Abstract
Landscape as Heritage: International Critical Perspectives brings together a constellation of multi-disciplinary scholarship to convene a critical interpretation of landscape and heritage studies. The volume, edited by Giacomo Pettenati, is centred around five guiding themes, or ‘challenges for thinking and practicing landscape as heritage’ (p. 10). These include mobilities and migrations, tourism, digital landscapes, decolonization and climate change. Despite this diverse thematic centring, the text itself is predominantly Eurocentric, with very few contributions stemming from outside of the greater European region. Although there is strong representation from outside of Western Europe, which succeeds in bringing historically marginalized European viewpoints to the fore, there lacks, overall, the geographic and epistemic pluralism required to fulfil a broader understanding of internationality. Moreover, while there is reference to the non-Anglo-Saxon orientation of the text, the frequently cited debates between Anglo-Saxon and European schools of thought serve to inadvertently reify the omission of non-Western perspectives. The volume is, however, an enduring and beneficial contribution towards understanding varying critical and contextual perspectives regarding ‘landscape as heritage’.
The volume is introduced through a processual reading of the history and development of critical landscape studies, critical heritage studies and cultural geography. In doing so, a post-structuralist foundation from which to read the text is formed. This includes attention not only to the conceptual development of ‘landscape as heritage’ over space and time but also to a recognition of the concept of ‘landscape’ itself as produced and reproduced (p. 6), an understanding of the power relations inherent in dominant heritage narratives or the ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (p. 8), as well as an appreciation of ‘multiple centralities/points of view’ (p. 7). This grounding introductory framework enables readers from a myriad of backgrounds to orient themselves with the disciplinary foundations from which the scholarship (and landscape as heritage debates) emerge.
The volume itself is comprised of 26 chapters and 24 case studies, each of which functions as its own stand-alone contribution. Despite the five thematic challenges to landscape as heritage presented in the introduction, there is no discernible categorization or schematic flow of chapters throughout the text. Rather than serving as a deterrent, this compels the reader to identify synergies and tensions within the discourse, of their own accord. The authors each approach the problematique of ‘landscape’ and ‘heritage’ in a unique and contextually grounded way. This includes, for example, examining the links between heritage, landscape and social/spatial justice in Italy vis-à-vis a ‘processual and relational’ pedagogical approach, which enables students to contest regional experiences of authorized heritage discourse (p. 24).
Several chapters take up the case of UNESCO World Heritage designation, and the ways in which this designation impacts local identity, politics and relationship to place. More-than-human relational ontologies are presented through the biocultural heritage of olive intercropping in Sicily, Italy (p. 80) as well as through an examination of bear biopolitics in Catalonia (p. 108). Both of these encounters centre ‘multispecies [and] more-than- human entanglements’ (p. 86) and question the ways in which certain spaces of heritage are (de)valued, or politically reconstructed, through the corresponding loss or activation of collective memory. Significant contributions explore the process of ‘remaking the landscape after trauma’ (p. 148), which includes examining the heritagization and memorialization of disaster zones (p. 149), the redevelopment and adaptation of ‘climate-ruined’ infrastructure (p. 255), as well as the reclamation of post- industrial and extractive zones as spaces of legitimate heritage (p. 207)––the latter being necessary for both ‘complicating’ the heritage story that is told about such places (p. 206), as well as for providing territorial healing and dignification (p. 279). Indigenous cartography and questions of coloniality are explicitly taken up through examinations of landscape intimacy in Colombia and Brazil, while questions of dissolve, remembrance and morality are unearthed through the study of ‘forgotten’ cemeteries in Aotearoa (New Zealand).
Perspectives are multi-disciplinary, with most chapters pointing towards the future within their examinations of the past. One can locate a definitive inquiry imbedded throughout the text regarding the ways in which heritage can (or should) be understood as ‘living’ and continually evolving within an ever-changing landscape. Despite this breadth of disciplinary and thematic inquiry, the 24 case studies relate only to 13 countries, the majority of which are located within the greater European region. 1 While the euro centrality of the text is acknowledged, and indeed questioned, by the editor, it makes the paucity of both geographic diversity and potential epistemic pluralism no less distinct. A subsequent volume, with specific contributions of thought from across the Americas, the African continent, the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific, the Caribbean, Australia, the polar regions and diasporic communities would uplift the conversation and contribute towards convening a broader, and more representative, assemblage of truly critical international perspectives.
Greater inclusion of alternative vocabularies and contextually distinct ways of conceptualizing landscape and heritage outside of the important––yet at times dualistic––discourse of ‘aesthetic versus substantive’ landscape heritage would help to broaden disciplinary pursuits away from inadvertent intellectual and epistemic imperialism and towards pluriversal ways of knowing. Moreover, examining the degree to which the volume’s overarching emphasis on formally recognized heritage landscapes can genuinely challenge entrenched power structures encourages the application of a critical lens towards the transformative potential (or limitation) of the existing disciplinary approach. For example, the prominence of formally recognized heritage landscapes as case-studies discounts the concomitant ways in which communities may engage in practices of relational autonomy (Ulloa, 2011) to protect spaces of landscape heritage while simultaneously seeking to make such spaces illegible to the State. Further explorations could examine the ways in which land-based cultures maintain landscape heritage through artistic and memory practices, when separated from a respective territory by space or time. In this way, the current absences within the book offer future opportunities to explore more deeply ‘heritage from below’, through the amplification of marginalized voices, decoloniality and attention to scale in both text and practice.
In all, the volume has certainly succeeded in ‘expanding and updating the debate about how critical heritage studies and critical landscape studies can be combined’ (p. 3) and is a highly useful resource for educators, students, scholars and curious readers alike. It is particularly relevant for those within the disciplines of human, cultural and critical geography, as well as political ecology, who seek to uncover perspectives about the interwoven and contemporary discourse(s) surrounding landscape as heritage.