Abstract
Through tracing what ‘landscape’ has meant, and the political and intellectual work that ‘landscape’ does, we in this chapter explore the shifting nature of Nordic landscape geography. We thereby aim to introduce readers to the role of the landscape concept within Nordic scholarship and critically engage with contemporary debates over the nature and meaning of landscape. Landscape was an important political concept long before the advent of geography as a discipline in the Nordic countries, though what landscape denoted differed between various national and linguistic settings. Based in our mapping of the concept as it has evolved within geography and related disciplines, we centre on three strands of landscape scholarship today: mediations on a particularly ‘Nordic’ substantive landscape concept, attempts to utilise landscape as a concept to influence planning, and attempts to utilise landscape as a concept to grasp environmental issues. Scrutinising these current traditions leads us to primarily underline the necessity of relational approaches to steer the concept away from a problematic and narrow emphasis on the local scale. Yet, and importantly, various relational approaches take analysis in different directions, leading us to also underscore the necessity of critically scrutinising where particular relational approaches might lead landscape geography.
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Introduction
Landscape is a key concept in geography, as well as within a number of related disciplines. It is also a concept that has meant, and continues to mean, different things to different scholars working within different research traditions (e.g. Setten et al., 2012; Howard et al., 2018). Consequently, there are literatures that demonstrate its (sometimes frustrating) complexity, while also underlining that such complexity is needed, engaging, and even fun (e.g. Henderson, 2003; Olwig, 2019). In this chapter we engage with the shaping of this influential concept and idea, centring on how it has been developed and put to use by scholars within a Nordic context.
When Don Mitchell (2008, p. 47, emphasis in original) held that landscape is not only “really […] everything we see when we go outside [but also] everything that we do not see”, he critically reminded the ‘landscape community’ to stay alert to how landscape is always more complex than its morphology or material reality implies (Mitchell, 2012; Setten, 2020). By implication, he warned against a prominent trait of much landscape research; that ‘reading’ the landscape, i.e. to let the visual evidence of culture speak for itself, enables drawing conclusions about its making and meaning. We concur with Mitchell. There is nothing self-evident about physical landscapes. Landscapes are produced and constructed by multiple processes, of which some are readily visible (e.g. mining or agriculture) while other equally impactful processes remain more opaque (e.g. high finance or legal frameworks). In short, landscape is “a symbol of the values, the governing ideas, the underlying philosophies of culture”, as Meinig (1979, p. 42) once put it. Furthermore, since the mid-1980s it has been generally maintained, and on the whole accepted, that however landscape is represented, it represents forms of power and ideology, both physical and symbolic (e.g. Cosgrove, 1984; Cosgrove & Daniels, 1988). Through unravelling ideological underpinnings and political-economic processes we can critically investigate how the landscape works to obscure, naturalise or make invisible its (re)production. Hence, the premise for this chapter is not only that any landscape is composed of what lies before our eyes as well as what lies within our heads, to paraphrase Meinig (1979, p. 34), but crucially, also that any landscape is subject(ed) to contestation and control.
Our ambition in this chapter is to discuss a set of prominent landscape-geographical traditions in a way that is fruitful for those familiar with such traditions, as well as comprehensible to readers beyond landscape geography. In approaching landscape from a ‘Nordic’ perspective, we are singling out a certain conceptual legacy that can be rightly justified, but also ultimately simplistic. Norden has never been a unified intellectual environment, nor an isolated one. Hence, in scrutinising a ‘Nordic’ landscape geography, we are facing numerous challenges and tensions, including tensions within ‘the Nordic’ itself. We approach these divergencies and tensions as a productive lens on the ways a ‘Nordic’ landscape has been conceptualised and normatively put to use. This is not possible without discussing how a ‘Nordic’ landscape concept has been in conversation, in particular with what can crudely be termed an Anglo-American concept. Furthermore, understandings and conceptualisations of ‘landscape’ emerge through constant conversation with other key concepts in geography (and beyond), primarily those of nature, place, region, space and environment. Even though we centre most explicitly on the former discussion, we cannot escape the latter. Therefore, our intention is not to present the essential meaning of (a Nordic) landscape (concept), but to demonstrate how the temporal, spatial and, by implication, political, are fundamental for landscape as a historically shifting notion.
The chapter proceeds as follows: In the next section, and in order to point at some key conditions for an emerging Nordic landscape geography, we narrate historical meanings of landscape within, and beyond, geography as a university discipline. In the section thereafter we identify and critically discuss three strands of Nordic landscape research that put landscape on the wider scholarly agenda. The fourth section explores a recent social science turn towards relationality, and critically scrutinises this turn from a landscape perspective. In the conclusions we return to landscape’s shifting meanings and tensions within Nordic landscape geography to discuss what our exploration could mean for what is at stake in landscape studies as well as for future directions in Nordic landscape geography.
An Emerging Nordic Landscape Geography
Early Meanings and Uses of ‘Landscape’
Like any concept or theory, ‘landscape’ is only possible to grasp in “the place and the time out of which it emerges as part of that time, working in and for it, responding to it” (Said, 1983, p. 174; see also Williams, 1983). Throughout history, landscape has been loaded with shifting meanings depending on historical conditions, including its interpenetration with political, cultural and scientific processes. Its origin has been subject to much debate, and different academic trajectories is evidence of its versatility (e.g. Howard et al., 2018). This section offers a sweep through historical-political developments crucial to both later conceptualisations of landscape, and the subsequent formalisation of geography as a university discipline in Norden.
