Landscape History

Abstract:  This paper presents an argument for considering issues of class in analyses of communicative planning projects. In these projects, class interests tend to be obscured by the contemporary preoccupation with the class-ambiguous category of “community”. Through a case study of a project of urban redevelopment at King's Cross in London, we conceptualize and map class interests in an urban redevelopment project. Three aspects of the planning process that contain clear class effects are looked at: the amount of office space, the flexibility of plans, and the appropriation of the urban environment as exchange or use value. These aspects structure the urban redevelopment but are external to the communicative planning process. The opposition to the redevelopment has in the planning discourse been articulated as “community”-based rather than in class-sensitive terms. We finally present three strategies for reinserting issues of class into planning theory and practice.

Le monde belge de l’architecture du paysage et de l’horticulture de la première moitié du XXe siècle a jusqu’à présent fait l’objet de peu d’investigations. Une série de lettres inédites (Archives de la construction moderne-EPFL Lausanne) de l’une de ses figures les plus emblématiques, Jules Buyssens, ouvre une porte sur ce secteur important de l’activité économique et artistique.

Considers how landscape study helps us better understand the development of Cornwall. Reviews what landscape is, what aspects of it have been researched in Cornwall, and how that has affected the ways it is valued. From prehistory to the present.

When Samuel de Champlain founded the colony of Quebec in 1608, he established elaborate gardens where he sowed French seeds he had brought with him and experimented with indigenous plants that he found in nearby fields and forests. Following Champlain's example, fellow colonists nurtured similar gardens through the Saint Lawrence Valley and Great Lakes region. In A Not-So-New World, Christopher Parsons observes how it was that French colonists began to learn about Native environments and claimed a mandate to cultivate vegetation that did not differ all that much from that which they had left behind. As Parsons relates, colonists soon discovered that there were limits to what they could accomplish in their gardens. The strangeness of New France became woefully apparent, for example, when colonists found that they could not make French wine out of American grapes. They attributed the differences they discovered to Native American neglect and believed that the French colonial project would rehabilitate and restore the plant life in the region. However, the more colonists experimented with indigenous species and communicated their findings to the wider French Atlantic world, the more foreign New France appeared to French naturalists and even to the colonists themselves. Parsons demonstrates how the French experience of attempting to improve American environments supported not only the acquisition and incorporation of Native American knowledge but also the development of an emerging botanical science that focused on naming new species. Exploring the moment in which settlers, missionaries, merchants, and administrators believed in their ability to shape the environment to better resemble the country they left behind, A Not-So-New World reveals that French colonial ambitions were fueled by a vision of an ecologically sustainable empire.

A finales del siglo XVIII, y sobre todo o principios del XIX, los viajeros «descubren» y describen Grecia como un espacio real, el «decorado» de la Antigüedad. Lo historiografía monifestoró, por su porte, un interés crucial: «lo geografía» se convertirá poco a poco en uno introducción indispensable poro todo historio general de lo Antigüedad, y se empezará asimismo o cuestionarse en qué medido lo geografía determino lo historio. Historiadores que leen a viajeros, viajeros que leen o historiadores; historiadores y filólogos que se convierten ellos mismos en viajeros: la frontera entre los dos campos a menudo se difvmina. En este artículo, examino esto a través del ejemplo de un lugar historiográfico y periegético concreto: Esparta. El espacio de Esparta se convierte en un lugar de reencuentro -filológico, pero también real- de hombres y de textos de diferentes países de Occidente. Un lugar de intercambios multiculturales pero también de controversias, donde los franceses, ingleses, alemanes, etc. construyen, representan y reivindican lo imagen de lo antigua Esparta, uno imagen con múltiples usos, no sólo por lo historiografía sino también por lo político y los corrien· tes ideológicos de lo época.

