The Local Action Plan proposed by the Province of Gelderland has been approved by the Joint Secretariat. This plan addresses the Policy Program Culture and Heritage - which is a policy instrument initiated and managed by the Province of Gelderland. Four actions have been proposed to improve this policy instrument and address regional challenges in the province.
The first action aims to broaden the Policy Program Culture and Heritage to include a spatial and area- based approach. At this moment, the provincial heritage policy is very focused on individual heritage sites. However, the learning cases approached in Innocastle showed that a regional approach would be fruitful when working on the collection of historic castles, manors and estates, an important part of the heritage in Gelderland.
The second action targets the estate zone Gelders Arcadia, aiming to create an area based approach towards tourism and recreation. The Province of Gelderland and all the active stakeholders aim to strengthen tourism at regional level by identifying ways in which the regional landscape could be experienced better.
The third action is related to climate adaptation at country and landed estates and it will be tested in the Baakse Beek area. In recent years, climate changes have led to long periods of drought and short intervals of intense rainfall. The Province of Gelderland aims to find out how country and landed estates could play a role in the challenging task of making the (built) environment climate proof. One specific action will be the setting up of a monitoring-pilot of the impact of drought on the heritage of country houses and historic estates.
The fourth (and last) action is related to spatial fragmentation and spatial policy, specifically in the wide-ranging estate zone around the village of Twello. Estate zones in Gelderland are usually situated in between urban and rural areas. Further urbanization can lead to diminishing the qualities of the castle-and-estate landscapes. Stakeholders in Gelderland are working on developing a new spatial tool to better embed the heritage qualities of the estate zone in future developments: the country house biotope.
Read the full Local Action Plan for Gelderland here.
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Innocastle is a two phase project. In the first phase of the project (June 2018 - November 2020), the project partners exchanged experiences through study visits, research and activated local stakeholders in each region to better understand the needs and challenges. The knowledge collected has been compiled into a final publication, the Baseline Survey, which can be read here.
Now that Innocastle has entered phase 2, each regional partners prepared a Local Action Plan for their region, in which they propose policy changes based on the experience thus far. Until November 2022, each partner will monitor the implementation of these proposed actions.
