Editorial: 2016: Landscape Justice in an Anniversary Year

Forty years ago, in 1976, the Landscape Research Group (LRG) changed the name of its newsletter, Landscape Research News, to Landscape Research, signalling an intention to upgrade it from what was primarily a members’ communication tool for news and reflection, to a medium for the publication and dissemination of landscape research in an accepted academic format. For the next 20 years, the LRG continued to publish the journal independently, but in 1996 they entered into an agreement with a commercial publisher (Carfax, who later became Taylor & Francis). 2016 therefore marks the 40th anniversary of Landscape Research as a research journal, and the 20th anniversary of its publication under the auspices of Taylor & Francis.

To celebrate this double anniversary we are devoting a whole issue later this year—‘The Editors’ Issue’—to a retrospective of the past 40 years, combined with a series of papers on current and future developments in landscape research. Guest edited by Mattias Qviström and Vera Vicenzotti, the Editors’ Issue will start with a review of the papers published over the past 40 years by Vera Vicenzotti, Anna Jorgensen, Mattias Qviström and Simon Swaffield. The remaining papers are the result of a Call we issued in 2014 to past and current editors of the journal, and members of the International Editorial Advisory Board, inviting submissions addressing the methodologies, epistemologies and scope of landscape research; the relevance of landscape as a concept; and the most pressing concerns, critiques, limitations and challenges facing landscape disciplines. The resulting contributions consist of: Matthew Gandy on wastelands and terrain vague, Susan Herrington on landscape aesthetics, Hanna Macpherson on walking methods in landscape research, Jala Makhzoumi on the discourse of landscape in the Arab Middle East, Tom Mels on environmental justice, Bas Pedroli et al. on the changing European ex-urban landscape, Ken Taylor on cities as cultural landscapes and conclude with John Wylie’s challenge to the idea of landscape as dwelling or cultural identity. I would like to thank the authors for their contributions, and Mattias Qviström and Vera Vicenzotti for their hard work as guest editors.

I would also like to thank all the contributors (authors, editors, editorial assistants, board members and reviewers) to the 40 years’ worth of Landscape Research that we celebrate this year. The journal is its contributors, and we rely on you for your continued support and input. More widely, the journal has always been and remains a key aspect of the activities of the LRG. Wittingly or not, contributors to the journal therefore play a major role in helping the Group to deliver its charitable objectives, for which the Group is very grateful.

The Editors’ Issue signals some directions for future landscape research. In the rest of this editorial, I would like to flag up one area that I personally think is especially important, and which I would like to see developed in the journal in future. In his paper, Mels (2016) writes of ‘a failure to engage with justice as a core issue of any politics of landscape’, and states that ‘landscape remains largely absent from environmental justice writing’. This reflects something that I have been feeling for some time: that both landscape architectural research and landscape research more broadly have tended not to engage critically with social and environmental justice to the same extent as some other disciplines e.g., planning.

What does ‘social and environmental justice’ mean for the purposes of this editorial? At the very least, it means addressing unequal (human) access to landscape goods and resources, including cultural resources or unequal exposure to environmental degradation and risk. I accept that this is an anthropocentric definition and raises the question of whether ‘environmental justice’ should also confer rights upon non-human beings and entities: animals, plants and other organisms, and perhaps entire ecosystems and even landscapes?

An enduring problem, in the context of landscape, is that whereas landscape may seem to be a neutral, even a natural environment, within which human activities occur, it is of course shaped continuously by those activities. Thus, it is inevitable that political, economic, social and cultural inequalities become enshrined in landscape itself, creating unequal access not only to natural goods and resources, but also to the embedded processes that determine how landscape is shaped and represented. Addressing those inequalities is made more difficult by the fact that it requires the involvement of non-landscape agencies, professions and disciplines. Further, the processual nature of landscape, combined with the increasingly global reach of the political, economic, social and cultural drivers that shape it, mean that landscape outcomes are often both temporally and spatially remote from their causes, making it all the more difficult to address those outcomes. It can also be argued that the critical edge of landscape architecture as a practice (in its broadest sense of landscape planning, management, design and science) always tends to be blunted by the immediate political and economic context in which it is operationalised. Thus, whilst a landscape professional can be critical about the project brief they are given, at the end of the day, it is the commissioning body that makes the decision about how the project should proceed, and if the professional is too critical they may find themselves out of a job. Whilst the academy might consider itself to be free of such constraints, they are continually present, e.g., in the research topics and terms of reference of research funding, and in the changing political economy of research institutions (see below), though such issues perhaps apply to all academic disciplines equally.

