Defining landscape justice: the role of landscape in supporting wellbeing of migrants, a literature review

Abstract

Landscape Justice, we argue, is one of the preconditions for social sustainability underlined by an ethos of equality. While there are several social groups who experience discrimination, in this paper we focus on landscape and migration in the context of Europe’s gravest refugee crisis since the Second World War. Refugees, and migrants in general, are one of the most vulnerable groups of people in society. In most Western countries they face economic hardship and difficult living conditions and frequently have to face a social climate of prejudices and hostility. Such adversities, affected by spatial conditions and access to spatial resources, as well as affecting potential positive associations with landscape, are at the core of landscape justice. Building on the premise that landscape is the essential infrastructure for wellbeing and that research on landscape justice is instrumental to achieving the goals of the European Landscape Convention, this article offers a review of existing literature on landscape and migration. The goal is to identify new potential research directions and strategies that would contribute to landscape justice and wellbeing.

Keywords:

• Migration
• place attachment
• wellbeing
• landscape justice
• refugees

Notes

1. This review focuses mainly on migration to Europe, North America and Australia due to a limit of the scope (word count) permitted in this journal. Another topic which merits investigation is the relationship between landscape and forced migrations in developing countries.