Historically, there is within the North Germanic languages an intertwined meaning of landscape as province or region, and landscape as physical terrain. In times long before the era of the nation states, landscapes denoted provinces characterised by self-government and their own legal frameworks (Olwig, 1996; Sporrong, 2008). At a time when the Nordic states as we know them today were yet to solidify, landscape laws such as Upplandslagen (Sweden), Skånske lov (Denmark), or Gulatingsloven (Norway) pertained to particular regionally based polities. However, from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century these regional laws and the bodies upholding them were gradually replaced by national legal frameworks as the Scandinavian countries increasingly became centrally governed states (Sporrong, 2008; Strandsbjerg, 2010).
With the stabilisation and centralization of Scandinavian state power, landscapes as self-governing provinces were replaced by a more ‘top-down’ division into counties, while political interest turned to mapping landscape as physical terrain. For example, Jones (2004) explores how sixteenth century Danish Astronomer Tycho Brahe through mapping his island fief of Hven introduced the technique of triangulation to Scandinavia, while Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus some two centuries later “preached the value of local area and field-based research as prelude not only to natural science, but also to economics” (Buttimer & Mels, 2006, pp. 17–22). However, even as political interest turned to mapping and exploring terrain, earlier conceptualisations of landscape never completely disappeared. Linnaeus’ Swedish travels were for example framed as explorations of the old landscapes rather than the newer counties, which were established in the 1630s. He travelled to Skåne (Scania) for his 1749 Skånska resa, rather than to the province’s then administrative units, Malmöhus County and Kristianstad County.
As the Nordic countries from the mid-nineteenth century underwent an often rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, this was followed by critique of modern civilization. A subsequent rise of a romantic and often nationalist movement that feared the vanishing of a ‘natural’ and ‘harmonious’ way of life, resulted (Löfgren et al., 1992). Thereby, landscape was rediscovered and revived, both as terrain and province. Historical landscapes were given a renewed meaning referring to long-term territorially based social cohesion, both regionally and nationally. Lingering historical elements in the cultural landscape were hailed as symbols of the past as well as serving as concrete correctives to urbanised living: meadows, pastures, idyllic smallness and, not least, nature, became the symbol and romanticised representation of cohesive regions, not to say the nation itself (e.g. Edling, 1996; Paasi, 1997; Mels, 1999; Raivo, 2002).
A well-known example of how the historical regional landscapes became part of building the image of a varied but cohesive nation is Swedish author and Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf’s geography reader, Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (published in English as The Wonderful Adventures of Nils). This children’s story followed Nils Holgersson, a lazy and mischievous boy that was turned into a pixie (pyssling) and forced to travel Sweden on a goose’s back. Published in two parts in 1906–1907, Lagerlöf’s work was inspired by both Rudyard Kipling’s anthropomorphic animals (in The Jungle Book) and the interest in folk culture and heritage sparked by turn-of-the-century nationalism (Palm, 2019). Her ambition was that the two volumes would allow youths to “gain knowledge of their own country and learn to love and understand it, as well as gain some insights into its resources (hjälpkällor) and possibilities for development” and that “our landscapes’ peculiarities shall appear more clearly to the viewer, and maybe that people should gain more of a longing to see the nature populated by animals” (cited in Palm, 2019, p. 370, p. 396, our translation).
As Crang (1999) remarks, Lagerlöf’s book illuminates a partial shift from a mediaeval notion of landscape to an emerging sense of landscape as a mode of viewing. Thus, the book “blends the old sense of province and that of panorama provided for an outsider by seating the protagonist on a magical goose’s back to behold each region in turn” (Crang, 1999, p. 450; cf. Olwig, 2017). Furthermore, in Lagerlöf’s book landscapes do not only figure as the sceneries viewed from above or in the sense of defined territories and locational markers. In the chapter Sagan om Uppland, a tale is for example told where this landscape becomes an actual active subject, as an initially poor landscape begging other landscapes for resources and features eventually amassed to enrichen Uppland (Lagerlöf, 1962 [1906–1907]).
The Landscape Concept in Landscape Geography
When geography during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century became a formal university discipline in the Nordic countries, ‘landscape’ thus held a plethora of meanings and connotations that go beyond its primary meaning in the English language, i.e. as scenery or vista. In the early twentieth century, Nordic landscape research was characterised by, on the one hand, a descriptive regional geographical approach and, on the other, the mapping of the older agricultural landscape as this was represented in the historical cadastral map material (e.g. Enequist, 1937; Moberg, 1938).
To illustrate, Swedish geographer Helge Nelson’s ambition was for his doctoral students to describe different Swedish provinces (Buttimer & Mels, 2006). For Nelson, who held the chair in geography at Lund University (1916–1947), studying one’s home area (hembygd) was furthermore of explicit political and moral value:
[A]s one begins to know it, then it usually grows in value, it has received a richer content and greater importance for oneself. Thus increased knowledge of the home area will strengthen feelings for it, rendering it warmer and richer. Enhanced knowledge will also widen perspectives, letting the home area emerge as a small part in a larger whole, in fatherland. Then the love of home area can grow to include all our land and people (Nelson, translated in Buttimer & Mels, 2006, pp. 37–38).
