Decolonising Landscape Approaches

I argue that it is uncultivated to call meahcit or marker “uncultivated land-scapes”, “wilderness”, or “wastelands” because those terms fail to acknowl-edge the cultures of other natures. When environmental impacts on meahcit (Schanche, 2002) are assessed as though they were impacts on “landscape”

in the meaning of the word that is used in environmental governance or, alternatively, uncultivated areas, those impacts are not registered. Studying or teaching “landscape” in reindeer pastures without recognising Sámi pastoral-ism and traditional relations to the meahcci is at best ignorant. At worst, it is a discriminatory continuation of colonial practices.

It is first and foremost anthropologists and geographers that have taken on the big job in articulating methodologies that reflect postcolonial thinking.

At a lecture on the Oslo School og Architecture and Design (AHO) in 2012, Jérémie McGowan called for self-reflection among architects. Architects have not discussed the colonial element in their attempts to perceive and represent places. McGowan criticised architects from Fehn to Koolhaas, as enjoying the status as the last white male intellectual heroes, in a profession where

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this is not yet addressed. It is time, then, to stop lagging behind in taking on the task of postcolonial self-scrutiny. Philosopher Etienne Turpin proposes that ‘By discovering affinities and alliances with both the sciences and the theoretical humanities, architecture as a practice can begin to reassess its privilege, priorities, and capacities for inscription within the archive of deep time’ (Turpin, 2013, 4). Reassessing privileges is part of a process to decolo-nise a discipline and a profession. Landscape architects do not yet have a clear voice in discourses of contested landscapes that matter greatly for Arctic communities. Can design thinking, tools and skills, the prospective capacity of the profession contribute in the negotiations of the future landscape?

Following Cosgrove, the art of representing space in the Renaissance became a science. Using science, measuring and gauging are necessary to make a prospect, in the meaning of both a view of a landscape and a mineral pros-pect. It might be useful to group the landscaping practices depending on the mastery of geometrical techniques and tools as prospective arts. But, in the meaning of a future, of making a future, a wider range of vested interests, strategies and tools needs to be taken into consideration, to understand the practice of prospecting. I therefore propose to use the term “prospective arts” for landscape-changing activities that are deliberate and regulated. The prospective arts propose landscape trajectories and have a vested interest in shaping the physical environment.

The materialities in the multimodal construction of arguments in the archi-tectural professions are acts of making. They are enmeshed in the social, in power-saturated relations but, at the same time, contribute specific ways of knowing, through material engagement with the world, by ‘employing the many media available for it, from buildings, drawings, exhibitions, maga-zines, books, photographs, to film, television, statistics, the Internet, and more’ (Scott, 2016, 442). Such material experience is implicit in the partici-pation in discourses surrounding industrial and infrastructural prospects and at local cultural scenes and international venues. In the public discourse about anticipated futures, the counter knowledge that is provided in the prospective arts is multimodally mediated in the shape of counter prospects.

Placing landscape architecture among the prospective arts places it in the same category as mining, infrastructure development, agriculture, husbandry and other prospective activities that compete to shape the future landscapes.

2 . 6 C O N C L U S I O N T O C H A P T E R 2

From the oceans, a continuous landscape stretches through Norway, Swe-den, Finland and northwest Russia, from green islands and alpine coastlines deeply indented with fjords to deep boreal forests, lakes and rivers, mountain plains and thawing tundra. The Atlantic Current of the Gulf Stream keeps the coastal waters ice-free. With multiple regional extensions and disparate po-litical affinities, Fennoscandia and Sápmi go by many names: ‘Scandinavia’, the ‘Barents region’, the ‘North Calotte’, and, in its uppermost regions, the

‘European Arctic’. These names have different histories, all of them freighted with geopolitical significance, and all of them confirming the high strategic importance the region has retained from the 16th century—when it was repre-sented as an inchoate northern territory—to the politically and economically demarcated resource province of the present day.

Studying and relating to contested landscapes requires a multifaceted concept of landscape. The term “landscape” appears with different meanings and ontological content in material and discursive landscaping practices. Ethi-cal, aesthetical and ontological dimensions apply differently to landscapes, depending on what the term “landscape” means, both as multi-dimensional cultural landscapes and as multiple mediated representational landscapes that make policy. This chapter has developed the notion of the perforated land-scape as an analytical framework to explain material-discursive practices in contested landscapes.

Although the polemics on the meaning of the term “landscape” have come to a temporary rest with the European Landscape Convention, various definitions of the term “landscape”—that is, different landscape concepts contained in different ontologies—are decisive for how landscape is governed, represented, perceived, constructed and mapped.

I have employed multiple prevailing meanings of the term “landscape” to construct four analytical categories of landscape that all have performative, representative, material, cartographic, discursive and prospective dimensions.

In these clusters of theoretic entanglements, the concept of landscape holds on to its elusiveness, resists definition and performs its tricks in the confound-ing discourses that surround contested landscapes. Unmaskconfound-ing the discursive attributes of the term “landscape” aims to highlight the tricky logic by which the term “landscape” is employed in landscape discourses, in order to be aware of the elusiveness of the term as a quality that is both simultaneously

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“Governable landscapes” building on the concept of “landscape as polity”

are represented, governed and contested through infrastructures of cartogra-phy and counter cartographies that can be explored in multimodal discourse analysis. “Worlding landscapes” are landscapes that yield worlds that can be encountered in ethnographic approaches, conversations and presence. “Pro-spective landscapes” read prospects as landscapes and concern the proposed, projected, planned and prospected areas that are read through resource map-ping. “Migratory landscapes” are monitored in ecosystem mapping but also enacted in seasonal practices, herding, fishing, gathering and hunting. It is in landscapes that traditional ecologic knowledge and scientific ecologies meet.

The combination of the four analytical landscape categories provides a base for a multimodal discourse analysis of resource mapping and counter map-ping, and the prospects of various landscaping practices.

There is an urgent need to incorporate a broader understanding of the many ways environmental impact assessments endow landscape with different meanings, and how generalised valuations of landscape reflect local

appreciation of landscape or not. I argue that it is necessary to investigate the implications of different positions within landscape theory about the meaning of the term “landscape” for projective landscape- and mapping practices, to better understand how the elusiveness of the term “landscape” works across government bodies and act accordingly.

Further, this chapter argued that the architectural professions are among what I call the “prospective arts”. Bridging the issues of landscape perception and the right to landscape with questions of resource extraction and the prospec-tive capacities of the architectural professions opens the way for a discussion on prospective responsibility.

Taken together, the inquiry into these four concepts of “landscape” opens up a discussion of counter prospecting as an alternative analytic and prospective method. The “prospective arts” are in a good position to explore contested landscapes. In Chapter 7, I develop “counter prospecting” as material-discur-sive practices in contested landscapes. In this, I employ the prospective ca-pacities of landscape architecture in a counter-prospective mode. The method shares characteristics with counter mapping in that it is a critical praxis that resists extractive worldviews. I propose that counter prospecting may be employed as a method to engage with such perforated and indeed contested landscapes. Taking a prospective approach to perforated landscapes entails methodological possibilities and implications that I will unpack in Chapter 3.

Chapter 3 A Counter Prospective