producing activity. The analysis concerns Portovenere, Cinque Terre and its islands, the Jurisdiction of Saint-Emilion and the Tokaj wine region. The study of these three cases leads us to think that the efficiency of landscape narratives regarding their ability to create a basis for sustainable thinking and action lies in their ability to handle the phenomena of landscape resilience, making the whole heritage issue a reality in discrepancy with the conditions that allowed it to happen. Only then, the narrative seems able to go on in time and identify the horizons of a sustainable development project that goes beyond a simple action on the forms of landscape and aims to establish the socio-ecological conditions of their production and their evolution