Este libro plantea una síntesis de uno de los temas metodológicos que más desarrollo ha conocido en la Arqueología de los últimos treinta años. Desde que en la década de los 1960 la disciplina arqueológica superase definitivamente el esquema que mantenía al artefacto como objetivo epistemológico principal y a la excavación como único vehículo capaz de alcanzarlo, las teorías, métodos y técnicas de reconocimiento y análisis territorial se han expandido de una forma acelerada. Ello ha creado un ámbito de estudio y práctica profesional de la Arqueología, del cual, a pesar de su pujanza y de la diversidad y complejidad de procedimientos técnicos y nociones teóricas que aparecen implicadas, todavía no se había realizado una verdadera síntesis en lengua española. Este manual ofrece a los jóvenes estudiantes y practicantes de la Arqueología actual un tratamiento riguroso, pero accesible, de los principios aplicados tanto en la detección y caracterización de sitios arqueológicos en el territorio actual (prospección de superficie, prospección geofísica, empleo de imágenes captadas por plataformas aéreas y espaciales, cartografía arqueológica), como en la interpretación de las pautas de aprovechamiento, organización y percepción del territorio que se dieron entre las sociedades del Pasado.

This is an anthology on the current use in Denmark of historical maps within a large number of subject areas and topics. Each of the articles focus on one such area.

The book is published electronically within the series of Geoforum Perspektiv as vol. 38 in open access online.

Published as a contribution towards the National Lottery Heritage Fund Project for the restoration of the bells in Hitcham church, this richly-illustrated, 146-page, book not only gives an account of those bells and the Tudor bellframe in which they were set (dendro-dated for this project), but also describes the architecture and fittings of the church and gives the histories of its rectors (notable amongst whom are a medieval cardinal and the Revd Professor J.S. Henslow, the man who both tutored and inspired Darwin). Another major theme of the book is the histories of the manors and dispersed farmsteads of this large central-Suffolk parish, including the detailed survey of the manor of Hitcham contained in the Ely Coucher Book of 1249-50. Analysis of this survey has enabled many features of the medieval landscape to be identified and understood, and has also shown how many of the names of the manor’s tenants were adopted as ‘tenement names’ for the farmsteads in later manorial records.
Available from: https://www.suffolkinstitute.org.uk/books

Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico

Oxford University Press (January 2017)


How do societies negotiate the apparently competing agendas of environmental protection and social justice? Why do some countries perform much better than others?

Democracy in the Woods addresses these question by examining land rights conflicts—and the fate of forest-dependent peasants—in the context of the different forest property regimes in India, Tanzania, and Mexico. These three countries are prominent in the scholarship and policy debates about national forest policies and land conflicts associated with international support for nature conservation. This unique comparative study of the trajectories of their national forestland regimes, challenges the received wisdom that redistributive policies necessarily undermine the goals of environmental protection.  It shows instead that national environmental protection efforts take on either an inclusive (as in Mexico) or an exclusive form (as in Tanzania and, for the most part, in India), depending on whether dominant political parties are compelled to create structures of political intermediation, which help channel peasant demands for forest and land rights into the policy process.

The political analysis of the control over and the use of nature presented in this book opens up new avenues for reflecting on how legacies of the past and international interventions interject into domestic political processes to produce specific configurations of outcomes of environmental protection and social justice.

This book offers three different tests of this theory of political origins of forestland regimes: First, India’s most radical forestland reforms became possible because of the opening of a unique political opportunity structure, which enabled forestland rights movements to successfully press for long-awaited institutional reforms needed to address land rights conflicts.  Second, it successfully explains the rather counter-intuitive local outcomes of the programs for formalization of land rights in India, Tanzania, and Mexico. Third, it offers a coherent explanation of why each of these three countries proposes a significantly different distribution of the benefits of forest-based climate change mitigation programs being developed under the auspices of the United Nations. Democracy in the Woods offers a theoretically rigorous argument about why and in what specific ways politics determine the prospects of a socially just and environmentally secure world.

To avail of a 30% advanced order discounts, use the code ASFLYQ6 and place your orders here:  https://global.oup.com/academic/product/democracy-in-the-woods-9780190637385

This paper assesses the potential of software developed
by the research group of the Swiss Federal Institute for
Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) in order to
georeference and vectorise historical landscape photographs.
The use of this ‘Monoplotting’ Tool introduces a new
application for topographical photographs and opens up
the possibility of using such photographs for measuring
land-use change. This paper reviews the literature on the
use of historical photographs for landscape history. It
introduces the new software and then goes on to examine
how vectorised topographical photographs may help in the
measurement of land-use changes in the mountainous
landscape of Liguria and Trentino in the late nineteenth
and twentieth century.

