A post-landscape Handbook Ed Wall
Post-landscapes are about seeking out ‘other landscapes’.1 They are a reminder to enquire beyond the places that we have been conditioned to construct, a prompt to question landscapes constructed for us, and an urgency to invent new relationships with worlds. Prevailing and dominant approaches to landscapes, including those experienced and produced in most places on the planet, represent a continued trajectory of centuries old, Western European priorities of imaging and commodifying land for the benefit of powerful individuals, organisations, and states. At a moment of intersecting environmental, health, and economic crises, this 16th Century conception of landscape that was conceived and has developed along with practices of capitalism and colonial expansion should be challenged. This post-landscape handbook is a call to make radical change, not just to redesign physical environments but to simultaneously challenge the technologies, disrupt the ideologies, upend the politics, and reinvent the governance structures that inform daily life. On their own, physical designs of landscapes are too easily appropriated to exacerbate inequities of land ownership, distract from ecological destruction, or conceal social inequities. It is necessary, therefore, to expand our roles into areas otherwise left to engineers and economists, activists and politicians—to prioritise other landscapes and establish more just relations. To work with landscapes is not only to engage with the material specifications of places. Instead, it is necessary to radically reconstitute relations that make worlds in order to realise ecologically just and spatially equitable lives. To build other landscapes, we must contest prevailing practices: first, the dominance of visual imagery and pictorial representations as mediators of landscape practices; second, the ego-centered positions from which landscapes are viewed and transformed; and third, the controlling frames that enclose and restrict access and relationships.2 In ‘Landscape’s Agency’, the geographer Don Mitchell states: ‘So we need to talk (a lot) about what these post-commodities and post-landscapes might actually look like (literally)’.3 The twelve points of this post-landscape handbook aim to respond to Mitchell’s call, ‘toward a new kind of post-landscape order, one being worked out on the ground’.4 1 Question vision To maintain pictorial images as the primary relations that we have with people, things, and worlds around us privileges particular ways of seeing that can tend towards the illusory. Histories of landscape representations that can be celebrated for their technical invention need to be questioned for their fixation with painterly compositions over lived realities. Landscapes need to be studied for what is concealed from view and what is excluded from the frame—revealing other landscapes that have the capacity for more productive relations. Visual images have critical roles, but they are more powerful when they expose the complex and often contradictory constructions of landscapes and avoid the tropes of architectural competitions, travel guides and marketing brochures. 13
