Revealing Change in Cultural Landscapes

Material, Spatial and Ecological Considerations

Catherine Heatherington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429657139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

This book explores different design approaches to revealing change within a landscape, and examines how landscape designers bring together the cultural context of a specific place with material, spatial and ecological considerations.

Revealing Change in Cultural Landscapes includes case studies such as Gilles Clément's Jardin du Tiers-Paysage in France, the Brick Pit in Sydney, Australia and Georges Descombes' Renaturation of the River Aire in Switzerland to uncover the insights of designers. In doing so, Catherine Heatherington considers the different ways designers approach the revealing of change and how this informs a discussion about people's perceptions and understanding of landscape.

With over 100 images and contributions from Jacky Bowring, Dermot Foley and Krystallia Kamvasinou, this book will be beneficial for students of landscape and landscape architecture, particularly those with an interest in how landscapes change over time and how this is perceived by both designers and visitors.

1

Introduction

There is a tendency to romanticise the timelessness of landscapes but, in reality, they are all about change – material and spatial records of the action of time. And it is not only the physical that is embedded and revealed in places; it is also the intangible – the memories, secrets and mysteries, the everyday practices and traditions. Tiberghien explains how landscapes can be thought of as ‘the sedimentation of collective acts, the witness of usages that have often disappeared, the memory of a world that has sometimes lost its sense for those who inhabited it’ (2009: 156).

Put more prosaically, landscapes can be thought of as the result of both natural processes and the perceptions and actions of humans (Council of Europe, 2000). Clearly, therefore, landscapes are cultural (Fairclough, 2016); indeed, many question whether any landscapes can be considered truly wild. Recently plastic debris has even been found in the 11,000 metres-deep Mariana Trench (Chiba et al., 2018). On a planetary scale it is now accepted that the world has entered a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – in which humans are the most significant agents of change (Steffen et al., 2011; Hamilton, 2019). The world is facing widespread environmental catastrophe, leading practitioners and academics to explore ways in which to build resilient landscapes that respond to the dramatic changes that are predicted. Yet little thought is given to how to make these landscapes legible.

The de-industrialisation of parts of the Western world has resulted in a growing discourse focusing on brownfield sites and industrial ruins. The post-industrial landscapes that attract the most attention are those where the ruins form the basis for the new design. However, in practice, the future of most of these sites is unremarked upon; often they fall into dereliction before either being redeveloped, when the economic circumstances are favourable, or they revert to green spaces – wildlife reserves or parks. The approach to change is expedient and quotidian. Large developments of industrial land, often in the centre of our cities, have also brought a new phenomenon to urban life – the often unacknowledged public/private dichotomy. Many open places in our cities appear to be public land but are in fact owned and controlled by large, private organisations; again, the legibility of landscapes is called into question. In addition, in towns and cities with increasingly diverse populations of people with different backgrounds and expectations, a fluid understanding of landscape meaning is demanded; narratives are contingent, changing and unfinished.

It is against this backdrop of change that this book is set. The case studies discussed in later chapters merge and blur, or create juxtapositions between the cultural and the (apparently) natural, while also considering the relationships between people and place. In examining cultural landscapes where change is revealed, I remain firmly at the human scale, examining the ways in which we perceive places with all our senses, their intangible and affective aspects, the role of memory and imagination and how we understand and create meaning and continuity. The focus on these more personal considerations might quite justifiably be challenged and questions asked about their relevance in the light of long-term global problems: not only the climate emergency, but also, for example, the continuing widespread contamination of large areas of post-industrial land that could take hundreds of years to be made safe. However, I am making a case for the diversity of interpretations, for storytelling, for the development of imagination and for the experiencing of landscape at the micro and the macro levels. By creating ways in which individuals can participate in places on multiple levels, designers can open up possibilities for a closer engagement with landscape that can lead to a more nuanced understanding of the issues that affect us all in the twenty-first century.

An academic discourse that emphasises process, change and the unfinished nature of landscape also needs to examine what this means in practice. In this book, I address this, not merely looking at seasonal change and plant growth – although I do consider these aspects – but also examining: ephemerality and transience; weather and tides; decay and ruination; unpredictable future change and historic cultural change. I also consider experiential and intangible aspects, such as memory, imagination and anticipation. This book draws these facets of change together, examining how designers address these issues, speculating on their success or failure and exploring how they are perceived and understood by visitors.

