Contested Landscapes

Landscapes are not just backdrops to human action; people make them and are made by them. How people understand and engage with their material world depends upon particularities of time and place. These understandings are dynamic, variable, contradictory and open-ended. Landscapes are thus always evolving and are often volatile and contested. They are also always on the move - people may or may not be rooted, but they have 'legs'. From prehistoric times onwards people have travelled, but the process of people-on-the-move - as tourists, or on global business, as migrant workers or political or economic refugees - has vastly accelerated. How and why do people who share the same landscape have different and often violently opposed ways of understanding its significance? How do people-on-the-move make sense of the unfamiliar? How do they create a sense of place? How do they rework the memories of places left behind? There is nothing easeful about the landscapes discussed in this book, which are often harsh-edged and troubled both socially and politically. The contributors tackle contested notions of landscape to explain the key role it plays in creating identity and shaping human behaviour. This landmark study offers an important contribution towards an understanding of the complexity of landscape.

Landscapes are not just backdrops to human action; people make them and are made by them. How people understand and engage with their material world depends upon particularities of time and place. These understandings are dynamic, variable, contradictory and open-ended. Landscapes are thus always evolving and are often volatile and contested. They are also always on the move - people may or may not be rooted, but they have 'legs'. From prehistoric times onwards people have travelled, but the process of people-on-the-move - as tourists, or on global business, as migrant workers or political or economic refugees - has vastly accelerated. How and why do people who share the same landscape have different and often violently opposed ways of understanding its significance? How do people-on-the-move make sense of the unfamiliar? How do they create a sense of place? How do they rework the memories of places left behind? There is nothing easeful about the landscapes discussed in this book, which are often harsh-edged and troubled both socially and politically. The contributors tackle contested notions of landscape to explain the key role it plays in creating identity and shaping human behaviour. This landmark study offers an important contribution towards an understanding of the complexity of landscape.

Conflict Landscapes explores the long under-acknowledged and under-investigated aspects of where and how modern conflict landscapes interact and conjoin with pre-twentieth-century places, activities, and beliefs, as well as with individuals and groups. Investigating and understanding the often unpredictable power and legacies of landscapes that have seen (and often still viscerally embody) the consequences of mass death and destruction, the book shows, through these landscapes, the power of destruction to preserve, refocus, and often reconfigure the past. Responding to the complexity of modern conflict, the book offers a coherent, integrated, and sensitized hybrid approach, which calls on different disciplines where they overlap in a shared common terrain. Dealing with issues such as memory, identity, emotion, and wellbeing, the chapters tease out the human experience of modern conflict and its relationship to landscape. Conflict Landscapes will appeal to a wide range of disciplines involved in studying conflict, such as archaeology, anthropology, material culture studies, art history, cultural history, cultural geography, military history, and heritage and museum studies.

The book uses Athens as a case study to identify the key features of urban anti-poverty policies in Greece and to discuss them in relation to policy developments in the crisis-ridden countries of Southern Europe. The idea of contested landscapes shapes the focus of the book on urban poverty and homelessness. Contested landscapes refer to the complex dynamics between visible and invisible poverty and to competing strategies on how to address them. The book takes a path-dependent view on the development of post-welfare arrangements, devolution, and pluralism that are being shaped by both neoliberal mentality, solidarity and communitarian practices. The authors draw on their own research and advocacy background in New York and Athens to shape their conceptual and methodological tools; however, rather than uncritically ‘importing’ North American and North European concepts to Greece, the book highlights the significance of distinctive Mediterranean features for analysing homelessness and anti-poverty policies. This will be a useful read for academics policy makers in areas of urban studies, sociology, social policy, human geography and anthropology.