A key task for geographers thus became to study particular regions in order to illuminate connections between hembygd and fatherland.
Even though Nelson’s scholarship entailed an ambition to study landscapes, he did not formulate an adequate methodology for such studies. This was later noted by one of his most influential students, Torsten Hägerstrand (1979). Contemporaneous with Nelson, a much more rigorous attempt to determine the methodological framework of landscape studies is instead found in Finnish regional geography, pioneered by Johannes Gabriel Granö in his ground-breaking Reine Geografie (1929). Therein Granö developed a methodology for grasping environments that connects to much later conceptual developments within geography (for a discussion of these connections, see Granö & Paasi, 1997). Firstly, geographers were not only to record visible phenomena, but also auditory, olfactory, and tactile phenomena, in a search for a complete grasp of their surroundings. Secondly, research was about researchers’ personal environment. Granö thus underlined how an “examination starts from a purely anthropocentric standpoint, that is, what a person, forming the center of his perceived environment, can observe at various distances” (Granö, 1997, p. 18).
However, though the landscape concept figured prominently in J. G. Granö’s methodological framework the study object was analytically divided “into two major parts on the basis of distances in the field of vision, that is, the proximity which we perceive with all our senses, and farther away the landscape, which extends to the horizon and which we perceive by sight alone” (Granö, 1997, p. 19). While his methodological philosophy underlined multi-sensory explorations, landscape nonetheless remained a distant vista. Granö’s approach came to influence some geographers, such as the Estonian Edgar Kant, but the landscape in focus for research in the pre-war era primarily remained in line with the traditional regional approach of thematically mapping physical features in the landscape, including for instance geology, settlement patterns and agricultural land use (e.g. Dahl, 1942). Hence, a theoretical development of the landscape concept, and landscape studies, were only partially occurring within the discipline in Norden at the time.
After the Second World War, the geography discipline was increasingly characterized by an emphasis on quantitative methods and a positivistic research agenda. Within Nordic landscape geography the traditional regional approach was complemented by more methodologically coherent landscape research that mainly studied historical agrarian landscapes influenced by the general quantitative approach. To a large extent, methodological influences came from Germany and inspired new research on the rich Scandinavian source material in the form of historical maps, but also field studies (e.g. Hannerberg, 1958: Helmfrid, 1962; Hansen, 1964; Sporrong, 1968, 1971; Rønneseth, 1974). These new trends were arguably strongest in Sweden, while for instance in Norway, historical landscape studies mainly took place within other disciplines (Widgren, 2015). Subsequently, a fruitful encounter arose between landscape geography and archaeology, not least in historical-geographical studies where the earliest maps could be triangulated with archaeological finds and results (Widgren, 1983; Riddersporre, 1995). More broadly, and elaborated on elsewhere (Jansson et al., 2004), there was a pronounced strive for coupling landscape research from different disciplines, including the natural sciences. This development meant that particular regional landscapes became more pronounced departure points for developing interdisciplinary empirical research (e.g. Berglund, 1991; Grau Møller, 1990).
However, what landscape signified as a concept was hardly discussed within this work. This changed during the 1980s and 1990s. As Widgren (2015) has shown, the development is complex, but two main features can be identified. First, there was an influence – and an interest – from international human geography, where ‘landscape’ had developed into a concept with a multifaceted meaning different from what was developed in the Nordic countries (Mels, 1999; Saltzman, 2001; Setten, 2004). Second, contemporary landscape research in the Nordic countries, which was largely driven by interdisciplinary developments, came to have an explicit aim to both analyse and inform policy (e.g. Jones & Daugstad, 1997; Waage & Benediktsson, 2010; Primdahl, 2014). The latter can most closely be linked to urbanisation processes, the effects of modern agriculture on landscapes and the measures that could be developed to protect environmental or cultural values in the landscape. The insights of much historical landscape research thus became a normative corrective to contemporary developments. The political and administrative bodies that, based on these developments, put landscape on the agenda, existed at both national and European level. These bodies, ranging from national environmental protection agencies to the The Council of Europe, heavily influenced the contacts and networks of a wide range of landscape researchers. In such cross-fertilisation it soon became clear that questions about landscape histories and values, including conceptualisations, are neither self-evident, nor neutral (Jones & Daugstad, 1997). Thus, Nordic landscape research faced an era of exciting turmoil.
‘Nordic Landscape Geography’ in the New Millennium
Today, Nordic landscape geography is characterised by a breadth in terms of methods used and theoretical inspirations. Beyond the developments outlined above, the field is to a significant degree shaped by developments over the last three to four decades elsewhere, including an increasing shift from German to Anglo-American influences (Jansson et al., 2004). A so-called ‘new cultural geography’ developed among British based geographers in the 1980s (e.g. Duncan, 1980; Cosgrove, 1984), followed by a more critical cultural geography developed among North American geographers (e.g. Jackson, 1989; Mitchell, 2008). These developments were taken up in Nordic landscape geography and sparked a renewal of historically based landscape geography. Crucially, the works of particularly Duncan (1980), Cosgrove (1984), and Cosgrove and Daniels (1988) heavily influenced a re-thinking of the concept of landscape itself, materialising primarily in Kenneth Olwig’s (1996) Recovering the substantive nature of landscape. Out of this publication came a self-declared ‘Nordic’ landscape concept (Olwig, 2003, 2019) that for many years came to play a central role in international landscape geography. We return to this concept in more detail below.