A quick search of the entire published content of Landscape Research since its inception in 1968 reveals 95 publications (including peer-reviewed articles, editorials, book reviews and other items) containing the word ‘justice’. Fifty-two of these have been published in the last 10 years (i.e., since the beginning of 2006), suggesting at least that interest in justice-related landscape issues has been growing recently. This ‘sea change’ was noted by Olwig in 2005, in his editorial in the Special Issue on ‘Landscape and Law’, stating that ‘The emphasis is now shifting from a definition of landscape as scenery to a notion of landscape as polity and place’ (p. 293). These 95 publications embrace a spectrum of engagement with these issues, with some authors engaging more deeply—including a handful who have contributed more than one publication, e.g., Shelley Egoz, Kenneth Olwig and Maggie Roe—and others for whom this focus is more superficial or incidental. The sample of 95 also includes the papers in a further Special Issue entitled ‘Justice power and the political landscape’, also edited by Olwig, together with Don Mitchell (2007). Despite these exceptions, it seems that justice related topics have only formed a small part of the subject matter of Landscape Research to date.

Of course it may be that quite a lot of work dealing with social and environmental justice has/is being done, including that published in Landscape Research, but that it is not explicitly framed as ‘justice’ research. For example, the concept and theory of sustainability address many important issues of landscape justice e.g., justice between generations. A search in Landscape Research for articles containing the word ‘sustainability’ retrieves an impressive 343 articles, a number of which undoubtedly do address the justice dimensions of sustainability in a profound way. However, ‘sustainability’ does not equate with social or environmental ‘justice’ (Campbell, 2013). At its most basic, whilst ‘justice’ implies universal values, ‘sustainability’ is frequently used in a more relative, context specific and development-oriented manner. Furthermore, both the word and concept of ‘sustainability’ are also often used very loosely in academic writing, e.g., to signify the general goal of a research enquiry, or assess the broad implications of research findings.

It could also be argued that justice is addressed in Landscape Research, but in very specific ways, which are not labelled as ‘justice’, e.g., by way of participatory methods and co-production; or in the consideration of specific issues, such as access to land, entitlements for non-human species, the landscape implications of deprivation and exclusion, children’s rights or the rights of people with disabilities. Whilst dealing with the specifics is essential, I would still call for greater and more explicit engagement with the range and complexity of social and environmental (in)justice in landscape, and for the continued development of theory and language for tackling landscape injustice.

The LRG’s (2014) new Research Strategy is therefore a very welcome development in this context. The overarching aim is ‘to advance research which contributes towards more just and sustainable relationships between people and landscape’ and, in particular research which addresses ‘the challenge of injustice in landscape contexts’; ‘the challenge of rapid environmental change by developing human responses to change at the landscape level’; ‘the challenge of short-term and narrow franchise approaches to the governance and development of landscapes’; and research ‘which questions conventional modes of thought and develops new ways of thinking concerning landscape’ (LRG, 2014, pp. 3–5).

The first of these priorities, which deals most explicitly with social and environmental justice, is elaborated as follows:

The challenge is to tackle injustice relating to the inter-connected social, cultural, economic and environmental benefits and burdens, goods, services and agencies arising from landscape. The LRG will advance research which contributes to the recognition, documentation, analysis and understanding of landscape injustice and to the development of transformative responses to such injustice. (LRG, 2014, p. 3)

The term ‘landscape injustice’ effectively encapsulates the nexus of ‘social, cultural, economic and environmental’ drivers and outcomes that coalesce in social and environmental injustice in particular landscape contexts, e.g., the escalating problem of slums and informal settlements in the global south (UN Habitat, 2015). This formulation of landscape injustice also indicates the major challenge facing researchers, which is that the causes of injustice are multiple, intertwined, complex and rapidly changing, and operate over multiple geographic and temporal scales, and political and disciplinary boundaries. As a result, the solutions to these complex, ‘wicked’, problems are said to lie beyond the scope and reach of conventional landscape interventions (i.e., planning, management, design and science) and to call for multi and interdisciplinary working, innovation in research methods and design and new models of research funding that cross geopolitical and disciplinary boundaries.

