Municipal Planning

A local plan is required to contain guidelines to safeguard cultural heritage assets in both urban and rural areas. Those assets comprise ancient monuments, buildings and cultural environments, including churches and their surroundings.

The municipalities are required to protect both preservation-worthy individual elements and composite assets, i.e. valuable cultural environments. Municipal efforts are to be directed at showing human endeavours in all periods, that is, from prehistoric times to the present day.

Requirements for municipalities 

Municipal competence in identifying and delimiting cultural environments in open land is a relatively new requirement for the municipalities. Since 2007, they have been required to provide more detail on and otherwise supplement information about heritage assets already identified in the former regional plans. Combined with the identification of urban cultural environments, this produces a comprehensive picture of the municipalities’ cultural environments.