Landscapes of Defence

John R. Gold, George Revill, John R. Gold, George Revill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317877516
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Planificación de ciudades y desarrollo urbano

This is a key text on the very topical themes of power, defence and space. Landscapes of Defence is an exciting collection of theoretical and empirical material from very well known contributors, desiged to help students understand how landscapes of defence fit in with some of the broader concepts of space, power and place to which they are introduced in the 1st year. The book is split into four sections, and each section contains an introduction placing the subsequent chapters in context. There is also a comprehensive introduction and afterword to tie the book's broad themes together. 2nd and 3rd year undergraduates in urban and cultural geography will be the key market for this title, as well as strong secondary market in departments of Sociology, Anthropology, Law and Planning.

CHAPTER 1

LANDSCAPE, DEFENCE AND THE STUDY OF CONFLICT

John R. Gold and George Revill

Some time ago, one of the editors of this book visited the newly opened ‘Broadway Centre’ of an outer suburban borough in West London. The centre itself was an interesting mixed development, finished externally in the neo-vernacular style of postmodern architecture that flourished in the early 1980s. Inside it contained the typical retail chain outlets and restaurants found in any British shopping mall but, somewhat unusually, it also incorporated a new public library, an outdoor meeting area with seating called the Town Square, fountains, an interior space that included a bandstand, and generous statuary. It seemed the right place to illustrate a planned lecture that could show that such places might play a role in future urban life if only it was possible to find the right blend of public and private, civic and commercial. With this, ironically sympathetic thought in mind, he took out his camera.

It was not the wisest move. Before he had done more than squint through the camera’s viewfinder, two security guards appeared on the scene, seemingly from nowhere. They proceeded to demand not just that he cease taking photographs – which he had not yet done – but also that he open the camera and hand over the film. A heated discussion ensued of the sort that probably convinced passers-by that a dangerous felon had been detained. When asked why photography was banned, the security guards stated that the architects had given ‘strict instructions’ that no one was to do so – presumably to ensure that only favourable images appeared in the local or professional press. ‘What you have to remember,’ said one, ‘is that this is private property.’ When challenged that this could scarcely be so when the complex now contained the borough’s main public library, he replied: ‘that is only the inside of the building. They can let you take photographs if they want, but the outside belongs to us.’

In the event, all ended reasonably amiably in the centre manager’s office. The photographer was allowed to keep his film, albeit at the expense of receiving a short lecture about ‘correct behaviour’ and the need to go through ‘the proper channels’ if he wanted to take pictures in future. There was, however, no change in the underlying attitude. Although it was admitted that appearances might be deceptive, it was emphasised that this was private space owned by a large financial corporation. The management reserved the right to control access. It was free to exclude any person or usage deemed unsuitable without the need for further justification. Taking photographs apparently placed the offender in that category.

All then was not as it seemed. A private corporation had provided space for a town square and a public library but had blurred the lines between private and public space. The new facilities gave every impression of being meeting places of the type that are standard parts of the civic life of most British towns and cities, but the owners retained the right to regard them as space within their control, policed by their own security staff. This control even extended to making attempts to restrict the way in which the external appearance of the buildings was represented, despite the fact that this had few implications for the security of tenants, proprietors or users.

Revisiting the Broadway Centre in 1999, we found that, while it retains its character as defended space, it is no longer an isolated island of security. Steel pillars, sometimes cast in the shape of upturned cannon but sometimes just functional square-sectioned posts, block the approaches to stores in the adjacent High Street at risk from ram-raiders. The gates of a local Church of England school carry notices to warn potential intruders that the metal has been treated with special non-drying paint that will adhere to anyone attempting to climb over. Ungainly iron frames found in surrounding streets await the return of the rubbish containers that were removed during the early 1990s to reduce the threat of parcel bombs left by terrorists. More significantly, the centre itself now lies in the heart of a large area of shops and offices over which networks of closed-circuit television cameras keep watch. These networks include both security video cameras belonging to private firms and a highly visible public network. The latter employs cameras placed at elevated points on buildings or mounted at the top of 10-metre posts, the massive reinforced bases of which look strong enough to guard against accidental or deliberate damage by a passing articulated lorry. Very occasionally the cameras silently swivel to change their angle of regard – the only tangible signs that they are in use. It is unclear though whether they simply feed images into video recorders for potential use in case of need or whether observers actively monitor them.

