Justice, Power and the Political Landscape

Kenneth Olwig, Donald Mitchell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780415448130
• eBook ISBN: 9781317996200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

Landscape is now on the agenda in a new way. The increasing interest in justice, power and the political landscape expresses a sea change occurring in the meaning of landscape itself, from landscape as scenery to landscape as polity and place. As Lionella Scazzosi argues "The meaning of the term 'landscape' has become broader than that of a view or panorama, which characterized many national protection laws and policies until the middle of the 20th century, and that of environment or nature, to which it has often been limited during the recent years of environmentalist battles." This is reflected in the new European Landscape Convention, for which: "'Landscape' means an area, as perceived by people." The tide thus has turned towards J. B. Jackson's view of landscape as not "a scenic or ecological entity but as a political or cultural entity, changing in the course of history." It is in this socio-political context that it becomes necessary to consider the role of power, and the importance of justice, in the shaping of the landscape as an area of practice and performance with both cultural and environmental implications.

This book was previously published as two special issues of Landscape Research.

JUSTICE, POWER AND THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

Edited by Kenneth R. Olwig and Don Mitchell

 

 

 

Introduction:

The editors of this book live and work continents apart, one, Don Mitchell in North America, the other, Kenneth Olwig, in Northern Europe. As Olwig sits down to write his contribution to this introduction the radio drones on in the background. The country where he resides, Denmark, is having a national election and his concentration is broken by the voice of a politician who tells an interviewer that she knows the “political landscape” of the country, and she knows that the citizenry is tired of the present government’s dependence for power upon the support of an ultra nationalistic and xenophobic right wing party. Those who normally work with landscape tend to identify it with physical phenomena like trees, lakes, hills and buildings, and many of them will wonder what the “political landscape,” to which the politician refers, has to do with their understanding of landscape. The answer is “quite a bit.” The vote in this election will have an effect upon the degree to which the Danish physical landscape in the future will continue to contain fenced in camps, complete with razor wire, for refugees denied entry into Denmark, but unable to go home because their homelands are unsafe. The election might also, if this particular politician is right, facilitate the creation of Moslem cemeteries and purpose-built mosques, complete with their characteristic domes and towers, which will change the character of the Danish landscape.

Across the sound dividing Denmark from Sweden, where Olwig commutes to work, there have long been cemeteries in Malmö where the Moslems from Denmark could go to bury their dead, and there also is, unlike in Denmark, a mosque whose white minarets pierce the characteristic grey sky – except, of course, when arsonists with firebombs have blackened them. The character of religious buildings is actually not a new issue in Scania, the ancient Danish “landscape” territory where Malmö lies. Scania, like other such landscapes, is “politi cal” in the sense that it is home to a polity that has shaped it through a history that goes back to ancient times, when custom was law. Scania became incorporated into the Swedish state in 1658 after the Swedes defeated the Danes in a war. The Swedes then embarked upon a “cultural cleansing” of the landscape that not only included the execution of Scanians that remained loyal to Denmark, but also changed the appearance of the churches and other features in the physical landscape so that they would look more Swedish (Germundsson 2006).

Meanwhile, on the other side the Atlantic, Mitchell could witness strikingly similar questions about the political landscape being raised in the midst of America’s (never ending) election. In October, New York State governor Eliot Spitzer announced a plan to make it possible for undocumented (“illegal”) immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. The rationale was straightforward: driver’s licenses are an essential tool in regulating the streets and highways, assuring drivers are insured, and decreasing the possibilities for fraud. Despite the fact that a number of other states already make such licenses available, and despite the go-ahead given the program by the US Secretary of Homeland Security, nativists latched onto the plan and attacked it as a form of “amnesty” for people in the country illegally. But what does this have to do with the landscape, the landscape, for example, of farms, idyllic apple orchards, small cities and rural towns across Upstate New York, where Mitchell lives?

The question of “illegal aliens,” by which is almost always meant “Mexicans,” is now a critical one in New York State, more than 2500 km away from the nearest border crossing with Mexico. Farmers here, not only in California or Texas, are feeling the effects of a broad-scale crackdown on undocumented workers and are afraid their crops will have to be left to rot with disastrous consequences for an already marginal farming region, and its bucolic landscape. Across the country, in fact, meatpackers, construction companies, hotel corporations, and countless other businesses are contemplating a perhaps radically changed labor market, and all of this affects different landscapes.