There is a beach in Suffolk that I have known all my life. It is not particularly special or beautiful but I have visited it on and off since I was small. It epitomises the different ways in which landscape change can be revealed. This is not a pristine, wild landscape – it is a beach in a town that has been declining for decades. The fishing industry of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries is all but gone, only a few tourists come, the canning and frozen food factories have closed. The changes along the beach have taken place against this backdrop and over multiple timescales. There are the obvious cyclical, diurnal and annual changes wrought by the tides, weather and seasons. These can be predictable but often are not; the cliffs here are subject to erosion and a storm or high tide can cause landslips. The visitor wandering along the beach finds bricks, concrete, sections of roof timbers and other detritus among the chalky boulder clay at the base of these cliffs, visible reminders of the houses that have succumbed to the forces of nature. Some years, looking up, it was possible to see part of a bungalow or chalet on the very edge, precariously waiting to be the next to fall. Bricks become rounded forms, scraped and eroded by the action of the sea. The landslides sometimes bring fossils to the surface, taking the focus of the visitor from the immediacy of the destroyed building to the distance of the geological past.

Less dramatic but no less mysterious are the effects of these storms and tidal surges on the beach itself. I have seen ridges of pebbles, head height, come and go in a season, timber and rusting metal groynes hidden by sand and then, one year, suddenly revealed. There are huge, old blocks of concrete fortifications battered by waves, eroding gradually, but seemingly unchanged from season to season and other defences built more recently in an attempt to protect the fragile dunes, heath and property. Marram grass establishes itself in swathes across the sandy pebbles and then is gone again. A walker along this changing beach cannot help but be aware of the threats to other coasts around the world, many of which will be irreversibly changed or submerged in the coming decades.

Among the dunes are anti-tank gun emplacements and concrete Suffolk Square pillboxes (a design unique to the area; Liddiard and Sims, 2014), reminders of the fortifications built during the Second World War. During the war, a decade or so before I knew it, the beach was covered in coils of barbed wire and lines of anti-tank concrete blocks were erected along the cliffs (Liddiard and Sims, 2014). Recently, a few miles south along the coast, long metal spikes were revealed by the changing tides – remnants of the ‘Dragon’s Teeth’ installed to rip out the bottom of invading boats (Hanson, 2019).

Other cultural interventions also stimulate the imagination: the footpath called Tramps Alley; the designated nudist beach that surprisingly for several years was situated in a fairly uninspiring section of the coastline; the curious grove of exotic bamboo that established itself among the heathland and dunes. For decades, as children, we had to avoid patches of oil – washed up spillage from the tankers sometimes glimpsed on the horizon. Questions remain in the mind of the visitor, stories are told, memories are formed and reformed.

Oil pollution is no longer normal and an alternative energy for the future is signalled in the views from the beach. Towards the town at Ness Point there is a single, huge, land-based, wind turbine. This prefigures the arrays of turbines in the North Sea that appear out of the haze on a clear day. More are planned and there is even talk that this industry will be the one to revitalise the town.

This beach is not a designed landscape but it is a cultural one. I have drawn attention to the changing coastline in order to make clear the different ways in which change occurs, how it can be understood and the stories that can be woven around it.

The structure of the book

In this book, I show how designers create aesthetic experiences that grant the visitor an insight into the dynamism of landscape and the relationship between the human and the non-human on both a local and a global scale. In Chapter 5, I examine the strategies and techniques used to reveal change when developing post-industrial, brownfield and other cultural sites. This is followed in Chapters 6, 7 and 9 with an exploration of different aspects of change through an analysis of selected case studies. First, in Chapter 6, I examine the actions of wind, water, the seasons and the tides and how designers work with these elemental changes. Friedberg remarks that ‘although light, wind, sun, shadow, reflection, temperature, seasons and time are omnipresent, they … go unnoticed. Yet their product is change – ephemeral’ (1996: 95). I discuss sites where attention is drawn to these natural phenomena and examine how designers have embraced, or guarded against, the indeterminacy that is a consequence of these elemental changes.

