In this article from Planning for Higher Education, Claire L. Turcotte, a member of the research team, writes about ten themes commonly reported back to the Getty Foundation from the 86 campuses which undertook campus heritage preservation planning initiatives.

• Architectural style
• Importance of landscape
• Stewardship of the land
• Adaptive Reuse
• Mid-20th century buildings
• Importance of additional design elements
• Use of students
• Development of systems used to evaluate and prioritize landscapes and buildings

"I cannot identify a single example of a sustained success story in downtown revitalization where historic preservation wasn’t a key component of that strategy. Not a one," Rypkema says. "Conversely the examples of very expensive failures in downtown revitalization have nearly all had the destruction of historic buildings as a major element."

Just as the concept of cultural landscape can mitigate polarized views of nature versus artifice, so it can bridge divisive opinions on the relative importance of "architecture" versus "history."

The segregation of these terms into categories was codified by National Register criteria and other documents emanating from the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and reflects long-term attitudes among preservationists in the United States. This bifurcation can wreak great mischief, for it reduces "history" to intangibles—associations with persons, events, and the like—robbing it of any physical dimension.