Between ‘Platial’ Imaginations and Spatial Rationalities: Navigating Justice and Law in the Low Countries

Abstract

During the past two decades, landscape has frequently been conceptualized as a distancing way of seeing space. This conceptualization is normally traced back to the rise of capitalism and various modes of artistic representation, notably in the early modern Netherlands or the northern Low Countries. Yet recent scholarly interventions have asserted that landscape in the Low Countries and elsewhere in Europe was more than a distant scenery or an artistic mode of representation. Landscape also animated practices and ideologies of political representation, platial justice and custom. The platial notion of landscape and related concepts in the northern Low Countries around 1600 is focused upon, bringing out the intimate relationships between land, water and diverging ideals and practices of justice. It is argued that artistic landscape representation provided ways to reflect upon spatio-political developments in the Netherlands. Finally, there is a brief consideration of how these theoretical and historical issues resonate with modern thinking about landscape in physical planning.

Keywords:

• Low Countries
• political representation
• landscape imagery
• place
• custom
• justice

Acknowledgements

An early version of the essay was presented at the Landscape, Law and Justice Conference, Centre for Advanced Studies, Oslo, 15 – 19 June 2003. The author would like to thank Ken Olwig for helpful suggestions.