This short news paper article is not written by me, but describes a landscape walk through the northern Netherlands coastal clay area, the former terps area. Oscar Borsen and I introduce the landscape and point out the relics of a dynamic past, many centuries before the dikes were build.

Avec ses vastes pelouses vallonnées, ses massifs d’arbres, ses nombreuses rocailles et ses étangs, le parc de Woluwe (Bruxelles) est aujourd’hui un lieu de promenade public très apprécié des citadins en quête de détente et de ressourcement. Mais en a-t-il toujours été ainsi ? L’auteur retrace ici l’histoire de ce grand espace vert de près de 70 hectares, dont les Parisiens firent l'éloge, non seulement dans ses dimensions paysagère et environnementale, mais aussi sous ses aspects humains : quels en furent les différents créateurs ? quelle fut son affectation originelle ? par qui a-t-il été fréquenté depuis son aménagement à la charnière des XIXe et XXe siècles ? Autant de questions auxquelles le lecteur pourra trouver réponse dans cet ouvrage.
[également disponible en e-book: http://patrimoine.brussels/fr/decouvrir/publications/bruxelles-ville-dart-et-dhistoire/le-parc-de-woluwe?set_language=fr]

Catalunya Romànica, vol. VI: Alt Urgell. Andorra, Enciclopèdia Catalana, Barcelona 1992: Els castells, pàgs. 34-43 L'organització del territori, pàgs. 74-76 La possessió del territori, pàgs. 76-78 L'espai quotidià, pàgs. 78-79. L'Arquitectura civil i militar i l'Arqueologia [Alt Urgell], pàgs. 99-100. L'Arquitectura civil i militar i l'Arqueologia [Andorra], pàgs. 405-406.

Dartmouth College, a member of the elite Ivy League, was founded in 1769 in Hanover, New Hampshire. Dartmouth is famous for its strong sense of community and tradition. Its traditions arose from the intertwining of history and legend and are often evident in material form in the College's cultural landscape. This paper examines Dartmouth's Old Pine, a purportedly mystical tree from the early days of the College that died in 1895. The preserved stump of the Old Pine subsequently transitioned from a natural feature to a cultural artifact. New traditions grew from the remains of the Old Pine in the form of the Class Day ritual and the erection of Bartlett Tower. The interplay between these artifacts in Dartmouth's landscape contributed to the development of a particular sense of place at the College. Through the years, social changes at Dartmouth generated controversies over class, racism, and exclusion in reference to Class Day, which consequently modified the meanings of the artifacts and rituals traditionally associated with the Old Pine. This paper argues that, despite these changes, old traditions and elements of socioeconomic class remain embodied in Dartmouth's cultural landscape and material culture aids in defining a place identity less evident than the one purported from the College's historical record and folk tradition.

Meend is a common place-name or toponym in and around the Forest of Dean. It is a name that is familiar to most people in the locality, and the majority of these could probably describe the principal characteristics of a meend. These could usually include an open character, uncultivated and accessible for informal recreational use. The word is often used in association with “forest waste”. These areas lay outside the forest plantation inclosures and were historically exploited by local communities for grazing and as a source of bracken, gorse and brushwood. These practices have declined over the last half century. Most meends that still exist have one or more of these attributes. However, many more have been lost over the years, and exist only as distant memories, have had their names corrupted or absorbed, or appear only as forgotten names on modern maps. This paper seeks to shed some light on the origins of what is possibly the most important group of place and field names in and
around the Forest of Dean and points to areas of research that would yield dividends in uncovering the social and environmental origins of the forest.

