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KlappentextThe articulation between persistence and change is relevant to a great number of different disciplines. It is particularly central to the study of urban and rural forms in many different fields of research, in geography, archaeology, architecture and history. Resilience puts forward the idea that we can no longer be truly satisfied with the common approaches used to study the dynamics of landscapes, such as the palimpsest approach, the regressive method and the semiological analysis amongst others, because they are based on the separation between the past and the present, which itself stems from the differentiation between nature and society.
This book combines spatio-temporalities, as described in archeogeography, with concepts that have been developed in the field of ecological resilience, such as panarchy and the adaptive cycle. Thus revived, the morphological analysis in this work considers landscapes as complex resilient adaptive systems.
The permanence observed in landscapes is no longer presented as the endurance of inherited forms, but as the result of a dynamic that is fed by this constant dialogue between persistence and change. Thus, resilience is here decisively on the side of dynamics rather than that of resistance.

Sandrine Robert is an archeogeographer, an Associate Professor at EHESS, France, and she has defended her professorial thesis. Her work focuses on the long-term dynamics of landscapes and she is the founder and chair of the Landscape Commission of the UISPP.

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Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781119881407

ProduktartE-Book

EinbandartE-Book

FormatEPUB

Format Hinweis2 - DRM Adobe / EPUB

FormatFormat mit automatischem Seitenumbruch (reflowable)

Verlag

John Wiley & Sons

Erscheinungsjahr2021

Erscheinungsdatum17.12.2021

Auflage1. Auflage

Seiten288 Seiten

SpracheEnglisch

Dateigrösse2281 Kbytes

Artikel-Nr.8660391

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Genre9201

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Leseprobe

1
Landscape: The Resistance of the Past?
1.1. The past in the present
1.1.1. Architectural and morphological persistences

Humanity has long been aware that certain constructions persist beyond the societies that shaped them. As early as the early Middle Ages, printed works and iconographic representations highlighted the presence of ancient constructions in the urban fabric of the city of Rome (D Amico 2009). These constructions are presented as anchoring elements, ensuring that the city itself remained eternal (Djament-Tran 2011). Roads were also identified as permanent features of the landscape (D Urban 1837, p. 415), and their continued presence is reflected in place names. The persistence of these roads was perceived locally by users well before Nicolas Bergier, a magistrate, made his first theoretical proposals in the early 17th century concerning the conditions under which these great ancient routes had survived the centuries (Bergier 1622).

By the late 19th century, scholars were well aware of the persistence of other, more extended and complex constructions in the landscape: town and city layouts, field patterns, village ground footprints and settlement patterns often followed agrarian structures established in the Middle Ages or even earlier. These elements attracted the attention of historians and legal specialists, philologists, geographers and architects from across the globe. This shared interest is partially explained by the development of increasingly detailed representations of space. Cartography made a significant leap forward at this time due to an increase in the precision of geodesic measurements and to new projection systems. Vast mapping campaigns were carried out over the course of the 19th century, establishing or updating national cartographic references by means of detailed surveys, at scales of 1:10,000, 1:40,000, etc. At the same time, cadastral surveys were carried out on an even larger scale: 1:1,250, 1:2,500, etc. (Steinberg 1982; Maurin 1992). Finally, the increase in the production and availability of travel guides provided further helpful tools for the first city and town planners, who were able to consult and compare existing layouts (Lavedan 1926a, p. 91).

Figure 1.1. Reproduction of an ancient centuriation plan near Bologna, studied by the archaeologist Alfonso Rubbiani, from the 19th-century cartography in Albert Grenier s Manuel d archéologie gallo-romaine (Grenier 1934, p. 17)

This new documentation clearly showed the continued existence of ancient forms in the landscape. Concerning ancient planned plots in Campania, for example, the French archaeologist Albert Grenier indicated that the land appeared to be divided into square plots with a very clear grid pattern . He added that the most striking example was found in northern Italy (Figure 1.1) (Grenier 1934, p. 15). From the 19th century on, philological studies of texts relating to ancient surveying practices, whereby certain territories were divided along rectilinear lines intersecting at right angles into parcels or plots known as limitations or centuriations (centuriae),1 were compared with material traces. Using cross-analysis of topographic maps, cadastral records, aerial photographs and field observations in Italy, France, North Africa, the Near East, etc., historians attempted to reconcile the material traces with the texts (Chouquer 2008a).
1.1.2. Looking to the present to uncover the past: regressive history