The timing of this ‘recovery’ is no coincidence. Within the context of the cultural turn, a key moment for landscape was the critical scrutiny of Carl Sauer’s (1925) notion of the cultural landscape as shaped by culture as an agent with the natural area as the medium. Theorising landscape against the then widespread environmental determinism in American geography (Solot, 1986), Sauer’s culture concept held that culture itself does things that can be observed and mapped in the physical landscape. When James Duncan (1980) published his attack on what he termed “The superorganic in American cultural geography”, he argued that the ‘traditional’ cultural geography that Sauer helped establish, was marked by a lack of attention paid to the complexities of the social world and that it failed to account for any human agency. Therefore it also failed to explain more pressing issues related to politics, social relations and identity formation. Where Sauer studied culture as that which is expressed through the morphology of landscape, ‘new’ cultural geographers were much more interested in landscape as representation and its ideological underpinnings, i.e. that which the landscape hides, normalises and subsequently naturalises. Heavily influenced by French post-structural currents, landscape was increasingly seen and read as text, discourse and power politics (e.g. Cosgrove, 1984; Daniels, 1989). Interestingly, ‘new’ cultural geography was thus to a large extent driven by research that effectively placed landscape – as representation – at the centre of the discipline as a whole. However, and despite the fundamental tensions between ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ cultural geographers, they united over a prominent weight placed on the visual and scenic, yet abstract, power of landscape. This is critical as it provided a window of opportunity for developments within a Nordic context.
Against this backdrop, we move on to discuss three closely related strands of thought and practice in Nordic landscape geography that became influential, hence sparking much debate: First, an etymologically and philologically driven conceptual strand that sought to uncover the meanings and implications of a ‘Nordic’ landscape concept; second, a policy-driven strand closely connected to the establishment of the European Landscape Convention (ELC) (Council of Europe, 2000); and third, a philosophically and politically driven strand set on developing a landscape concept that responds to rapid environmental transformation and (most often) degradation.
‘The Substantive Nature of Landscape’
Set within an approach to the discipline of geography as the study of the physical world, over time reshaped by the imprint of natural and human factors, and interwoven with analyses of the production, meaning and power of the representations of this physical world, the first strand revolved around Olwig’s (1996) notion of “the substantive nature of landscape”. As Olwig (2019, p. 18) writes himself he, while working in Sweden, discovered that among Swedes the term landscape (landskap) referred “to an historical place, often their home region [and that] made me curious about the origin, meaning, and history of the meaning of landscape as place and region”. It was such everyday discoveries that eventually led him to argue for a “substantive meaning of landscape as a place of human habitation and environmental interaction” (1996, p. 630). Beyond, and against, more established notions of landscape as “a restricted piece of land”, “the appearance of land as we perceive it”, or as “a flickering text” (Cosgrove & Daniels, 1988, p. 8), Olwig (1996) stressed that landscape can also be understood as that which connects community, justice, environmental equity and nature. With special reference to mediaeval Scandinavia, usages of the concept landscape thus appeared to pertain to “a judicially defined polity, not a spatially defined area” (Olwig, 2002, p. 19). Understandings of landscapes as lived in and of place, rather than exclusively understood as abstract space, resonated with numerous landscape scholars in Norden (see e.g. Lehtinen, 2000; Setten, 2004). From the turn of the millennium, a ‘substantive’ landscape concept thus emerged from explorations of Nordic history and North Germanic etymology, and inspired by contemporary Scandinavian vernacular, it managed to establish itself as a forceful approach for studying both the physical and symbolic power of landscape.
For Olwig, conceptualisations of landscape, were of more than merely historical or academic interest. Resembling the kind of critique of state rationalities and modernist planning later made famous by James C. Scott (1998), Olwig (1996, p. 638) argued that land surveying had “created a geometrical, divisible, and hence saleable space by making parcels of property out of lands that had previously been defined according to rights of custom and demarcated by landmarks and topographical features”, and that “[t]hese ideas, which were foreign to Northern Europe, lent legitimacy to the ideological transformation of land into private property”. As Germundsson (2008, pp. 178–186) elaborates, decision-makers and land-owners could, steeped in such ‘foreign’ ideas, for instance initiate the well-known nineteenth century enclosure reforms throughout Scandinavia.
However, and as pointed out in our introduction, there is not one linguistic or conceptual legacy within the Nordic realm. Waage (2012) has shown how the Icelandic concept of landsleg, as it appears in the fourteenth century sagas, corresponds to ‘the lie of the land’, and thus in a sense lies closer to (and predates) its English meaning. Waage further illustrates how the Icelandic conceptualisation describes a visual perception of morphological features, often associated with aesthetic appreciation. Similarly, underscoring the emphasis on visual characteristics in the Icelandic landslag (i.e. the modern spelling of landsleg), Benediktsson (2007, p. 207) has reminded geographers to also acknowledge that the “everyday understanding of the landscape concept […] tend[s] to emphasize the scenic aspect”. Thus, critical geographers should, according to Benediktsson (2007, p. 211), acknowledge the importance of the scenic and be ready to argue for the value of landscapes “in the halls of political and economic power”. An emphasis on the visual qualities of the environment also holds for the Finnish landscape concept maisema (Raivo, 2002; Paasi, 2008). Or rather, as Paasi (2008, p. 513) elaborates, in Finnish the landscape concept is divided into maisema¸ which typically denotes landscapes’ visual dimension, and maakunta, which “points to the areal, vernacular, and administrative dimension”. These concepts can furthermore be combined into maisemakunta (landscape province) to refer to “the products of scientists by which they aim at spatial classification of the visual elements of nature and culture” (Paasi, 2008, p. 513).