Le paysage bocager occupe une place de choix dans l'imaginaire collectif de nos paysages et en particulier dans les régions de l'ouest de la France. Pendant longtemps, ce terme désignait dans le langage courant un pays boisé fait de haies mais surtout d'arbres disséminés et de bosquets. C'est ce sens qui est encore mentionné au début du xxe siècle dans le Petit Robert. Le sens restrictif qu'on lui connaît aujourd'hui a été forgé par les géographes à la fin du xixe siècle pour désigner un système de champs enclos et complantés, associé à un habitat dispersé, un dense réseau de chemins, une forme relativement massive et irrégulière des parcelles et à un régime agraire individualiste. Il fut conçu et décrit comme l'antithèse de l'openfield. La haie et son talus/ fossé occupent évidemment une place de choix, mais ce qui la fait passer au stade de « bocage » est sa structuration en réseau. À l'issue d'un siècle d'études géographiques, historiques mais aussi archéologiques et paléoenvironnementales, ce concept de « bocage » en ressort durci et pose quelques problèmes lorsqu'il s'agit d'intégrer les récentes découvertes ou relectures qui entrent parfois en contradiction avec l'usage qui en est fait. Il s'agit pour cette raison d'un « objet en crise », dont les voies de recomposition existent pourtant et restent à
développer. Afin d’en faire la démonstration, nous commencerons par
retracer l’histoire de ce concept, déclinée à la mode bretonne, puis nous
ferons son analyse épistémologique en pointant les éléments en crise qui posent question. Enfin, nous esquisserons les voies de recomposition qu’offre, entre autres, l’approche archéogéographique, à travers quelques exemples succinctement rappelés.

The landscape garden of the Csáky family at Hotkóc is a well-known and important relic in the History of Hungarian sentimental gardens, owing to the contemporary descriptions and drawings about it. The oil painting ’Scenes from the Csáky garden at Hotkóc’ –the so called ’garden portrait’- is one of these relics. The portraitist János Rombauer was a well-known painter is Hungary, and in Russia to. First in my study I present the life and works of the painter, than I examine the garden structures painted on the garden portrait. On the basis of  the descriptions and the drawings I reconstruct the place of the small garden structures. At the end of my study I examine the importance of the painting, other analogous works of art, and other two portraits by the painter, which are connected to the sentimental gardens.

This article investigates rural resettlement schemes implemented by the French colonial administration in the light of the relationship between major economic, social and demographic dynamics in the Protectorate of Morocco. It explores the ways in which the French colonisers transformed the rural landscape of the Gharb valley in Morocco’s Rabat region. I depict the spatial configuration of the several stages by which rural colonisation and agricultural modernisation took place in the region, in relation to the patterns of human settlement they produced. The initial spatial configuration of the Gharb, determined by French colonial policies through the official colonisation programme and its orientation toward extensive agriculture, was subverted by the massive introduction of water drainage and irrigation infrastructure. The construction of reservoir dams and the establishment of drainage and irrigation perimeters across the valley induced a concentration of private and public investments that led to rural modernisation in certain, delimited areas. To compensate for a rural exodus that was overcrowding the outskirts of major Moroccan urban centres and for the lack of a local workforce available for employment on colonists’ farms, the French architect and urban planner Michel Écochard and his collaborators at the Service de l’Urbanisme conceived an ambitious programme of rural resettlements in the Gharb valley.

Urbanization in the Netherlands. A thousand years of spatial development.

(Paper in Dutch)