The Swedish state’s behavior in Scania, on the southern border with Denmark, when they altered the appearance of a conquered Danish territory’s landscape to look more Swedish, is an established part of Europe’s heritage that is rarely eulogized – as in the case of the Spanish conquest of the southern part of what is now Spain, and former mosques were remodeled as Christian churches. The Spaniards finalized this conquest at the same time as Columbus sailed for America, inaugurating a colonial era in which the Spaniards created a cultural landscape, throughout much of South America, Central America and South Western North America, which was dotted with urban centers focused on a public square, as in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Sante Fe, however, is now part of the United States because the Southwestern corner of what is now the U.S. was appropriated after a war in 1848. This left the Mexican population, like the Moors of Spain and Northern Africa, as aliens in what had once been their homeland, and this is clearly visible in the landscape, in the form, for example, of an impenetrable fence or wall along America’s southern border. The fence is an important element of landscape heritage, even if it is not as pleasant to think about as other relicts of this same history, such as the cityscape of Santa Fe or the extraordinary Moslem palaces and gardens of Alhambra and Generalife in Granada, Southern Spain.

By taking the political landscape into consideration, the landscape becomes core both to the appreciation of places that delight, as well as to the understanding of the conflicts that make such places socially and culturally vital. It may thus seem fairly unproblematic when the European Landscape Convention requires signatory states to: “recognise landscapes in law as an essential component of people’s surroundings, an expression of the diversity of their shared cultural and natural heritage, and a foundation of their identity” (Europe 2000a: chpt. 1, art. 1: chpt 2, art 5), but when one considers the political and cultural tensions that have characterized European (and American) history, one realizes that this goal of the convention cannot be achieved unless one recognizes the importance of the political landscape. This is tacitly recognized, in fact, by the European Landscape Convention insofar as its official commentary includes the statement that: “Landscape must become a mainstream political concern, since it plays an important role in the well-being of Europeans who are no longer prepared to tolerate the alteration of their surroundings by technical and economic developments in which they have had no say” (Europe 2000b: II, §23). Such a statement, however, raises the question of what Europeans are prepared to “tolerate” if economic developments result in the importation of foreign workers who change the landscape upon which Christian European identity depends, for example by creating Moslem grave yards and building mosques? Is this part of Europe’s diversity of shared cultural heritage? And what if these immigrants bring with them plants and animals that have not historically been present in Europe, will this be tolerated? Alhambra is clearly one thing, the firebombed Malmö Mosque another. Likewise, Sante Fe is one thing, the Mexican barrios of Los Angeles another. Both extremes are critical to our understanding of landscapes, and their social importance.

The political landscape is clearly integral to contemporary landscape concerns, but it is by no means the sort of topic that has traditionally been identified with landscape as the repository of conservative unchanging values, to which a citizenry can cling while being buffeted by technical and economic developments in which they have no say. It is rather a landscape that is concerned with issues of justice and power that question the time-worn verities that are often identified with landscape, both in Europe and in America. The political landscape and conservation’s landscape exist, it must be recognized, in a mutual tension that can enrich, or destroy, either or both.

Genesis

The articles in this book are presented in the separate introductions to this book’s two sections. The story of this book’s genesis, on the other hand remains untold. Collections of articles are often a boring disjointed affair, their raison-d’etre lying primarily in the ability of the binding and covers to hold the whole thing together. An exception is a book like Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (Cronon 1996 (orig. 1995)), which was the outcome of meeting over an extended period of time in a residential seminar, so that even if the articles are on widely different topics, they nevertheless speak to one another, as in a conversation. This book has its genesis, not coincidentally, in a somewhat similar residential seminar, called “Landscape, Law and Justice,” held during the academic year 2002–2003, which took place at the Center for Advanced Studies under (literally) the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo. Kenneth Olwig, had been part of the seminar that produced Uncommon Ground, and he helped formulate the project proposal for the Landscape, Law and Justice seminar together with his (then) colleague at the University in Trondheim, Michael Jones, who later headed the project. The idea of the Oslo seminar was to rethink landscape together with a group of congenial scholars, much as Cronon’s seminar rethought nature, but from the specific standpoint of law and justice. As fortune would have it Don Mitchell was a Fullbright Scholar at the University of Oslo during this same period of time, and this gave him the opportunity to participate, fully bright, in the group’s many seminars.

The importance of the Oslo seminar for this book is evidenced by the articles by Michael Jones, David Lowenthal, Kenneth Olwig and Don Mitchell, who were either members or supporters (in Mitchell’s case) of the research group. Anne Whiston Spirn, Tom Mels and Gregory Taff, furthermore, all presented papers at the final conference of the group (Jones and Peil 2005; see also Jones 2006), and these papers were subsequently substantially rewritten for publication here. Subsequent to the Oslo seminar, Mitchell and Olwig later participated in a conference on law and landscape held in the Basque country, and it was here that Lynn A. Staeheli and Alexander Scherr became involved with this book project. Finally, Mitchell and Olwig co-organized and chaired a session at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Chicago on the topic of Justice, Power, and the Political Landscape. A room was booked for 50 people, but interest was so great that people were sitting over and under the tables and along the walls, and the line of people pressing to enter extended far down the hall. There was clearly enough interest in the topic to warrant a book. The book itself, however, has been published in two (or three) stages.

