Challenges in Landscape Methodologies

Methodologies discussed within landscape architecture and planning are moving towards more action-based and holistic approaches under the influ-ence of the ELC (Jørgensen et al., 2016; Stahlschmidt et al., 2017; Egoz et al., 2018). The preamble to the ELC calls for a ‘true landscape democracy’

(EC, 2000, cited in Primdahl et al., 2018, 162). Methods for public partici-pation in landscape matters are up for revision towards more inclusion in the negotiation of landscape value. One of the means to achieve that is to challenge the prevailing practices of “landscape character assessments” that have gained importance and are now a mandatory part of any project that is subjected to environmental impact assessments in Northern Europe. In Land-scape Analysis: Investigating the Potentials of Space and Place, the authors, Per Stahlschmidt, Simon Swaffield, Jørgen Primdahl and Vibeke Nellemann, emphasise that the landscape analysis process must become more accessible and values-based as a ‘discursive activity’ if it is to be a means to

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tising landscape in the future (Stahlschmidt et al., 2017, 32). They provide ample space for disciplinary established landscape approaches and methods used in the process of “making landscape”. These situational landscape anal-ysis tools can be listed as transdisciplinary map inquiries to understand the

“natural aspects” of the landscape (geology, hydrology, topography or land-cover), “historical landscape analysis”, different examples (retrieved from the historical record within the architectural disciplines) of utilising cartography interpretatively to understand place (such as the Nolli Map of Rome), as well as techniques of investigating “landscape potential”, by drawing site sections and overlay methods. Investigating landscape potential is part of the prospec-tive capacities of landscape architecture. I argue that these projecprospec-tive capaci-ties have much to offer landscape theory in terms of anticipation of landscape trajectories. It is a potential in this to develop a multimodal and anticipatory discursive method.

Rural landscapes are subject to rapid change. Primdahl and Kristensen (2016) argue that ‘Experiences gained in urban planning are, therefore, useful when discussing the emerging rural landscapes’ (Primdahl and Kristensen, 2016, 227). The authors propose drawing in insights from urbanism to meet the challenges posed by deregulated/centralised market policies and policy interventions that are fragmented across various domains and political-ad-ministrative levels, while ‘spatial planning has been inadequate to deal with rural landscape change’ (ibid, 228). Jørgen Primdahl and Lone S. Kristensen compare challenges to policy and planning approaches to guiding agricul-tural countryside change in Denmark with geographer Patsy Healey’s (1988) analysis of how urban problems in the 1970s and 1980s led to the following:

‘More strategic and more integrated approaches focusing on place making issues for neighbourhoods, town quarters, city regions and other spatial enti-ties have to a large extent replaced former, highly sectorial urban planning practice’ (Primdahl and Kristensen, 2016, 277).

To be successful, a landscape strategy process requires a relatively high degree of consensus among the stakeholders involved in managing the landscape in question and is, therefore, unlikely in landscapes with high levels of unresolved conflicts. (Primdahl et al., 2018, 162)

In order to understand landscape, and landscape terms, one will actually have to spend time in the landscape, and to be curious and open to the knowledge those who produce the landscapes through practice. Further, we need to be careful to connect and to interpret concepts and theories in relation to practice and to a variety of ways of knowing. Fiskevold (2016) calls for critical acts

of perception, in order to be able to perceive something that is not already preconfigured as and described as a landscape category. In other words, to be open, be observant and attentive and willing to learn. Learning new concepts alters the mode of landscape perception.

In 2013, I attended a lecture by Mikkel Nils Sara on reindeer herd socialities.

He described herd dynamics, from a social science perspective and described how the herders learned to know the personalities of the individual reindeer through the ways they interacted with the herd. For instance, some individual reindeer always moved to the very centre of the herd, some were always taking the lead during migration, while others were always lagging behind.

In the spring, for instance, they would be gnawing lichen from the stones sticking out of the snow and waiting till they were prompted by the herder to resume walking. In 2015, I participated in a short stretch of the spring migration. From the snowmobile I saw, just as Sara had said, that there was a group of reindeer that always waited until the herders was quite close before they moved on. A calf was falling behind because it started do get exhausted.

We drove close to see how it was coping and I saw that it was walking in the footsteps of those in front. When I asked about this afterwards, I was told that yes, reindeer walk in each other’s paths to save energy, and that is something everybody knows. This landscape experience taught me the complexity of relating to practical knowledge and building relations to landscape on many levels.

As I concluded in chapter 2, studying and relating to contested landscapes requires a multifaceted concept of landscape. Feminist, postcolonial, and Indigenous approaches have discussed methodology in ways that help analys-ing the complexities and ambiguities that exist contested landscapes.

Under a communitarian, feminist ethical model, researchers enter into a collaborative relationship with a moral community. (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011, 418)

This is what my thesis has attempted to carry out in terms of research meth-odologies and methods but also through design techniques and tools. It is important, at the start of the chapter, to mention that these are drawn from my professional expertise and practice as an architect. They are also part of my development as a researcher, learning how to apply my graphic, spatial and visual literacies and fluencies to fieldwork, to a wider critical reading of cartography, and to providing a mix of data and their relations in academic analysis.

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3 . 2 R E F L E X I V E A N D Q U A L I T A T I V E R E -S E A R C H M E T H O D -S

Broadly, my research is largely qualitative in character, both contextual and interpretative in its reach. It is a reflexive study that employs multiple meth-ods and draws on aspects of design-based and hermeneutic inquiry. It does so in a reflexive research design that includes the interplay between situated studies that draws on document analysis, along with the voices of a diversity of participants.

