Session organisers: Andreas Aagaard Christensen1,2, Veerle Van Eetvelde2,1
(1) Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University, Denmark
(2) Department of Geography, Gent University, Belgium
Session description
This session focuses on the process of re-building landscapes in response to breaks in landscape development. Papers will map different modes of response to the re-building of landscapes following events disrupting land use. These include social reform and green transitions, warfare, earthquakes and volcanic events, and extreme events characteristic of the anthropocene, such as wildfire, drought, flooding, and sea level rise. The session seeks to synthesise insights from case studies on what it means to re-build landscapes and how that can be understood scientifically, and address applied questions about formulating land use policy for re-building of landscapes after disaster and reform events.
The term ‘re-building’ references social memory and previous structures now lost through disruptive events where great changes have led to a break with the past (or with multiple pasts) that must be managed, challenged, ignored, patched up, or re-imagined. In landscape studies there has been considerable emphasis on factors and structures that impede change, studied under such headings as "lock-ins" and "path dependency". Here we can find conceptual inspiration for a topic addressing a key component of historical scholarship: the distinction between continuity and breaks, and the need to identify methods to distinguish between when processes stop, start, evolve, transform or are replaced by something new.
One inspiration is the idea of the morphology of landscape developed by Carl Sauer, in which cultural landscapes take shape through continuous human actions. Culture is the agent in this perspective, and nature is the medium, with the cultural landscape being the result. Sauer’s frame of reference was one of humans pitted against other humans - with new landscapes being imposed on others through changes in the dominant culture. But are there models for the creation of cultural landscapes through disruptive change that better fit the anthropocene? Ones that account for humans having to adapt rapidly in the face also of significant non-human agency? Emerging debates in the field of more-than-human geographies and cognate fields point to ways of coming to terms with the unruliness of the Anthropocene. Similarly, work on "shared landscapes" in the context of biodiversity indicates that overcoming continued species loss will depend on re-building landscapes, thereby providing a direct link to a policy platform and practical outcomes.
Our aim is that the contributions in this session will provide a conceptually clear way to discuss and dissect productive, dynamic, unpredictable, reflected, forward looking processes conducted with the intention to rebuild landscapes after dramatic change and/or loss of intentional human control.