In countries bearing fewer marks of Roman occupation, many researchers focused on medieval agrarian landscape structures. In 1895, August Meitzen, a professor of statistics and economics at the University of Berlin, posited that a type of land division that he had observed on cadastral plans was, in fact, the imprint of legal land plots established in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (Meitzen 1895). Meitzen s analytical method was widely disseminated, and historians began to pay increasing attention to cadastral plans as source materials. Inspired by Meitzen s work, F.W. Maitland (1850-1906), professor of law at the University of Cambridge, began to study the origin of the grouped villages in the open field system and the dispersal of the English bocage. He stated: Two little fragments of the original one-inch ordnance map will be more eloquent than would be many paragraphs of written discourse (Maitland 1987, p. 16). Maitland s work gave rise to a new tradition of research in historical topography in Great Britain, first based on map analysis, and later on aerial photography (Darby and Williams 2002, p.18).

In France, the historian Marc Bloch (1886-1944), familiar with the work then coming out of Germany and Great Britain, formalized the inverse method in 1931. Bloch s approach consisted of reading history backwards from texts and cartographic representations produced during the 18th century, a period in which landscapes and agrarian practices began to be better documented (Bloch 1988, p. 49). According to the historian Adriaan Verhulst, the regressive method consists of:

[Beginning with] the least unknown, which is usually also the most recent or closest to us, such as the present landscape or the nineteenth-century cadastral plan, in order to travel backwards into the past by means of clues which become increasingly difficult to interpret the further back we go, but which occur in a clear historical sequence. (Verhulst 1995, p. 20)2

Recent documentation is used for reasons of simple necessity, where no historical equivalent exists for the period in question. For urban historians, planimetric documents are the only practical source for obtaining ancient city plans, since it is impossible to excavate a whole town or city. For Marcel Poëte, one of the fathers of urban morphology in France (alongside Pierre Lavedan)3, there are clear and significant medieval legacies in the current layouts of major cities (Poëte 1924, p. 7). Ordnance maps, cadastral documents and modern plans are thus perfectly acceptable source documents for the study of medieval cities, and even for the ancient period (Lavedan 1926a, p. 94). Lavedan generalized these into a principle, which, if not universal and absolute [â¦], is at least applicable to the majority of cases: the rule of persistence of the plan 4, which he described in detail in Qu est-ce que l urbanisme? in 1926: Any city, left to itself, will retain the plan on which it was built. This persistence is only disturbed by local interventions, made known to us by history (Lavedan 1926a, p. 91). In 1966, the architect Aldo Rossi, speaking of Poëte and Lavedan s theory of permanence , stated: This last point is Poëte s most important discovery. Cities tend to remain on their axes of development, maintaining the position of their original layoutâ¦ (Rossi 1984, p. 59).

On the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea that traces of the past survive in the present had thus expanded beyond the point of simply observing ruins and monuments still present in the landscape, to the consideration of broader spatial structures. Several authors used the notion of the palimpsest to communicate the idea of temporal collisions, originally in the sense of an accumulation of forms from different periods. This metaphor has proved remarkably durable, used over several decades, with variations in meaning reflecting changes in the way in which we understand the notion of time in a landscape.
1.1.3. The palimpsest as accumulation

The term palimpsest was used from ancient times to denote a tablet or sheet of parchment, which was scraped to remove earlier text prior to reuse. From the Renaissance on, chemical techniques were used to read the undertext of palimpsest manuscripts; these techniques became increasingly sophisticated, reaching their height in the 18th century (Larousse 1898, p. 628; Gaffiot 1981, p. 1105). The metaphor began to be applied to landscape in the 19th century; the first recorded instance is found in the work of F.W. Maitland (Lucas 2012), who studied dispersed habitat of presumably Celtic origins from the ordnance map (that marvellous palimpsest, which under Dr Meitzen s guidance we are beginning to decipher) (Maitland 1987, pp. 15-16). Maitland belonged to a school of thought in which landscape was compared to text, and elements in a landscape were analyzed using semiological techniques. In 1934, the historian H.J. Randall again used the palimpsest metaphor, indicating that elements in a landscape should be seen as signs, and that their assembly constitutes a historical document in the same way as written documents. For Randall, maps provided a record of history, inscribed into the landscape:

The face of the country is the most important historical document that we possess. Upon the map of England - that marvellous palimpsest - is written much of English history: written in letters of earth and stone, of bank and ditch, of foliage and crop. As is the case with every map, the writing is not such as he that runs may read. It needs patience to discover, knowledge to decipher, insight, sometimes amounting to genius, to interpret. But the writing is there, all...
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Resilience

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Understanding Landscapes, from Land Discovery to their Spatial Organization / Comprendre l'espace de peuplement, de la découverte des territoires à leur organisation spatiale

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