The substantive weight placed on the ways that culture, community, law, morality and custom shape people’s lives in much Nordic geography, should also be critically considered as it has been pointed out how landscape often invokes what Wylie (2016) has termed ‘homeland thinking’ (see also Crang, 1999). Mels (2002, p. 138) shows, for example, how the Swedish notion of hembygd (comparable to homeland) in the early twentieth century “was at once confirmed and incorporated in a wider discourse of national coherence during a period of political turmoil, proletarization, and intense commodification of urban and rural spaces”. Wylie (2016) argues that ‘homeland’ epistemologies and presumptions cause difficulties for a wide set of understandings and uses of landscape, including across different branches of landscape research, because landscape invokes and naturalises attachment, sentiment and identity. These characteristics have also been alluded to in discussions around a ‘substantive’ notion of landscape, hence deserving of a critical questioning of its explanatory power both within research and in current society (Setten et al., 2018). However, this is not to deny that landscapes do work and are set to work as markers of ‘home’, belonging and identity, as elaborated on by, for example, Häyrynen (1997), Sörlin (1999), Mels (2002) and Germundsson (2005).
Landscape as Policy Term
Whereas a ‘substantive’ landscape concept buttresses a political-intellectual project critical of modern state power, the strand we now turn to instead utilises landscape as a concept and research object to aid in planning and policy-making. During the 1980s and 1990s agricultural restructuring, combined with ambitions to safeguard natural and cultural values in the agricultural landscape, spurred a demand for landscape evaluations (Widgren, 2015, p. 201). Lamenting the destruction and subsequent loss of historical landscape values and, in effect, identity values, became widespread, particularly among historically oriented landscape geographers as well as in various administrative cultural heritage and nature conservation bodies (cf. Emanuelsson, 2009; Slätmo, 2017).
A concern for the future of landscapes resonated well with the rationale for the establishment of the European Landscape Convention (ELC) (Council of Europe, 2000), designed to facilitate landscape protection, management and planning. The overall aim was to establish ‘a true landscape democracy’ (Arler, 2008). The by now well-known ELC definition of landscape as “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors” (Council of Europe, 2000, p. 3) soon sparked considerable and critical engagement among Nordic landscape researchers (e.g. Jones & Stenseke, 2011). Scholars engaging with the Convention was in close conversation with proponents of a ‘substantive’ understanding of landscape. This is in a sense unsurprising. Both strands are explicitly normative, i.e., they favour local participation, and by implication are (implicitly) loaded with notions of morality, social justice and what has been of particular interest among landscape scholars, the right to public participation in decision-making concerning our everyday landscapes (e.g. Jones, 2011). In short, the interest in landscapes in the wake of the effects of international agricultural policy, including the emergence of the ELC, both directly and indirectly constituted a fertile ground for Nordic landscape geography.
However, as Setten et al. (2018, p. 421) have pointed out, seeing substantive landscapes as lived spaces that are “morally constituted by people, polity and place offers some radical insight, but has only to a limited extent been demonstrated or radically theorised”. For example, there is a frequent favouring of local agency, yet without critically thinking about how this creates or sustains exclusions of its own. Hence, it remains unclear how ‘local landscapes’ fit with issues of justice and morality at larger scales. It has been argued that the motivation for embracing the ELC is straight-forwardly that local landscapes are best managed and evaluated locally (Setten et al., 2018). There is, in other words, a tendency to equate localised decision-making, and the local scale, with something inherently good. Much of the landscape literature concerned with notions of justice is characterised by a frequent conflation of local with ‘good’ democracy, echoing what Purcell (2006) conceptualised as the ‘local trap’. However, public participation in landscape management does not necessarily lead to more just landscapes. By implication, there is nothing inherently democratic about local landscapes. Rather, ‘landscape democracy’ is always struggled over, and does not simply exist. Hence, we are once again reminded of Wylie’s (2016) unease with a presumed association between ‘landscape’ and ‘homeland’. Landscape (research) has a long tradition of being concerned with dwelling, settlement and inhabitation. These are arguably controversial features of much landscape research (Setten et al., 2018), as there is a tendency that the combination of existence and location assumes that “certain peoples and certain landscapes belong together and are made for each other, […] at least historically in a deep sense” (Wylie, 2016, p. 409). The ELC serves as a case in point: Europeanness or Eurocentrism is embedded in the Convention, and the Convention’s preamble confirms that its aim is to consolidate European identity (Widgren, 2015). Landscape, it states, “contributes to the formation of local cultures and […] is a basic component of the European natural and cultural heritage, contributing to human well-being and consolidation of the European identity” (Council of Europe, 2000, p.1). Beyond such potentially rather problematic identity-affirming work, landscape here functions as a policy term and tool that enables connecting different, and often opposing, interests. Yet, and to a significant degree, it remains a tool of agricultural and heritage interests to secure their landscape values, and to buttress attempts to secure funding for such landscape-preservational work.
