A study on cultural landscape in the Akaiwa area of Kuni mountain village, Gunma Prefecture.

The paper looks for cultural landscape in the mountain village of Kuni-mura (Gunma prefecture). As the remaining historic rural landscape is not of outstanding value, the research carefully approaches the historic landscape. The first move is a land use analysis through several periods: Edo, Showa, Meiji and present. The land use analysis has been possible thanks to the realization of comparable maps obtained from the digitalization of ancient ones. The second step has been to collect all data and compare them; in this way it has been possible to understand how the landscape changed in the past three centuries. The last step then has been to overlay all the maps in order to find out landscape transformations in the past three centuries. The final result is therefore a mapping of all territorial resources in terms of cultural landscape value. Out of this results I made some considerations and proposals on the historic landscape preservation and management.