Heritage and Environment. The 5th Heritage Forum of Central Europe ebook

Table of contents

Pref­ace

Part 1: Envi­ron­men­tal His­tory and Pro­tec­tion

Lieux de Mem­oire: Geneal­ogy, Mem­ory, and Envi­ron­ment

Water His­to­ries and Her­itage: Spaces, Insti­tu­tions, and Cul­tures

Com­mon-sense Dis­courses of Nature: A Gram­s­cian Analy­sis of Con­ser­va­tion Des­ig­na­tions in the Scot­tish High­lands

The Augustów Canal: The Cre­ation of Man and Nature

His­tor­i­cal Res­i­dences and Mod­ern Chal­lenges: Mov­ing Towards Sus­tain­abil­ity

Super­seded Real­ity: The Recon­struc­tion of Manor Parks in Soviet Lithua­nia

Towards Eco-her­itage: Shap­ing the Rela­tions between Nature and Cul­tural Her­itage in Con­tem­po­rary Kraków

From Envi­ron­men­talised Her­itage to Her­itagised Envi­ron­ment: The Case of the Reed­land at Fertő/Neusiedlersee

Part 2: Land­scape

Trans­for­ma­tions of the Mora­vian Vine­yard Land­scape as a Polit­i­cal Con­se­quence

Museo­graph­i­cal Per­spec­tives on Mod­ern For­ti­fied Land­scapes: World War I Defen­sive Lines in Italy

Notes on the Reflex­ion of an Indus­tri­ally Exploited Land­scape in the North: Bohemia in the 20th Cen­tury Visual Arts – the Power of Image

Con­ser­va­tion Issues of Two For­ti­fied His­toric Towns and World Her­itage Sites: Rhodes and Val­letta

Towards an Aes­thet­ics of Inter­face: A Pre­lim­i­nary Study

The Touris­ti­fi­ca­tion of Ital­ian His­toric City Cen­tres: The Les­son for Cen­tral Europe about the Airbnb Erup­tion

Part 3: Her­itage and Polit­i­cal Envi­ron­ment

Pro­tec­tion of Cul­ture in Con­flict: Her­itage in a Mil­i­tarised Envi­ron­ment

New Archi­tec­ture and Her­itage: Estonian State Archi­tec­ture Pol­icy in the Euro­pean Con­text

Cul­tural Nation­alisms and Her­itage Dis­courses in a Con­tested Bor­der­land: The Case of the Upper Sile­sian Wooden Church

Syn­a­gogues in Post-Soviet Belarus and the Region: Over­com­ing Aban­don­ment through Appro­pri­a­tion

Issues of Aes­thet­ics in the New Archi­tec­ture of UNESCO World Her­itage Sites in Lithua­nia

Multi-lay­ered Sig­nif­i­cance of Her­itage: Map­ping Cas­tles, Their Func­tions, and Envi­ron­ment in Post-World War II Slove­nia

Part 4: Edu­ca­tion

Land­scape and Free­man Tilden’s Phi­los­o­phy of Her­itage Inter­pre­ta­tion

Inven­tory of Intan­gi­ble Cul­tural Her­itage: the Exam­ple of Esto­nia

The Liv­ing River: A Prac­ti­cal Inter­pre­ta­tion of Her­itage Trends

Trans­bound­ary Euro­pean World Her­itage: The Chance and Chal­lenge of Build­ing a Euro­pean Iden­tity through Edu­ca­tion

Two Roads – One Mis­sion: Cul­tural and Nat­ural Her­itage and Edu­ca­tion of Chil­dren

Her­itage and the Envi­ron­ment from the Anthro­po­log­i­cal Per­spec­tive of Cul­tural Ecol­ogy

About the Authors

Foot­notes

© Copy­right by the Inter­na­tional Cul­tural Cen­tre, 2021

REVIEWDr Tamás Fejérdy, Dr Rafał Szmytka

MAN­AG­ING EDI­TORMarzena Daszewska

TECH­NI­CAL AND COPY-EDI­TOR­INGAlek­san­dra Kamińska

PROOF­READ­INGAlek­san­dra Kamińska

COVER DESIGNKrzysztof Radoszek (Radoszek Arts)

LAY­OUT DESIGNWojtek Kwiecień-Janikowski

TYPE­SET­TINGWoj­ciech Kubi­ena (Biuro Szeryfy)

ISBN 978‑83‑66419-29-2

Inter­na­tional Cul­tural Cen­treRynek Główny 25, 31-008 Kraków, Polandtel.: +48 12 42 42 811, fax: +48 12 42 17 844e-mail: sekre­[email protected]

The ICC pub­li­ca­tions are avail­able at the book­shop located in the ICC Gallery or can be ordered online: www.mck.krakow.pl

With the finan­cial sup­port of

Pref­ace

Pref­ace

Jacek Purchla, Agata Wąsowska-Paw­lik

Her­itage Forum of Cen­tral Europe is a plat­form of inter­na­tional dia­logue on phi­los­o­phy, man­age­ment, pro­tec­tion, eco­nom­ics, pol­i­tics, and social issues of cul­tural her­itage.