Landscapes and/of Environmental Change
The third strand, conceptualisations of landscapes in light of broader environmental concerns, is, to be clear, neither new nor fully removed from the European Landscape Convention’s framing, concerned as it is with achieving “sustainable development based on a balanced and harmonious relationship between social needs, economic activity and the environment” (Council of Europe, 2000, p.1). It is in an important sense wrong to place environmentalism as a recent turn (see e.g. Olwig (2003), on Danish botanist Joakim Frederik Schouw (1789–1852) as an early environmentalist). Ingold (2011) for example characterises Hägerstrand’s 1970s work on the interaction between society and nature as ‘prophetic’ in foreseeing the collapse of the ‘great divide’ between nature and society (see Stenseke, 2020, for a longer discussion). Searching for how geographers could contribute at a time when environmental questions had become prominent on the academic and political agenda, Hägerstrand (1976, p. 331) emphasised an integrative role for geographers as knowers of landscapes and regions when “landscape evolution as a wholesale problem [was] beginning to force itself unto the political arena”.
However, rather than arguing for a return to traditional regional geography’s ‘chorological descriptivism’ (Buttimer & Mels, 2006, p. 72), Hägerstrand drew on his model-builder background in search of “a deeper insight into the principles of togetherness where-ever it occurs” (Hägerstrand, 1976, p. 332, emphasis in original). His phrasing in this does indeed resemble later attempts to emphasise socio-ecological entanglements or relations. Germundsson and Sanglert (2019) have thus argued that Hägerstrand’s explorations of the landscape concept opened fruitful ways forward for landscape studies through hinting at both phenomenology and the kinds of equating of ‘society’ and ‘nature’ that later became prominent within actor-network theory. As Hägerstrand himself states:
Togetherness is not just resting together. It is also movement and encounter. By using such very general terms we would be able to look upon Nature and Society under one perspective because what is all the time resting, moving and encountering is not just humans or natural items in between themselves but humans, plants, animals and things all at once (Hägerstrand, 1976, p. 332, emphasis in original).
Casting Hägerstrand as an environmentally concerned landscape theorist has recently been advocated by some landscape researchers (e.g. Qviström & Wästfelt, 2020; Stenseke, 2020), but his position within the field nonetheless remains relatively marginal. As Stenseke (2020) comments, conceptualisations of landscape are parts of Hägerstrand’s works that has never attracted research communities the way his more famous time-geography did. Much of his writings on landscape are published in Swedish, and Hägerstrand explicitly instructed that one of his key texts, Tillvaroväven (2009), should not be translated (Stenseke, 2020).Footnote 1 However, and notably, Hägerstrand’s way of approaching landscapes as movement and encounter, and as a kind of continuously shifting interspecies togetherness, predates a turn towards ‘more-than-human’(Whatmore, 2006) inquiries within landscape geography (and cultural geography more broadly), which is perhaps mostly made prominent through anthropologist Tim Ingold’s (2000, 2011) extensive contributions to landscape research.
In later arguing for precisely such a turn, Whatmore (2006, p. 603) criticised both ‘old’ and ‘new’ cultural geography for casting “the making of landscapes (whether worked or represented) as an exclusively human achievement in which the stuff of the world is so much putty in our hands”. Numerous landscape geographers have since then striven to further develop and apply frameworks for conceptualising landscapes as socio-ecological relations. To illustrate, Qvenild et al. (2014) and Frihammar et al. (2020) have researched the politics of invasive alien plant species and the position of the simultaneously cherished and invasive garden lupine (Lupinus polyphyllus) in Norway and Sweden respectively. For Qvenild et al. (2014) this allows honing in on how gardeners themselves make sense of alien or invasive as categories, and how they engage with plants such as the garden lupine in their gardening. Qvenild et al. (2014, p. 25, emphasis in original) draw on Ingold (2000) as well as Whatmore’s (2006) critique in order to acknowledge “human experiences and knowledge […] as always already embedded within dwelt-in worlds of continuous encounters between all living things, and consequently not given by humans alone”. In another gardening study, Saltzman and Sjöholm (2018) are similarly inspired by Ingold, drawing on his insistence of viewing all living things as biosocial becomings (see also Ingold & Pálsson, 2013). Frihammar et al. (2020), on their part, instead draw on heritage scholarship to underscore how debates about the garden lupine’s spread throughout Sweden illuminates the political nature of boundary-making and how invasive species threatens a particular landscape-as-image, landskapsbild, perceived as an important cultural heritage. Between the lines, the ‘landscape’ they are concerned with is conceptualised as an image carrying particular connotations that is ‘written’ in weeds and flowers, yet not reducible to a text (cf. Cosgrove & Daniels, 1988). These studies underline and illustrate how landscape cannot be understood as an “exclusively human achievement” (Whatmore, 2006, p. 603). Toudal Jessen (2021), for example, in a recent study of two local ‘everyday’ periurban landscapes in Denmark, uses a relational approach to dissolve the thematic categorization of nature- and culture-driven processes. In her analysis she traces the development of the physical landscape in light of the history of Danish planning and governance both before and during the rise of the modern welfare state.