This all seems to convey an atmosphere of danger, but local people report that they do not feel any more or less secure than they did prior to the introduction of security equipment in the central area. Normal life proceeds much as before. Nor for that matter are there significant signs that surrounding areas, unprotected by the paraphernalia of high-technology security equipment, are suffering grave insecurity. The tree-lined residential streets have front gardens bounded by traditional low fences or neatly clipped hedges. Relatively few have burglar alarms or security lights, and there are rio grilles on windows. There are few signs of graffiti or of wilful damage to road signs, bus shelters or other street furniture. Indeed, most people scarcely seem to have noticed the increase in surveillance and control that has been implemented in the adjoining town centre. The security equipment found there is regarded as unexceptional: commonplace features in the landscape that are taken for granted by those who use the town centre. They have simply become part of the reliable background for everyday life.

These small examples hint at wider themes. Whatever one’s assessment of the long-term prospects for global security after the end of the Cold War, other indications suggest that little has occurred to reduce the role of security considerations at other levels. The new, often fiercely contested, boundaries established after the internal partitions of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the former Soviet Union have offset the erosion of national boundaries within the European Union. The military continues to hold huge tracts of land in Europe and North America for training and weapons testing. Indeed, it may be argued that concerns about security, control and reduction of risk have become increasingly important influences in the conduct of everyday life. Close observers of cities, suburbia and rural areas throughout the Western world would argue that the private domain is steadily expanding through the agency of defensive strategies that seek to create surveillance over, exert control over and partition the public domain. In the process, we find the growth of ‘landscapes of defence’, defined here as landscapes shaped or otherwise materially affected by formal or informal strategies designed to reduce the risk of crime, or deter intrusion, or cope with actual or perceived threats to the security of the area’s occupants.

Our aim in this book is to bring together a set of essays that offer critical analyses, explanations and some understanding of landscapes of defence in their wide diversity. Through a series of case studies focusing substantially on Anglo-American experience, our authors examine issues of ethnicity, nationalism and landscape symbolism, land rights, resource use, globalisation and environmental risk, privatisation and public space, surveillance, policing, and citizenship. They find defensive landscapes in suburbia and the inner city; in the financial heart of the City of London and the remotest rural regions; at international airports and in the design of prisons. They find expression of landscapes of defence in the fears of parents for their children and in the schemes of planners and architects; in the cultural politics of community activists and in the rhetoric of ethnic separatists. They show that even in an age apparently characterised by globalisation and transnational developments, defensive landscapes continue to proliferate, addressing new sources of conflict and uncertainty as well as reflecting longstanding sources of social, cultural and political conflict.

However, with such a multiplicity of phenomena potentially offering themselves for inclusion within the scope of this text, it is important to explore carefully the rich meanings of our central term ‘landscapes of defence’. Certainly, when used independently, the terms ‘defence’ and ‘landscape’ both have complex patterns of usage which have an important bearing on any term that expresses their conjunction. The task in the remainder of this chapter, therefore, is to explore the nature of landscapes of defence, sample something of their diversity and begin to ask what it is that brings these different phenomena together.

DEFINING TERMS

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Defence, as the extensive entries under this heading in the Oxford English Dictionary make clear, is a word with rich connotations. It can apply equally to the prevention of physical attack, a response to symbolic threat and the presentation of a response to legal prosecution. It is conceptually related to security and control, to minimisation of risk and maintenance of privacy, to preservation of status and projection of power. It can apply equally to the actions of an individual in warding off direct aggression or the operation of culturally derived rules that regulate grounds for dispute so thoroughly that conflict is scarcely noticed in practice. ‘Defence’ can imply creating divisions between insider and outsider, civilisation and wilderness, order and chaos, self and other: but the meaning of each of these dichotomies can and does change over time. Depending on the prevailing circumstances, the hard-fought battlefield of one era can easily become a forgotten name on a changing political map, an ecological treasure, a mythologised site for rallying nationalism or a heritage centre for a booming tourist industry (Gold and Gold 2000). Certainly, analysis of the different ways in which the term ‘defence’ is used to give legitimacy to physical and social interventions can supply a potent starting point from which to scrutinise a wide range of social processes and practices.