Examples of these new types of research funding in the UK include the recent joint research councils’ call under the Valuing Nature Programme (2015), led by the Natural Environment Research Council, calling for research bids relating to ‘Understanding the Value of the Natural Environment for Improving Human Health and Wellbeing’. The call emphasises the need for ‘a broad interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral approach’, for ‘whole system approaches’, and for partnership working with end users in the co-development of projects and the co-production of knowledge and applied outcomes.

Another example that is both international and more directly aimed at landscape injustice is the suite of research calls under the UK Government’s Newton Fund (Department for Business Innovation and Skills, 2015), intended ‘to develop science and innovation partnerships that promote the economic development and welfare of developing countries.’ The calls are based around research collaborations between UK researchers and research collaborators in a suite of countries in the global south namely Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines, South Africa and wider Africa, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam. The ‘Urban Transformations in China’ Call involving the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council and the National Natural Science Foundation of China focused on projects addressing the issue of urbanisation, and the projects funded under the call address problems of ‘social exclusion, housing, migration, transport, crime, food security, disaster risk and environmental resilience’ and are said to have the following characteristics in common: they are ‘cross-disciplinary’, ‘multi-scalar’, ‘future oriented’ and ‘internationally comparative’. It would be interesting to find out whether grant-giving research bodies and governments in other countries have the same preoccupations.

Does this accelerating demand for interdisciplinary and multiscalar working mean that landscape justice can only be a focus for large research consortia and not small grants or unfunded research? On the contrary, I believe that there is an important and continuing role for smaller projects offering in-depth exploration of specific issues and instances from a single disciplinary perspective. However, such research needs to be conducted with an enhanced understanding of the wider contexts and complexities of the problem under consideration, as well as the limitations (and strengths) of an intradisciplinary approach. Conversely, there are many aspects of the new research paradigm that ought to be scrutinised, e.g., by asking whether co-production, whilst helping to focus research enquiry on ‘real-life’ problems, also potentially fetters the ability of the academy to ask ‘awkward’ questions?

The international dimensions and reach of landscape injustice affecting the global south have recently become much more apparent as the result of the current so-called European refugee crisis. A cartoon in the style of a graphic novel that seeks to explain the origins of the Syrian civil war is currently circulating on social media (Quinn & Roche, 2011). According to this cartoon, the origins of this crisis lie in climate change, which produced the worst drought on record in Syria from 2006 to 2011, leading to the abandonment of farming in many areas and mass in-migration to cities. This mass social mobility, combined with the Arab Spring, created a hotbed that gave rise to pro-democracy protests in March 2011, which were brutally suppressed, leading progressively to the ongoing and escalating conflict, in which world superpowers are now involved. Over 11 million people (half the Syrian population) have now left their homes, with 4 million seeking refuge in other countries (Rodgers, Gritten, Offer, & Asare, 2015). Whether or not this represents an accurate picture of the causes of the Syrian conflict, it seems that there is currently a more generalised pattern of people fleeing economic hardship and/or political oppression in Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea and other countries including Iran, Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia and Sudan, and seeking refuge in Europe.

It is clear that landscape injustice is both a cause and an outcome of this process e.g., being a characteristic aspect of both the inequalities that precipitate mass migration and the conditions in the camps that await refugees. What seems to differentiate this process from previous waves of migration is both the role of new media in attracting refugees to particular European destinations and the way in which the flow of people is acting as a very tangible bridgehead between landscape injustice in the global south and the developed world. In consequence, it is becoming more difficult to think of landscape injustice as a geographically remote or isolated phenomenon.

Whenever I return to the UK from abroad I am struck again by the new fiction of the UK Border in passport control. Minutes after I have emerged from inside the plane, noted the local weather and aspect, set foot on UK terrain, and walked the often considerable distance to passport control, only to be confronted with the sign in front of me demarcating the UK border, I invariably start wondering about the nature of the no person’s land I am in, and which legal or other functions this new border concept fulfils, contrasting my own ability to move smoothly through ‘the border’ with the legal and regulatory barriers facing many others. Somehow the physical and ideological borders of the country have been prised apart. Is this a new phenomenon, or just the latest in a long line of ideological tinkering with borders?

The refugee crisis is tangible proof that both the origins and consequences of landscape injustice are far reaching, providing new agendas for landscape research. These relate to the injustices people are fleeing from and to, but also to the landscape consequences of this mass migration: how such increasingly mobile global populations relate to landscape as well as the landscape and landscape-related ideological strategies deployed to respond to these mobilities. We look forward to receiving contributions on these and other justice-related topics.

Anna Jorgensen
Department of Landscape, University of Sheffield, UK
[email protected]