The history of Dutch cities has been the subject of
extensive research. Many themes and periods, as
well as many individual cities, have been studied.
However, a comparative overview of Dutch urbanization
has never been written. Therefore, the
Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands and
the Faculty of Architecture of the Delft University
of Technology decided to launch the Atlas of
Dutch Urbanization. This research project, the
first results of which are presented in this article,
aims at describing and explaining the growth of
cities from early mediaeval times up till the present.
This long-term overview of urbanization explains
the locations, structures and appearances of
our present-day cities. Many questions about city
design, transformation and heritage protection
can only be answered on the base of such an overview.
In this article, an overall picture of Dutch urbanization
is presented on the basis of a classification
of today’s 35 largest cities, classified by their origins.
From this classification five groups of cities
emerge. The oldest cities developed in the 11th and
12th century, all situated on the borders of wide
rivers, on locations throughout the Netherlands. A
second group of cities formed in the 13th and 14th
century on the borders of smaller rivers,. The third
group of late mediaeval cities consists of Amsterdam,
Rotterdam and The Hague, the three largest
cities of our time. The first two are located on the
fringes of the core area of the province of Holland,
on locations excellently connected to the sea and
the hinterland, while The Hague developed as the
administrative centre from the 16th century onwards.
From around 1400 AD, no new cities emerged until
the 19th century. From 1870 onwards, new
cities arose along the new railway infrastructure
in the sandy areas in the east and south as a result
of rapid industrialization. At the same time, suburbanization
led to the emergence of residential
towns. After World War II, a number of new
towns were created to absorb the rapid population
growth of the big cities in the west. In this period,
the roadway infrastructure played a leading role.
These first observations show that the emergence
and growth of cities is connected to their original
functions, but also to the landscape in which they
are located, and their location with regard to the
main infrastructures.

Aquest article pretén realitzar una primera aproximació al coneixement del paisatge històric del Segrià meridional, una regió que comprèn grosso modo els termes municipals d'Almatret, Llardecans, Maials i la meitat meridional del de Seròs. L'estudi agafa com a marc cronològic la longue durée, de manera que se centra en els principals processos que s'han anat produint al llarg de les diverses èpoques històriques i que han dut a la conformació del paisatge actual. D'aquests, pren una rellevant importància dins l'article l'anàlisi de les restes de centuriacions romanes, que sens dubte suposaren un abans i un després en el territori i marcaren fortament la seva evolució posterior. Entre d'altres aspectes, se centra també l'atenció en diverses partides creades en temps baixmedievals, que hom pot estudiar sobretot a partir de la documentació dels segles posteriors, així com en les transformacions d'època contemporània, principalment de l'any 1956 ençà.

[This paper aims to provide a first approach to knowledge on the historical landscape of southern Segrià, a region comprising roughly the municipalities of Almatret, Llardecans, Maials and the southern half of Seròs. The project establishes a long-term chronological framework focussing on main events from several historical periods that resulted in the current landscape arrangement. One of main events in the paper that set a milestone in the territory and played a key role in its evolution is the analysis of the remains of Roman centuriations. Other aspects touched upon are the 'partides' (Catalan land division) created in late medieval times, mainly studied through documents from later centuries, and contemporary transformations, particularly from 1956 onwards.]

The Kyklades or Cycladic Islands have always been popular amongst archaeologists working on the Aegean Bronze Age and the 'glorious' Classical Greek past. In contrast, not much light has been shed upon aspects of post-Roman life on the islands. Research into the post-medieval period has been a subject mainly for historians and folklorists. This paper attempts to explore aspects of the lifestyle of the peoples who inhabited this island group throughout the more recent, yet most neglected centuries of Greek history, using archaeological, textual and other sources and methods. My aim is to reconstruct everyday rural life in Greece, by focusing on the domestic sphere and addressing questions concerning society and the domestic material culture of a littoral area that has remained traditional until very recently.
This paper examines some .first results of the CYRE.P. (Cyclades Research Project) and introduces examples concerning the domestic material culture of the late medieval and post-medieval periods (early 13th-late 19th centuries) in the Aegean Islands of the Cyclades, with particular reference to housing, furniture and internal.fittings, costumes and embroideries.

This chapter looks at two nineteenth century asylum sites to explore ideas of 'madness' and 'landscape' in colonial Melbourne, Australia.  Ambivalent attitudes about the power of 'landscape' to both induce and cure madness is documented by analysis of asylum sites and what was said about them. Of particular interest is the perception that the land itself, that is the experience of 'Australia,’ produced its own form of madness. In this sense, the land can be conceived of as an ambivalent agent in the asylum experience, as representing both menace and salvation. Finally, the persistence of the belief in a particular 'landscape' as appropriate for the treatment of mental illness is briefly explored.

