Speeding Towards the Future through the Past: Landscape, Movement and National Identity

Abstract

Recent theorising has emphasised the importance of movement in people’s engagement with and understanding of landscape. We suggest that there is a need here to problematise movement further. Rather than taking movement and the engagement with landscape that it offers for granted, we need to pay attention to the different forms of engagement with landscape that different forms of movement afford. This suggests, in turn, the importance of looking at how different forms of movement are made possible, demanded or denied. In looking at driving in Iceland we seek to draw attention to how different ways of moving are facilitated or hindered. We point out how the experience of driving is embedded in a larger and always complex political history so that the moving engagement with landscape is mediated by a larger story of the ‘nation’ and its relationship with the land.

Key Words:

• speed
• roads
• movement
• landscape
• Iceland

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to everyone in Iceland who has given of their time to talk to us. Thanks also to various reviewers and editorial staff at Landscape Research and to Jo Vergunst for their invaluable suggestions. Catherine Munro provided much needed assistance in producing the final version of the paper. The research was made possible by financial assistance from the National Research Council of Iceland, the College of Arts and Social Sciences and the School of Social Science of the University of Aberdeen. Contribution from the University’s Visiting Scholar Scheme made writing all the more manageable. We are grateful for the financial support.

Notes

1. Interviewees were recruited through informal family and friendship networks in Iceland. We sought specifically for interviewees who were old enough to remember travel along roads in Iceland before they were largely tarmacked.