Methodology concerns questions about how we know what we know and how we make accounts of the world(s) we study. ‘Methodology, as the word suggests, relates to processes where the design of the research and choice of particular methods, and their justification in relation to the research project, are made evident’ (King and Harrocks, 2010, 7). Across the humanities and social sciences, there are different schools of thought as to what are appropriate methods in the production of different kinds of knowledge.

Qualitative methods are well established in most social sciences and in the humanities. Qualitative methods of collecting and analysing empirical material range from ‘the interview to direct observation, the use of visual materials or personal experience’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011, 14). Qualitative methods also include the procedures of managing and interpreting large amounts of qualitative materials. Denzin and Lincoln (2011, 14) continue:

‘The researcher may also use a variety of different methods of reading and analysing interviews or cultural texts, including content, narrative and semiotic strategies.’ In Alvesson and Skjölberg’s (2009) view:

It is not method but ontology and epistemology which are the determinants of good social science. These aspects are often handled better in qualitative research – which allows for ambiguity as regards interpretative possibilities, and lets the researcher’s construction of what is explored become visible – but there are also examples of the use of the quantitative methods in which figures, techniques and claims to objectivity are not allowed to get the upper hand but are subordinated to a well thought out overall research view. (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2009, 7)

Critical approaches study the material conditions of ideology. ‘Foucault’s thinking has a special methodological relevance, since he focused on the relation between power and knowledge’ (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2013, 228). Qualitative research covers a range of approaches with a commitment

to radical democratic, participatory and power-sensitive research practices.

That is taken up in disciplinary and transdisciplinary formations in and between anthropology, different forms of discourse analysis, cultural studies, media studies, community and place studies, landscape research, pedagogy, healthcare, critical arts-based inquiry and more. ‘Critical arts-based inquiry situates the artist-researcher in a research paradigm committed to democratic, ethical agendas’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011, 415).

It might be appropriate at this point to restate that my study is not a wholly or exclusively social science study. My thesis is an interpretative landscape study with a critical design approach. Design approaches in research are often process-driven inquiries. I work in a way which is multimodal, transdisci-plinary and multisited, all of which are modes of inquiry that are encouraged in qualitative research. I have worked primarily with qualitative methods but have included some quantitative research from the environmental sciences in my analysis; further, cartographic representations always contain quantitative and geo-positioned information. While quantitative research is concerned with measurements, frequency, and probability expressed by numbers, per-centages and ratios, qualitative research is interested in rich descriptions and interpretations of people’s lifeworld. In the The SAGE Handbook of Qualita-tive Research (2011), Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln offer an initial, generic definition:

Qualitative research is a situated activity that locates the observer in the world. Qualitative research consists of a set of interpretive, material practices that make the world visible. These practices transform the world. They turn the world into a series of representations, including fieldnotes, interviews, conversations, photographs, recordings, and memos to the self. At this level,

qualitative research involves an interpretative, naturalistic approach to the world. This means that qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to interpret phenomena in terms of the meaning people bring to them. (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011, 3) The positivist ideal of the disinterested and neutral researcher that is often privileged in research programmes is challenged in reflexive methodologies.

Reflexivity offers insight into the researcher’s own interests, in order for the reader to locate from where the research text is speaking. A focus on cultivating a method to be reflexive of the researcher’s position comes to the forefront.

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from the handling of empirical material towards, as far as possible, a consideration of the perceptual, cognitive, theoretical, linguistic, (inter)textual, political and cultural circumstances that form the backdrop to – as well as impregnate – the interpretations. (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2009, 9)

In reflexive methodology, there has been long-standing work to find strategies to analytically and methodologically relate to complexity and ambiguities. In qualitative inquiry, that orientation is related reflexively and interpretatively to contexts, participants and participative voices and interested perspectives (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011). This may be a mix of the ethnographic and the participant observer, a set of contextual studies from law to policy, and a variety of shifts between description and analysis.

To be situated and to be reflexive are different things. According to Haraway (1988), we do not have enough insight in ourselves to be reflexive; instead she proposes that the knowledge that is produced must be situated. I draw on theoretical support from Donna Haraway on how knowledge comes into being and focus on how the ethnography (the multimodal ethnographic description) that I created came into being. Haraway writes that:

A map of tension and resonances between fixed ends of a charged dichotomy better represents the potent politics and epistemologies of embodied, therefore accountable, objectivity. For example, local knowledges have also to be in tension with the productive structurings that force unequal transitions and exchanges—material and semiotic—

within the webs of knowledge and power. (Haraway, 1988, 588) Situated knowledge is located and based on critically positioned seeing that open for reflection.

We are also bound to seek perspective from those points of view, which can never be known in advance, that promise something quite extraordinary, that is, knowledge potent for constructing worlds less organized by axes of domination. (Haraway, 1988, 585)

To move beyond generalised explanations that render everything the same, real conversations in actual landscapes are needed.

The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in

politics and shared conversation in epistemology. (Haraway, 1988, 584)

Such conversations do not leave the field untouched (Stien et al., 2015, 294).

All research is performative ‘because realities are being made alongside representations of realities’ (Law, 2003). In research involving landscape and cartographies, this is indeed the case, as ‘Mapping itself participates in any future unfoldings’ (Corner, 1999, 214). More than mere rhetoric, qualitative research has also sought to shape and to convey the type and character of its investigations, their status and their potential to provide trustworthy and detailed accounts that draw on a range of media types and modes of communication.

Qualitative research allows the researcher to be flexible and let the events that take place during the study to a certain degree guide the choice of methods. If new tools or techniques have to be invented or pieced together, then the researcher will do this. (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011, 4)

Multimodality (Kress, 2011) asserts that “language” is just one among the many resources for making meaning. Some of the multimodal methods I used was invented or augmented during the course of the study.