Strategies to achieve defence against other people or against nature have long figured prominently in shaping the human environment. Although it is always dangerous to infer too much from the archaeological record, the evidence clearly shows that defence in its broadest sense was intrinsic to the ordering of early civilisations. Dykes and other works designed to defend communities from flooding were implemented as much as 6000 years ago to allow settlements to flourish in the otherwise hazardous bottom lands of the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, Indus and Yangtze valleys. Field evidence also provides ample evidence of military defence. The survival of relic walls, ditches, ramparts, castles and garrisons, sometimes in a well-preserved state of repair, reflects the effort once expended upon their construction. Some were undoubtedly designed to protect communities from their natural or human enemies, yet concentrating the populations in fortified centres also served the political goals of ruling elites. Throughout Europe, for instance, the feudal regimes of the medieval period created a network of fortified towns situated in planned and regulated countryside (Baker and Harley 1973; Ashworth 1987; Dodgshon 1987; Roberts 1987; Morris 1994). These, as European history clearly shows, were necessary to meet defensive needs, but defence also justified the concentration of population into a space where they could be controlled. Later, during the period of colonial expansion, many defensive constructions served the function of protecting the interests of an imperial power, symbolically serving to establish a presence and create an image of power that might impress indigenous populations or rival colonists. For example, the planned settlements of the British Empire – ranging in architectural style through Italian Renaissance and mock Tudor to pastiche Mogul – both translated European culture into alien environments and represented an imaginative reconciliation with an exotic colonised ‘other’ (King 1976). Over time, ‘defence’ encompassed an ever wider range of features. Access to scarce resources, ethnic separatism and the security needs of private financial corporations, among others, presented new demands for defensive measures giving rise, as we shall see later in this chapter, to a new repertoire of secure structures and forms of control.

Landscape, our second key term, also provides a challenge to the lexicographer. Originating in the late sixteenth century as a technical term used by painters to describe the depiction of natural inland scenery, it quickly took on wider meanings and connotations. Inter alia, landscape became associated with styles of gardening, artistic representation, topographic interpretation and photographic convention. From the standpoint of the present inquiry, however, it is important to recognise that there are firm grounds for associating ‘landscape’ with notions concerning ‘defence’. It may be convincingly argued that the very term ‘landscape’ is itself intimately bound up with activities associated with defence, security and protection. Warnke (1994), for example, began his study of landscape painting by considering the representation of frontiers in both language and painting. He argued that it is only relatively recently that the borders between European nations have been reduced to mere lines. Hence the border and all that this represented in terms of cultural, political and economic difference was conveyed in a vocabulary of landscape. Moreover, he noted (ibid.: 11) that the common German word for ‘frontier’ until well into the sixteenth century was Landmarke, the second element of which is cognate with the English marche (as in the ‘Welsh Marches’):

Borders were thus constituted by marches – woods, mountain crests, wildernesses, steppes, swamps, moors, lakes or rivers & To describe such boundaries as ‘natural frontiers’ tends to obscure the fact that nature was left artificially intact so that it could function as a boundary and so serve a cultural purpose.

In the same vein, Olwig (1996) showed how the medieval German term Landschaft referred to a restricted or administratively bounded piece of ground (see also Muir 1999: 3). Other authors claim that the development of landscape as a set of aesthetic practices and as a way of seeing are closely tied into landscape’s defensive functions. In its most general formulation, W.J.T. Mitchell (1994: 9) related the aesthetic practices of landscape to militaristic cultures widely ranged across time and space, arguing that:

Two facts about Chinese landscape bear special emphasis: one is that it flourished most notably at the height of Chinese imperial power and began to decline in the eighteenth century as China became itself the object of English fascination and appropriation at the moment when England was beginning to experience itself as an imperial power. Is it possible that landscape, understood as the historical ‘invention’ of a new visual/pictorial medium, is integrally connected with imperialism? Certainly the roll call of major ‘originating’ movements in landscape painting – China, Japan, Rome, seventeenth-century Holland and France, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain – makes the question hard to avoid.