The first stage in this book’s long road to publication was published in a special issue of the journal, Landscape Research under the title “Landscape Justice, Morality and the Law of the Land” in July 2005 (v 30, nr 3). It is rooted in the discourses that emerged from the seminars in Oslo and the Basque Country. The second stage, emerging from the ideas behind the Chicago session, appeared in the same journal in October 2007 (v. 32, nr. 5) under the title of this book, “Justice, Power and the Political Landscape.” This book also includes an article by W.J.T. Mitchell, which he presented at the Chicago session, but which was not included in either of the special issues of Landscape Research. The long genesis of this book also engenders a debt to the people who took on the task of peer reviewing the manuscripts, though they must remain anonymous, the conference and seminar participants whose presentations and commentary helped shape the ideas that eventually merged in the these papers and the staffs of the research organizations and journals that make such ventures possible. This book, then, is a product of a collaboration, growing out of the editors’ engagement with the political landscape on two different continents, but not in two different worlds, since, as the reader will see, the degree of overlap between the articles emanating from the two continents, plus New Zealand, is quite thought provoking. To provoke thought, in the end, is also the purpose of this book, which seeks to look beyond the environmental and esthetical issues normally identified with landscape in order to examine the relationships between the landscape as the place of a polity and the issues of justice and power that shape it.

Bibliography

Cronon, William, Ed. (1996 (orig. 1995)). Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York, Norton.

Europe, Council of (2000a). European Landscape Convention, Florence. CETS No. 176. Strasbourg, Council of Europe.

—— (2000b). European Landscape Convention, Florence, Explanatory Report. CETS No. 176.

Germundsson, Tomas (2006). “Regional Cultural Heritage versus National Heritage in Scanias Disputed National Landscape.” The Nature of Cultural Heritage and the Culture of Natural Heritage. Northern Perspectives on a Contested Patrimony. In Kenneth R. Olwig and David Lowenthal, Eds. New York, Routledge: 19-35.

Jones, Michael (2006). “Special Issue: Essays on Landscape, Law and Justice.” Norwegian Journal of Geography 60 (1).

Jones, Michael and Tiina Peil, Eds. (2005). Landscape, Law and Justice. Proceedings of a Conference Organized by the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Oslo 15–19 June 2003. Oslo, Novus Forlag.

Introduction to Part One: Law, Polity and the Changing Meaning of Landscape

KENNETH R. OLWIG

Introduction

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:

The meaning of the term ‘landscape’ has become broader than that of a view or panorama, which characterized many national protection laws and policies until the middle of the 20th century, and that of environment or nature, to which it has often been limited during the recent years of environmentalist battles. (Scazzosi, 2004, p. 337)

This is reflected in the ELC, according to which: “‘Landscape’ means an area, as perceived by people” (Council of Europe, 2000, Article 1: a). An early manifestation of this sea change was in the pioneering work of J. B. Jackson, who during a long career persisted in comprehending landscape “not as a scenic or ecological entity but as a political or cultural entity, changing in the course of history” (Jackson, 1979, p. 153). Landscape is increasingly being seen as being “both ‘site’ and ‘sight”’, as the legal geographer Nicholas Blomley puts it. It is the site which is the object of sight, or other forms of perception (Blomley, 1998, p. 574). Landscape is hereby understood as the site or sites where political or cultural entities manifest themselves, creating the amalgam of places that can be perceived as landscape (Mitchell, 2002; Olwig, 2002, forthcoming).

However, the contemporary shift in the understanding of landscape does not so much involve the emergence of a new idea, as a revival of older ways of thinking about landscape. Dr. Samuel Johnson thus defined landscape in his classic 18th-century dictionary in “site” and “sight” terms as: (1) “A region; the prospect of a country” and (2) “A picture, representing an extent of space, with the various objects in it” (Johnson, 1968 (orig. 1755), landscape). And in the 19th century, as we are told in the above-mentioned issue of Landscape Research, the great German cosmopolite and geographer Alexander von Humboldt, defined landscape as the: “totality of all aspects of a region, as perceived by man” (Ermischer, 2004, p. 371). It is this dual notion of landscape, emphasizing both the area and the role of human perception in defining that area, that manifests itself in the ELC’s definition of landscape as “an area, as perceived by people”. The ELC, “with its em...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. General Introduction: Justice, Power and the Political Landscape
• Part 1: Law, Polity and the Changing Meaning of Landscape
• Part 2: From American Space to the European Landscape Convention
• Index