In Chapter 7, I examine the ways in which designers reference relatively recent historical and cultural events that have taken place in the landscape prior to its redevelopment and how these sites continue to reveal change. I explore how materials and forms are used to reference cultural history, the reuse of materials and artefacts and the palimpsest approach to layering histories in the new landscape. I discuss ways in which landscape can become a ‘bridge to the past’ (Manzo, 2005) and examine how visitors create their own sense of personal continuity through the stories they tell and the memories these landscapes evoke (Heatherington, 2018).

Often, abandoned industrial and military sites find new leases of life as wildlife and nature reserves – reverting ‘back to nature’. There are many examples where the former uses of these landscapes become completely concealed beneath vegetation. However, in some cases the encroaching nature and the decaying culture are kept in an uneasy balance. This approach is sometimes called managed decay (DeSilvey, 2005) or, when the ultimate end is erasure of what has gone before, it is known as controlled ruination. In Chapters 7 and 9, I discuss case studies at different stages on this nature/culture gradient, in some cases, revealing the ecological processes that drive change but in others concealing it. In Chapter 9, I consider how natural processes help manage water remediation and circulation and discuss how the non-expert might understand such processes, be they natural or designed. I also examine sites that have been designed with the expectation that they will change in the future. This may be due to changing political and social priorities or because of financial considerations, or it may be that the future of the sites cannot yet be determined.

I set the scene for the book in Chapter 2 where I examine the discourse around time, landscape and change, touching on geological time, cyclical, seasonal change and rhythm as well as linear and sequential time, before discussing process in landscape architectural theory. I discuss the ways stories might be told about landscape, histories concealed or revealed and also consider the place of memory and imagination in visitors’ perceptions.

This is followed in Chapter 3 by an examination of the context in which decisions are made about the approach to take to the redevelopment of brownfield and former industrial sites. I also consider the issues raised by the increasing desire to rewild or renaturalise landscapes and, finally, I discuss the problematic nature of disruptive change.

The book is interspersed with three chapters by practitioners and academics in the field, focusing in more detail on key theoretical and practical concepts. In Chapter 4, Krystallia Kamvasinou examines the different approaches taken to ephemerality in five interim landscapes that have grown up in London, UK, over the last decade. These projects have defined ‘place’ both temporarily and for the long term in diverse and sometimes intangible ways that defy fixed notions of site and place-making.

Jacky Bowring writes in Chapter 8 about the aftermath of the 2010 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand. She reflects on how the histories and memories of residents, moved from the uninhabitable Red Zone to new housing developments, remain as traces in the now unpopulated landscape. The future of this vast landscape poses questions about how landscape palimpsests are managed through processes of change.

With innovative landscape plans as visual tools, Dermot Foley in Chapter 10 explains the processes behind the development and construction of a park in Dublin. He focuses on the reuse of secondary-raw-materials as surface elements and explores the ways in which these end-of-waste products can be used as substrates for the development of successional vegetation.

Finally, in Chapter 11, I consider what can be learnt from these case studies when designing landscapes in an increasingly uncertain future. I question whether our digital environment is taking precedence over the experience of being in the here-and-now and examine the place of memory, loss and forgetting in landscape. I consider the role of ephemerality and complexity in gardens and the impact of shocking juxtapositions between different time periods. I end with a call for designers to consider how landscapes might contribute to a limited form of individual and cultural resilience – doing the best we can.

References

Chiba, S., Saito, H., Fletcher, R., et al. (2018) Human footprint in the abyss: 30 year records of deep-sea plastic debris. Marine Policy, 96, pp. 204–212.

Council of Europe (2000) European Landscape Convention. Available at: www.coe.int/t/dg4/cultureheritage/heritage/landscape/ (accessed 2 August 2014).

DeSilvey, C. (2005) Rot in peace: Putting old buildings and settlements to rest. Slate. Available at: www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2005/12/rot_in_peace.html (accessed 24 May 2013).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of plates
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Thinking about time and change
• 3 Contexts of change
• 4 Experiencing interim landscapes: Ephemerality and place-making
• 5 Revealing change
• 6 Cycles, succession: Being in the here-and-now
• 7 Histories: Reimagining the past
• 8 The temporality of memories in an abandoned landscape: Christchurch’s Residential Red Zone
• 9 Processes: Anticipating the future
• 10 Small imperfections: A case study
• 11 Making sense of change
• Index
• Plates