Kenneth R. Olwig

The practice of landscape ‘Conventions’ and the just landscape: The case of the European landscape convention

Abstract The role of conventional practice in generating the idea of a just landscape, it is argued, became manifest in the process by which the European Landscape Convention was generated, and in the way it is being implemented. The concept of convention thus not only provides a way of understanding the relationship between ideas of justice and the constitution of landscape, it also provides a key to navigating the complexities of interpreting the European Landscape Convention in practice. Rather than focusing on the meaning of fixed definitions of landscape and related concepts, this article thus focuses on the process by which meaning is generated through convention in general, and through the European Landscape Convention in particular.

Multiple interfaces of the European Landscape Convention

The multiple interfaces of the European Landscape Convention were the topic of a roundtable panel discussion held at the meeting of the Permanent European Conference for the Study of the Rural Landscape in September 2006. The roundtable was convened by Kenneth R. Olwig, who together with four other speakers presented the main topics for discussion. Their presentations are given here as a series of short articles. Initially a brief historical background and the main provisions of the European Landscape Convention (Florence Convention) of 2000, in force 2004, are presented. The interfaces with law, landscape ecology, heritage, and globalisation are then successively discussed. Finally, the European Landscape Convention itself is examined as a discursive interface, with contradictory as well as synergetic aspects.

The Landscape of ‘Customary’ Law versus that of ‘Natural’ Law

Anglo-American common law is rooted in time-out-of-mind, place-specific, custom. It coexists uneasily, however, with the ‘Natural’ law ideal of the Enlightenment, which is inspired by the timeless and placeless mathematical and geometrical principles that govern natural science, and which are characteristic of Newtons absolute space. Each notion of law, it is argued, creates its own conception of landscape, and this conception, in turn, shapes the political and material landscape. These differences are illustrated through a comparison of the landscapes of New England and Mid-Western America.

Editorial: Law, Polity and the Changing Meaning of Landscape

The increasing interest in landscape and law is related to a sea change occurring in the predominant meaning of landscape itself. The emphasis is now shifting from a definition of landscape as scenery to a notion of landscape as polity and place (Olwig, 1996, 2002). Evidence of this shift is notable, for example, in a recent issue of Landscape Research, which was devoted to articles reflecting on the implications of the European Landscape Convention (ELC). Here, we find an article by Lionella Scazzosi in which it is argued that:

Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocene

Love it or hate it, the Anthropocene is emerging as an inescapable word for (and of) the current moment. Popularized by Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen, Anthropocene names an age in which human in...

The Earth is Not a Globe: Landscape versus the ‘Globalist’ Agenda

Abstract ‘Globalism’ can be defined as a mode of thought deriving from the practice of thinking globally, both literally and figuratively. Globalism not only informs major trends within governance and economics, it also informs environmental issues, not least those related to global warming. It will be argued, using the example of the production of energy and power, that there may well be a built-in contradiction between globalism and the interests of landscape as the diverse place of people, polity and nature. This study discusses the theoretical and practical implications of such a contradiction.

The Duplicity of Space: Germanic ‘Raum’ and Swedish ‘Rum’ in English Language Geographical Discourse

The modern definition of geography as the science of ‘space’ derives in important measure, it will be argued, from the Germanic concept of Raum. The implications of the importation of this concept into English are masked, however, by its translation as ‘space’, an English word with very different connotations from the German Raum. Whereas the English space is conceptually distinct from place, Raum has a double meaning, combining elements of both space and place. This doubleness becomes duplicitous when Raum is transmogrified into the English space, thereby blurring the distinction; allowing space to appropriate the meaning of place. The problem is further complicated by the fact that this process of transmogrification occurred largely via contact with Swedish geography–in which rum is cognate to the German Raum. Geography, this essay concludes, would do well to apply the same reflexive critique to its concept of space as it has applied, with great success, to landscape, a Germanic concept that can also refer to both place and space.

HEIDEGGER, LATOUR AND THE REIFICATION OF THINGS: THE INVERSION AND SPATIAL ENCLOSURE OF THE SUBSTANTIVE LANDSCAPE OF THINGS – THE LAKE DISTRICT CASE

Abstract “Thing” has undergone reification, and it has done so together with its linguistic “conjoined twin” – “landscape”. Whereas thing once was the name for meetings where people assembled to treat common things that matter, things, in the modern sense, have become physical objects (things as matter). Likewise, landscapes meaning has been reified from being a polity constituted by common thing meetings treating substantive things that matter, to becoming a spatial assemblage of physical things as matter. To fully grasp the contemporary meaning of both things and landscape it is necessary to understand the way in which those meanings are the intertwined outcome of a process of revolutionary inversion, or turning inside–out, by which the meaning of things has been spatialized, enclosed, individualized, privatized, scaled and reified as a constituent of the mental and social landscape of modernity. The potentiality of the concept of thing lies, it will be argued, in its continued containment of older, subaltern meanings that can work to empower an alternative “non‐modern” understanding of things along the lines of, but distinct from, Bruno Latours notion of Dingpolitik, which will be termed “thing politics” here. This argument is analysed in relation to Martin Heideggers concept of the “thing”, and exemplified by the mandate of the European Landscape Convention, and the modern planning usage of Landscape Character Assessment and Ecosystem Services, as applied to Englands Lake District.

Liminality, Seasonality and Landscape

To the student of landscape, as well as to the landscape planner, designer and manager, it is important to distinguish between differing modalities in the conceptualization of landscape and seasonality. The logic of the absolute geometric space of the map and central point perspective prospect, and the chronometric time of the calendar, is qualitatively different from the liminality of place and seasonal holidays. Here it is the content that defines the seasons, not the regularities of a quantitative system of measurement. This distinction is critical when it comes to working with seasonal landscapes, because they can be defined in terms of either modality.

Virtual enclosure, ecosystem services, landscape's character and the 'rewilding' of the commons: the 'Lake District' case

Abstract It is paradoxical that, while there is a generally increasing recognition of the scientific and cultural importance of conserving ‘semi-natural’ pastoral environments, and the negative effects of their widespread abandonment and overgrowth, British ‘rewilding’ activists and environmental managers are effectively advocating policies that will have a similar negative effect on the character of the semi-natural pastoral commons of places like England’s iconic Lake District. This situation, it will be argued, owes to the mindset of ‘virtual enclosure’ whereby the character of landscape is pre-defined by an assumed, behind-the-scenes, Euclidean/Ptolemaic spatial logic that leads to the comprehension of nature as a bounded scenic property; an (e)state of nature with its own economic system and services. This mindset is antithetical to both the practice of pastoral commoning and much contemporary natural science and conservation policy. It fits well, however, with older teleological ideas of nature, as well as modern ideas of privatisation, private property and management control.