Session organisers: Arjan M. Conijn1, Andreas Aa. Christensen2,3
(1) Department of Landscape History, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.
(2) Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University, Denmark
(3) Department of Geography, Gent University, Belgium
Session description
For centuries humans have engaged with natural processes, using landscape resources for their own benefit and in this way forming diverse cultural histories of nature, which are visible and have biophysical form in cultural landscapes. As such, cultural landscapes can be considered complex socio-ecological systems in which land use management is influenced by composite arrays of anthropogenic and natural factors, which often cannot be distinguished from each other. Through their daily practices, land users realize the decision making patterns of society as patterns of land use, materializing the combined impact of their cultural context. Gradually but directly, this is what forms and reforms the landscape.
In recent years, more and more attention has been given to take natural processes as a starting point for human land use, in order to reduce costs and increase the fit between land use systems and their “natural” basis in the landscape. This reflects an ambition to seek out and navigate boundaries between human and non-human agency in landscapes. Rewilding processes, nature based solutions and industrial or “grey” infrastructure development are understood widely to encapsulate three positions or poles on a spectrum of human agency. But what is actually the scale and poles of this spectrum?
In this session the spectrum of human agency in cultural landscapes will be explored using historical evidence. How did man deal with natural processes over the centuries and how did nature react on that? Does a more harmonious interaction between man and nature offer a solution?
The historical cultural landscapes are the result of centuries and in many cases millennia of developing a liveable balance between humans and nature. The session aims to explore how the study of historical human-nature interactions can be beneficial to research on nature-based solutions. An example of this is the use of saltmarshes for flood prevention in the Netherlands. People live on these marshes for several millennia and have adjusted their life and landscape multiple times. By studying these centuries of trial and error we can learn valuable lessons on how to conceptualize and optimise contemporary land use. Our aim with the session is to share insights from the study of such histories in order to explore the border between humans and nature in landscapes. Questions will address historical relationships between human agency and what was then, or is now, considered nature - including how such categories of analysis can and should be constructed and sustained.
Through sharing research and discussion of paper contributions the session result in an argument regarding how knowledge of cultural landscapes can contribute to the development nature based solutions. This provides a starting point for a common publication, possibly in the Journal of European Landscapes.