En este trabajo se presenta una propuesta didáctica que permita al alumnado universitario de las titulaciones en Geografía y Arqueología iniciarse en la caracterización e interpretación de los paisajes históricos. Para ello, se propone un procedimiento metodológico-pedagógico fundamentado en el reconocimiento de la estructura original del paisaje bajo un enfoque geosistémico (geosistemas origi-nales) a partir del cual se procederá al análisis de los procesos históricos-clave y fundamentos socioeconómicos que han contribuido a la configuración de los paisajes históricos y actuales. Final-mente, la prospección arqueológica superficial se utilizará como procedimiento para identificar y cons-tatar aquellos elementos tangibles e intangibles que permitan la reconstrucción del tipo de poblamien-to (asentamientos), modelos socioeconómicos del pasado y, en última instancia, el paisaje configura-do a partir de la interrelación sociedad-medio por parte de las civilizaciones del pasado.

I recently had the opportunity to review Alex Gibson’s thought provoking volume, 'Enclosing the Neolithic: Recent studies in Britain and Europe'. That review, to which the reader is directed for further commentary, identified as a weakness the uneven spread of regional case studies, and in particular the omission of studies from the West Country, Wales and North West England, which are so important in understanding the Irish Sea Zone. The aim of this paper is to address this with regard to the material from the North West of England, and in particular Cumbria. This paper is therefore meant to be read in conjunction with Gibson’s edited volume.

This article explores the early history of Kensington Palace gardens from the earliest reference in the Doomsday Book, to the purchase of the property by William and Mary in 1689 and the subsequent development of the gardens features, until 1702 when Queen Anne ascended to the throne.

This report shows how it is possible to collate Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data for historic settlement nucleation and dispersion with a range of data on environmental variables in order to investigate the relationships between them. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression model specification, selection and validation procedures, followed by further analysis using spatial regression methods, identified environmental variables that appear to have had the most significant influence on settlement organisation. The use of OLS and spatial regression and the innovative Relative Area Overlap (RAO) technique has enabled investigation of how relationships between key environmental variables and historic settlement organisation varied across England. Overall, the regression analyses indicate that far more of the variation in the measures of settlement organisation is not explained by the environmental variables than is explained by them. The results of the RAO analysis echo this conclusion. Using unsupervised classification, it has been possible to develop new, national-scale characterisations of historic settlement organisation and of key environmental variables. These new classifications of historic settlement organisation often broadly align with Brian Roberts and Stuart Wrathmell’s delineations of provinces, sub-provinces and local regions, but the cluster outlines and Roberts and Wrathmell’s boundaries diverge more often than they agree.

Buku ini membahas tentang perkembangan kebun-kebun (gardens) di dunia sejak antikuitas hingga munculnya profesi arsitek lansekap, dikaji berdasarkan konsep-konsep kebun yang berkembang pada tiap negara, pasang surut, bertemu, berinteraksi dan pengaruhnya terhadap perkembangan kebun di dunia. Masih sedikitnya tulisan yang membahas tentang kontribusi Islam, Cina dan Jepang dalam perkembangan arsitektur lansekap dunia menjadi dasar penyusunan buku ini.

The British Agricultural Revolution gradually but dramatically changed the face of the English countryside by the turn of the 19th century through a series of Enclosure Acts. New methods of farming backed by achievements of the Industrial Revolution were also responsible for the transformation of the landscape. These advancements were well known in the Continent and attracted many professionals and reform-minded individuals to Britain.

Among them were many Hungarian intellectuals whose struggles to make the feudal society of their homeland more similar to that of Britain is clearly expressed in their writings. For them, everything was connected: While English landscape gardens referred to the freedom and equality of all citizens, the overall cultivated English countryside expressed 'good society' where those free citizens were able to experiment and develop various farming methods and implement them to improve productivity. And finally, good society can lead to the common wealth of the nation.

The state of a society and its economic power is therefore well expressed in the landscape. This research explores Hungarian public thinking on designed and evolved landscapes of Britain in the first half of the 19th century, through the eyes of Hungarian travellers. Diaries, journals and travelogues were used, with numerous previously unknown manuscripts among them. The research has revealed that the perception of the English countryside had a serious impact on Hungarian agricultural development and landscape evolution.