Managing Manorial Heritage – Scaling and Balancing Public and Private Issues

The evolutionary socioeconomic changes in Western Europe as well as the revolutionary turns in Central and Eastern Europe have contributed to a shift in the role of properties, which had originally been built as private land estates of the nobility. These processes have been accelerating over the last decades due to the restructuring of land use and land property. Even urbanization and depopulation have, to a different degree, been affecting rural regions and their historically grown spatial and built structures. Maintaining the most valuable historic manors and castles has become a more and more challenging task.At the same time, especially this category of objects is one of the most powerful foundations for all kinds of strategies in tourism planning, or – to express it more broadly – in the spatial development of whole regional entities. Indeed, several leisure, knowledge and experience--oriented developments in the society provide new chances for the manorial heritage.