1. Hannes Palang Tallinn University palang@tlu.ee
On landscape identity
Hannes Palang
Tallinn University

2. Landscape identity
the perceived uniqueness of a landscape (Pedroli, Stobbelaar 2011)
Never absolute, as people’s perception don’t coincide
identity belongs as much to the landscape as to the observer
the unique psycho-sociological perception of a place defined in a spatial-cultural space.

3. Landscape identity
can either refer to the landscape itself and the features that render its differences, or on how people use the landscape to construct their individual or collective identity, but it can always be understood as the mutual relation between landscape and people (Loupa Ramos et al, forthcoming)

4. From Birkeland and Soini, 2010: Seven definitions of cultural sustainability: 7) Cultural sustainability is cultural change and socio-cultural evolution

5. Cultural sustainability?
Fourth pillar?
In the Nordic tradition, landscape is also seen as an interface of culture and nature, with culture deeply embedded in the term landscape. Landscape reflects the way humans have cared for, built in and exploited the surroundings. Culture represents in this way both problem and possibility, form and process, and concerns values and practices whereby a landscape may continue to exist or change.
Landscape as archive, record

6. Cultural sustainability
A sustainable landscape is not based on a deterministic state or condition that is frozen in geographic space and time, or something likely achieved by practicing a cookbook of practices. It represents a dynamic state of the system with multiple trajectories and outcomes and embodies multi-functionality, provides ecosystems services, and is resilient and adaptive’ (Musacchio 2009, 1007).

7. A major question …
… including in terms of sustainability, is how to handle the past – forget, destroy, or absorb into the new emerging system? (Viik et al. 2015)
BECAUSE
A culture can be called sustainable when it is capable of absorbing elements of other cultures; that at least is one possible definition of sustainability.

8. A small case
A small village in Estonia, max 7 farms during 20th century
2 farms in the hands of the same families for at least 4 generations.
Interviews with 3 generations from these who have left – between 23 and 86 years of age.
What for them constitutes the identity of that village

10. Outcome Work – or play for the younger
Places conneted to work and sometimes play. Older girls (81 and 86 now) recall haybarns.
Boys (now 49 and 46) have much wider range
Almost no mentioning of plants or forest or sth.
Everything has changed

11. What has remained?
Boy, 49: some old trees. The road. Well, the buildings also, in principle
Girl, 81: nothing. Can’t quite understand how the roads go – everything looks closer. We had the lilac hedge there … And the house is completely different now

12. Is it still home? Boy, 49: Nope. It was, but now – no
Girl, 81: It felt home when I lived there. But now … No, it’s not my home any more. Home is in the memories.

13. What keeps it all together?
Boy, 49: very simple: people. It was our childhood, happy and easy. But it’s people. Take them away, and everything disintegrates.
Girl, 81: I can’t tell you. It was hard life, work. I thought I don’t want my children to have life like that, didn’t want children at all therefore

14. Cultural Explosion (Lotman 1992)
Landscape as chronotope – i.e. time and place both important
Times of relative stability and times fo explosive change
In case of explosion, many competing new scenarios of development emerge, only one of which finally consolidates and achieves the central position.
In the same way, we can distinguish periods of gradual and explosive changes in landscapes, where in the epochs of explosive change a disruption with previous landscapes is produced.

15. Key issues
Lotman (2009) pays main attention to borders within one system, and the translation possibilities that the border creates, i.e. the continuity or persistence and the change of the system.
after a qualitative change (which he calls explosion) the culture must be able to describe its own change. During the explosion itself this sort of describing is impossible.
It is important to create the link with what was there before the explosion. If a culture is able to describe the explosion, the pre-explosion becomes part of the culture, if not, the link is lost.

16. Interlacing constituents of perceived value of landscape (Kaur et al 2004).
Genius loci

17. Thank you for your attention