Others have combined political ecology with landscape geography, underscoring realised and as yet unrealised areas of crossover between these research traditions (Widgren, 2015). As Widgren (2015) argues, a landscape geography centring on the contemporary resource rush as well as on the relations between farming landscapes and labour could build important bridges to political ecology. Meanwhile Jönsson (2015, 2016) has scrutinised the production of high-end golf landscapes, and the conflicts surrounding these, drawing on both landscape geography and political ecology.
Recent efforts to centre on landscape as co-constitutions of the natural and the social is crucial also to debates on environmental (in)justice (Mels, 2016, 2021). With resource extraction on Gotland as his case study, Mels (2021) explores how a dialogue between environmental justice and landscape ecology can be initiated, stating that “environmental justice is historically entangled with a contested material and discursive process of landscape production. By extension, therefore, this moves scholarly engagement with environmental justice to the deep historical geography and ecology of landscape change” (Mels, 2021, p. 12). Particularly drawing on Pellow and Brulle’s (2005) ‘critical environmental justice’, a form of environmental justice that moves beyond local scales of inquiry and extends analysis over longer time periods, Mels traces the way that Gotland, from the mid-nineteenth century, was remade through injections of foreign capital, as mires were drained, and as 40 ships of lumber yearly left for England. In the conflicts surrounding such transformations he holds that “peasant claims to the right to the landscape as a customary, everyday place of use value were claims to environmental justice” (Mels, 2021, p. 8). Landscape and landscape transformation should hence be the concern both of landscape geographers, and of those studying and striving for environmental justice. Mels’ explorations of Gotland’s transformation thereby not only offer an example of how concerns over (current and historical) environmental transformation is increasingly moving to the centre of Nordic landscape geography. It also underscores how ‘new’ combinations of different research traditions, developed within different contexts and changing epistemologies, can reinvigorate landscape research in the broader sense. In this particular case, Mels (2021) is aided by environmental justice scholarship in underscoring the necessity of developing a landscape theory that accounts for injustices inherent to the capitalist production of nature (see Smith, 1984).
Towards New Landscape Relations?
Throughout this chapter, we have illuminated important tensions in how landscape is conceptualized within both Nordic geography and landscape geography more broadly. On the one hand, landscape as both concept and reality is, at least historically, heavily invested in cultivation, dwelling and settlement (e.g. Bender & Winer, 2001; Wylie, 2016). But such preoccupation with stability, coherence and fixity is increasingly under attack from scholars arguing for a landscape concept that must be much more open and sensitive to multi-scalar forces and spatial dynamism, including critical questions concerning dislocation, alienation and (in)justice (Wylie, 2016; Mitchell, 2017; Setten, 2020; Mels, 2021). Although coming from different positions, these scholars argue that landscape is fundamentally relational, which is to say that humans and nature are co-producers, or co-agents, of landscapes (e.g. Mitchell, 2017; Stenseke, 2018), though this does certainly not mean that there is an agreement on what it could or should mean to claim co-production. During the last two decades this view has been further buttressed by a ‘relational turn’ within the social sciences that, simply put, aims to shift the focus from specific objects to networks, relations and entanglements (Allen, 2011; Jones, 2009). Though we should be wary of over-simplistically summarising what this means for socio-spatial theory, it is safe to say that relational thinking spurs researchers to scrutinise geographical study objects as internalising, and thus constituted by, the interplay of different processes (Harvey, 1996; Massey, 2005).
As we have seen, a relational approach to landscape is indeed something that several Nordic scholars have emphasised, frequently with reference to the kind of geography necessitated by the increasing prominence of environmental problems in academia and policy circles alike. But at the same time, it is important to critically scrutinise what various framings of relationality do to how landscape is conceptualised. Rather than emphasise abstract relationality per se, we need to ask ourselves what kind of relationality for what kind of landscape scholarship. This is a question of both intellectual and political importance.
Returning to Hägerstrand (1992), his concept of a förloppslandskap (processual landscape) was inspired by Sörlin’s (1990) writings on a ‘natural contract’ (naturkontrakt). Hägerstrand argued that landscape should refer “to not only what one can see around oneself, but to all that is present within the decided geographical boundary, including everything that moves in and out over the boundary during the time-period one has delimited” (Hägerstrand, 1992, p. 10–11, our translation). In emphasising movement and the relations between places, Hägerstrand (1992) conceptualised landscape as a never stable configuration. This has allowed Sanglert (2013) to use Hägerstrand’s conceptual apparatus for opening up possible connections to the ontological stratigraphy of critical realism as a basis for landscape studies. Yet, at the same time, the processes accounted for in Hägerstrand’s framework are placed at a rather high level of abstraction. He is concerned with the relationship (still phrased within a dualist framework) between ‘society’ and ‘nature’ rather than with exploring the intricacies of power within such a relationship. Hägerstrand hence falls short of accounting for the fundamental power relations that any landscape holds.