The various historical aspects of this assertion have been examined in a range of contexts. Typically, these connect landscape aesthetics to the strategic practices of surveying, cartography and civil engineering. Schama (1995: 10) suggested that landscape as a pictorial aesthetic developed from the culture of defensive landscapes in the seventeenth-century Netherlands:

Landshap, like its German root, Landschaft, signified a unit of human occupation, indeed a jurisdiction, as much as anything that might be a pleasing object of depiction. So it was surely not accidental that in the Netherlandish flood-fields, itself the site of formidable human engineering, a community developed the idea of a landschap, which in the colloquial English of the time became a ‘landskip’.

Cosgrove (1984; 1985) has shown how the origins of pictorial perspective derive from the rediscovery and reworking of geometric theory in Renaissance Italy. The development of visual perspective is therefore linked to the practices of map making, land surveying, cartography and navigation. These technologies were fundamental to the development of the Venetian state as a maritime power and trading nation, to the making of agricultural land and the consolidation of wealth in the Venetian hinterland. Sullivan (1998) argued that issues concerning defence, security and national integration in early modern England were discursively bound into depictions of land and landscape in the theatre, themselves echoing the discourses of politics, estate management, surveying and cartography. In this regard, the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries amplifies the arguments of the time concerning moral economy of national defence and security in the transformation from feudal relations of authority and security to capitalist relations of absolute property (ibid.; see also Helgerson 1986).

It is also true that in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was an important relationship between topographical drawing and military surveying. This was the case overseas, where sketching and watercolour painting supported topographical and geological surveys for imperial purposes (Livingstone 1992; Godlewska and Smith 1994; Gregory 1994). However, it was also important within Britain itself, where the aesthetics of landscape painting were undergoing radical transformations – as exemplified by the rise to prominence of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. In this context, for example, Daniels (1993) has argued that the mapping of Britain was part of a broader revision of the country by travel writers, antiquarians, landscape gardeners and landscape painters, linked to the threat of invasion during the Napoleonic Wars. Perhaps the most notable artist in this regard was Paul Sandby, who began his career as a draughtsman employed on the military survey of Scotland. His art continued to be highly influenced by military drawing and map making, and later he became a renowned topographical painter, credited with popularising the sites and scenes of the Highlands of Scotland (ibid.: 61). Indeed, Sandby’s work, with its underpinnings in military need and topographic representation, was typical of much that helped to shape imaginative geographies of Scotland during the late eighteenth century (Gold and Gold 1995: 39–41).

INSTINCT AND AFFECT

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Ideas that are deeply rooted in human history often invite analyses that give prominence to instinct theory. Given the deeply engrained relationship in Western culture between landscape and defence, it is not surprising that a variety of theoretical perspectives have sought to essentialise this relationship as one derived from instinctive behaviour. To Jay Appleton (1990; 1996; see also Orians 1986; Bourassa 1991; Kaplan 1992; Muir 1999: 255–8), for instance, our cultural preferences for designed parkland landscapes and for landscape paintings based on theatrical rules of perspective and visual closure are derived from our ancient ancestry as savannah-dwelling hunter-gatherers. In his view, the conventions of both the designed parkseape and landscape painting are merely expressions of an innate desire to locate ourselves at a hidden, defended and protected vantage point. Appleton’s ‘habitat theory’ and ideas of ‘prospect’ and ‘refuge’ assert that the landscapes we find most attractive are those ‘that once would have afforded us, as individuals involved in the struggle for survival, the opportunity to see without being seen, to eat without being eaten, to produce offspring that survive’ (Greenbie 1992: 65; Muir 1999: 249).

Although such biologically ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Landscape, defence and the study of conflict
• 2 Landscapes of risk: conflict and change in nuclear oases
• 3 Fear, loathing and space for children
• 4 Landscaping for power and defence
• 5 Fundamentalist loyalism: discourse, resistance and identity politics
• 6 Israeli security scapes
• 7 Fortification, fragmentation and the threat of terrorism in the City of London in the 1990s
• 8 Landscapes of defence, exclusivity and leisure: rural private communities in North Carolina
• 9 Living on the edge: defending American Indian reservation lands and culture
• 10 CCTV surveillance in urban Britain: beyond the rhetoric of crime prevention
• 11 Urban design approaches to safer city centres: the fortress, the panoptic, the regulatory and the animated
• 12 A constable in the landscape
• 13 Designing control and controlling for design: towards a prison plan classification for England and Wales?
• 14 Policing the public realm: community action and the exclusion of street prostitution
• Bibliography
• Index