Winner of the 1998 Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Section on Marxist Sociology of the American Sociological Association Homeless persons find themselves excluded, repressed, and displaced in all sectors of everyday life--from punitive police and city zoning practices to media stereotypes. Wandering through the streets of developing cities, these poorest of the poor have no place to go. More and more, these city developments are not simply accepted passively; rather, resistance by organized homeless groups--civil protests, squatting, and legal advocacy--spread as conditions of everyday life deteriorate for the very poor. Out of Place: Homeless Mobilizations, Subcities, and Contested Landscapes details the development of two organized homeless resistances in two different cities. From the redevelopment protesters and squatting activities of the Student-Homeless Alliance in San Jose to the squatter camps of Tranquility City in Chicago, the differences and similarities between both groups are highlighted within the context of city redevelopment policies. Wright argues for considering homelessness not merely as an issue for social welfare, but first and foremost as a land use issue directly connected to issues of gentrification, displacement, and the cultural imaginings of what the city should look like by those who have the power to shape its development. How the homeless combat the restructurings of everyday life, how they attempt to establish a "place" is understood within the context of tactical resistances. Questions of collective identity and collective action are raised as a result of the successful organizing efforts of homeless groups who refuse to be victims. The struggle between individual and collective forms of empowerment is highlighted, with the conclusions pointing to the necessity to rethink and go beyond the traditional solutions of more housing and job training.

This book examines the politics of landscape and heritage by focusing on the example of Great Zimbabwe National Monument in southern Zimbabwe. The controversy that surrounded the site in the early part of the 20th century, between colonial antiquarians and professional archaeologists, is well reported in the published literature. Based on long term ethnographic field work around Great Zimbabwe, as well as archival research in NMMZ, in the National Archives of Zimbabwe, and several months of research at the World Heritage Centre in Paris, this new book represents an important step beyond that controversy over origins, to focus on the site's position in local contests between, and among individuals within, the Nemanwa, Charumbira and Mugabe clans over land, power and authority. To justify their claims, chiefs, spirit mediums and elders of each clan make appeals to different, but related, constructions of the past. Emphasising the disappearance of the 'Voice' that used to speak there, these narratives also describe the destruction, alienation and desecration of Great Zimbabwe that occurred, and continues, through the international and national, archaeological and heritage processes and practices by which Great Zimbabwe has become a national and world heritage site today.

Associating social justice with landscape is not new, yet the twenty-first century's heightened threats to landscape and their impact on both human and, more generally, nature's habitats necessitate novel intellectual tools to address such challenges. This book offers that innovative critical thinking framework. The establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, in the aftermath of Second World War atrocities, was an aspiration to guarantee both concrete necessities for survival and the spiritual/emotional/psychological needs that are quintessential to the human experience. While landscape is place, nature and culture specific, the idea transcends nation-state boundaries and as such can be understood as a universal theoretical concept similar to the way in which human rights are perceived. The first step towards the intellectual interface between landscape and human rights is a dynamic and layered understanding of landscape. Accordingly, the 'Right to Landscape' is conceived as the place where the expansive definition of landscape, with its tangible and intangible dimensions, overlaps with the rights that support both life and human dignity, as defined by the UDHR. By expanding on the concept of human rights in the context of landscape this book presents a new model for addressing human rights - alternative scenarios for constructing conflict-reduced approaches to landscape-use and human welfare are generated. This book introduces a rich new discourse on landscape and human rights, serving as a platform to inspire a diversity of ideas and conceptual interpretations. The case studies discussed are wide in their geographical distribution and interdisciplinary in the theoretical situation of their authors, breaking fresh ground for an emerging critical dialogue on the convergence of landscape and human rights.

The uprooting and displacement of people has long been among the hardships associated with development and modernity. Indeed, the circulation of commodities, currency, and labor in modern society necessitates both social and spatial mobility. However, the displacement and resettlement of millions of people each year by large-scale infrastructural projects raises serious questions about the democratic character of the development process. Although designed to spur economic growth, many of these projects leave local people struggling against serious impoverishment and gross violations of human rights. Working from a political-ecological perspective, Anthony Oliver-Smith offers the first book to document the fight against involuntary displacement and resettlement being waged by people and communities around the world. Increasingly over the last twenty-five years, the voices of people at the grass roots are being heard. People from many societies and cultures are taking action against development-forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR) and articulating alternatives. Taking the promise of democracy seriously, they are fighting not only for their place in the world, but also for their place at the negotiating table, where decisions affecting their well-being are made.