Tomas Germundsson

Regional Cultural Heritage versus National Heritage in Scania’s Disputed National Landscape

This article argues that the official landscape heritage in Sweden is formed in an interplay between regional and national discourses, and that the national ideology during the last century has promoted the preservation of stereotyped landscapes that partly ignores the conditions under which these landscapes were actually formed. This tends to naturalise the landscape, often cleansing it of human action and thereby generating a notion of an innate and given national landscape. To illustrate this, the landscape of the province of Skåne in southernmost Sweden is discussed from a heritage perspective. This province (which was Danish up to 1658) has a landscape characterised by its openness and contrasting to the emblematic Swedish cultural landscape of forests and small hamlets. A conclusion is that Skånes landscape heritage runs the risk of being alienated when it is valued from a national criterion, and that a critical questioning of official heritage practice is therefore needed.

The Landscape of Vittskövle Estate — At the Crossroads of Feudalism and Modernity

An essential question regarding the understanding of landscape concerns the role of history. While every landscape is considered contemporary, they also possess historical dimensions. Sometimes the historical traits in a landscape are very palpable; but as long as no time machine exists, even the most ancient landscapes must still be regarded as present-day landscapes. “The past is [thus] a foreign country,” as David Lowenthal (1985) has so famously argued. Concerning linear time, there therefore exists a duality in every landscape, simply expressed as a “now” and a “then”. As the line between now and then is constantly moving, it means that the historical dimension of a landscape is continually reshaped. Furthermore, as time moves on, the past takes on different meanings depending on the position of the observer in the present. This is of course valid for history at large — all history bears the mark of the time in which it is written, but landscape history is special in that it is materialised history forming the totality of the present world.

Figures in the Revolutionary Landscape: An Introduction

As a concretization of social relations, landscape properly understood provides a means to analyze – to make visible – the social relations that go into its making, even as one of the functions of landscape is precisely to make those social relations obscure. The fetishizing function of landscape should not be discounted. It really is not possible to directly “read” the landscape in any satisfying sense. But it is possible to analyze it: to search for how it is made, to explore its functions, to examine the other places that are foundational in its production and meaning, to understand its history and trajectory, to uncover how power works in and through it, and therefore, to learn what it says about the status of and possibility for a just world in the here and now (Mitchell 2008, p. 47).

Introduction: Reassessing Landscape Drivers and the Globalist Environmental Agenda

Cop 15 the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference was held in Copenhagen, Denmark, 7–18 December 2009. It was a major ‘global’ event in that it was not only concerned with global warming, but also involved the participation of global political, environmental and scientific leaders, NGOs, economic lobbies, Rainbow Warriors and so on and on. Living in Copenhagen, or just across the Øresund bridge in Malmö, Sweden, at this time was a bit like living in the set for a Buck Rogers or Star Wars movie, in which some global intergalactic council was being called to save the Earth, what with the periodic closing of the airport, train lines and highways to make way for global VVIPs, and with the interminable racket of helicopters overhead and global demonstrators in the streets (and jails). On 8–9 October, two months earlier, in the midst of the pre-Cop 15 buzz, the Council of Europe (CoE) held an international conference in southern Sweden, just across from Copenhagen, on the theme of Landscape and Driving Forces. This was part of the CoE’s work to facilitate the implementation of the European Landscape Convention (ELC). The articles in this special issue have been selected from the papers presented at a research seminar on Reassessing Landscape Drivers and the Globalist Environmental Agenda held on 7 October at Lund University in conjunction with the CoE conference. The seminar was organized by the Landscape Research Group (LRG) together with The Nordic Landscape Research Network (NLRN) in cooperation with the conference organizers. Both events were co-sponsored by the Swedish Heritage Board, which was in charge of the then ongoing process of Swedish ratification of the ELC. Given the way the research seminar was framed by the upcoming Cop 15 event, it was natural that its organizers, the editors of this special issue, Tomas Germundsson, Peter Howard and Kenneth Olwig, would choose a topic that linked the conference theme to the issue of global warming. We went, however, one step further and linked it to ‘globalism’ more generally, because global warming was not the only ‘global’ agenda framed by Cop 15. Beside the global environmental agendas of global Landscape Research, Vol. 36, No. 4, 395–399, August 2011