Both in Widgren’s (2015) attempt to combine political ecology and landscape geography, and in Mels’ (2021) engagements with environmental justice, the ambition to hone in on power relations is more central, while the identified root problem is a tendency within landscape geography to not fully analyse the multi-scalar relations that make and remake the landscapes studied (see also Setten, 2020). As Widgren (2015, p. 202) remarks, research that “explicitly addresses the global links of European agriculture does not often figure within the landscape framework, despite the fact that European landscapes in the past and in the present are the clear outcome of such links”. It is in light of such under-acknowledgement that Widgren sees potential in linking political ecology and landscape geography, countering both the relative lack of interaction between these research fields, and a historical tendency for landscape geography to centre on Europe and political ecology to centre on the Global South. More to the point, Widgren (2015, p. 200) invokes one of the most prominent tools of 1980s political ecology, Piers Blaikie’s (1985) chain of explanation, to illuminate how “many of the most cherished ‘traditional’ landscapes in Europe […] are the products of an early modern world system and rising capitalism in the 17th to 19th centuries, rather than reflecting subsistence and inertia, as much of the dominant landscape preservation narrative argues”. This evidently becomes a conceptual framework for elaborating on landscapes as not that which draws us ‘in’, ‘home’ or ‘back’, but that which can become a starting point for pondering often deeply unequal forms of multi-scalar connectivity.
Conclusions
In this chapter we have sought to emphasise that ‘landscape’ in a Nordic context is a notion that has a rich history within as well as beyond geography, spanning almost a millennium from the landscape laws and the Icelandic sagas onwards. It is a complex, productive and engaging concept which both historically and today carry multifarious meanings. Depending on the language we take as our starting point, it can refer to visual characteristics (as with the Icelandic landsleg or landslag, or Finnish maisema), a polity (as with the Danish landskab or Swedish landskap), or a historical province (as in one of the meanings in Swedish and Norwegian). As a political act, studying landscapes can, as with Nelson or Linnaeus, be a way to strengthen state power and overall feelings for the fatherland. But landscape can also be a way to emphasise political possibilities beyond modern state rationalities (Olwig, 1996), as well as a way to scrutinize issues of power, exploitation, and environmental justice in contested landscapes (Widgren, 2015; Setten, 2020; Mels, 2021).
Meanwhile, landscape can be a common-sensical concept that remains implicit in research, or a concept at the very heart of methodological frameworks (Granö, 1997). It can be used to highlight human actions and perceptions, or (increasingly with current environmental concern) a concept utilised to highlight the fundamental entanglements between human beings and the rest of the world (Stenseke, 2018). Importantly, there is little use in searching for a true meaning beyond these various utilisations. Here we again rely on Said’s (1983) insistence on acknowledging the historical and political situatedness of theory. Landscape, as we begun this chapter by stating, is a complex concept, and to a significant degree this is precisely because the concept has meant so many different things throughout history.
What these shifting meanings underscore is that, like all influential concepts, landscape requires that researchers and students scrutinise just what we think of and refer to, and what we are ignoring or writing out when utilising a particular spatial vocabulary. Though all three of this chapter’s authors engage with landscape in our research, we are not completely mesmerised by the concept. As we have emphasised, there are good reasons to question key traits of influential strands of landscape geography, and perhaps particularly to scrutinise what we believe is an over-emphasis on ‘the local’ as an inherently moral good. The task, it seems, is to move beyond this scale to render landscape geography more sensitive to various kinds of relationality, while also staying attuned to the ways that an analysis of landscape remains an analysis of the geographies of power.
For a concept that has been somewhat analytically stagnating for some time (Setten, 2020), explorations of landscapes need to become more tailored to understandings of relationality. However, the point is not merely to account for connectivity or fluidity per se. Rather, the point (again) is to critically scrutinise which relations for which kind of fluidities and relative (in)permanences can teach us more about the works that landscapes do and are set to do. There are multiple sources of inspiration that can be turned to that, no doubt, will produce a multitude of landscape relations. Employing a phenomenological ‘dwelling perspective’ (e.g. Qvenild et al., 2014 or Burlingame, 2020) will lead to a different kind of study and the unveiling of other landscape relations than one leaning on Hägerstrand’s förloppslandskap (Germundsson & Riddersporre, 1996). Similarly, Stenseke’s (2018) call for connecting relational landscape approaches to the introduction of ‘relational values’ in sustainability science, surely will lead to other ‘landscapes’ than Löfgren’s (2020) analysis of how landscapes can be known in spatial planning.
Lastly, but crucially, the way that Nordic landscape geographers have already striven to develop ways to approach landscapes in relational terms, has not been possible without being immersed in relations beyond the ‘Nordic’, be they of conceptual, material and/or social nature. Moreover, inspirations have continuously spurred traffic between landscape geography and other academic fields. In his introduction to political ecology, Bryant (2015, p. 19) underlines the significance of ‘part-time’ political ecologists, who “often bring novel insights to political ecology from research done in other areas”. Underlining the permeable nature of disciplinary boundaries and the fact that many scholars have an interest in multiple academic fields in multiple places at the same time, Bryant points to a facet that is just as prominent in landscape geography. In finding future ways of fruitfully grasping landscapes emphasising such a ‘part-time’ feature, and thus the continual traffic between various academic discourses, sub-fields and institutions, seems to become ever more important.
Notes
- 1.
However, see Germundsson and Riddersporre (1996) for an attempt to critically discuss the preservation of historical landscapes based on Hägerstrand’s notion of the ‘processual landscape’ (förloppslandskapet).
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Germundsson, T., Jönsson, E., Setten, G. (2022). In Search of Nordic Landscape Geography: Tensions, Combinations and Relations. In: Jakobsen, P., Jönsson, E., Larsen, H.G. (eds) Socio-Spatial Theory in Nordic Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04234-8_7
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