Impact assessment of the building activity in the landscape of Knossos

Abstract

The degradation of cultural and natural landscapes has attracted the interest of the international scientific community recently. This paper focuses on the measurement of built-up change around the Knossos monument based on photogrammetry. In specific built-up evolution is recorded based on aerial photography stereo pairs of two different dates. The measurement is done in both two and three dimensions. The objective is to evaluate whether there exists visual degradation in the cultural landscape around the monument and how this evolves though time. The degradation is an impediment in including the monument in the list of global heritage of UNESCO. Based on the analysis it is estimated that during the past three decades the built-up area has increased around 50% and approximately two thirds of this increase has taken place in exurban space. Concurrently, viewshed analysis performed has shown that approximately half of the new buildings are visible from the monument. Overall it is concluded that the quite significant built-up increase threatens the integrity of the landscape in the area. Some suggestions on how the proposed method can be used operationally in the context of spatial planning toward landscape preservation are given.