Organ­ised since 2011 by the Inter­na­tional Cul­tural Cen­tre, it has already become an impor­tant meet­ing ground for the researchers and experts from Cen­tral Europe and all over the world. Every two years in the Main Square of medieval Kraków we dis­cuss the com­plex issues of cul­tural her­itage.

The 5th Her­itage Forum of Cen­tral Europe, organ­ised in Sep­tem­ber 2019, was ded­i­cated to the links between cul­tural her­itage and envi­ron­ment, as well as their mutual engage­ment. In recent years, and espe­cially very recently, we have become increas­ingly aware that the envi­ron­men­tal con­text is of para­mount impor­tance to the com­plete under­stand­ing of val­ues and the very mean­ing of cul­tural her­itage, which remains one of the cen­tral ele­ments of every­one’s iden­tity. The pan­demic of the 2020–2021, with its vastly neg­a­tive impact on the cul­tural her­itage sec­tor, will undoubt­edly stim­u­late many cul­tural her­itage insti­tu­tions to tackle top­ics related to the so-called “green rev­o­lu­tion.” We strongly believe that indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions work­ing in the field of cul­tural her­itage will have to assume respon­si­bil­ity for edu­ca­tion and rais­ing social aware­ness with regard to envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns.

One should cer­tainly keep in mind that the UNESCO World Her­itage List fea­tures 1,121 prop­er­ties, includ­ing 869 cul­tural sites, 213 nat­ural sites, and 39 mixed sites. This imbal­ance is very symp­tomatic, as our iden­tity depends on both cul­tural and nat­ural her­itage. Our sur­round­ings and our cul­tural land­scape (whose major com­po­nent is, as a mat­ter of fact, nature) have become the legit­i­mate sub­ject of schol­arly inves­ti­ga­tion in the field of the human­i­ties and social sci­ences. Simul­ta­ne­ously, recent cli­mate changes and a grow­ing aware­ness of indi­vid­ual respon­si­bil­ity for the future of our planet have made us quite con­scious of the fact that both envi­ron­men­tal and cul­tural resources are non-renew­able. What is more, research car­ried out within the frame­work of envi­ron­men­tal his­tory has helped us bet­ter under­stand the processes of urban devel­op­ment as well as changes in cul­tural land­scape.

On the part of the her­itage sec­tor the first steps have already been taken. Cli­mate Her­itage Net­work (CHN) was launched in 2019, pro­vid­ing a vol­un­tary, mutual sup­port net­work of gov­ern­men­tal arts, cul­ture, and her­itage agen­cies at local, regional, and national lev­els; site man­age­ment author­i­ties; NGOs; uni­ver­si­ties; busi­nesses; and other organ­i­sa­tions com­mit­ted to tack­ling cli­mate change.

In March 2021 Europa Nos­tra, together with ICO­MOS and CHN, with the sup­port of the Euro­pean Invest­ment Bank Insti­tute, have pre­pared and pre­sented Euro­pean Cul­tural Her­itage Green Paper. In the fore­word Her­man Parzinger writes that “respond­ing effec­tively to cli­mate change is the defin­ing task of our time.” The doc­u­ment chal­lenges the pol­i­cy­mak­ers and cul­tural her­itage oper­a­tors to treat cul­tural her­itage as an impor­tant tool and at the same time field where the goals of the Euro­pean Green Deal can meet and cre­ate syn­er­gies.

In Poland a group “Muzea dla kli­matu” [Muse­ums for the cli­mate] actively uses social media to share infor­ma­tion, expe­ri­ence, and exper­tise con­cern­ing pos­si­ble changes and direc­tions for the devel­op­ment of cul­tural her­itage insti­tu­tions in response to the chal­lenges linked with cli­mate cri­sis.

It is our plea­sure to present this vol­ume, which is the out­come of the 5th Her­itage Forum of Cen­tral Europe. While plan­ning this con­fer­ence three years ago, lit­tle did we know how urgent this issue was about to become. We sin­cerely hope that this vol­ume may con­tribute to accel­er­at­ing research into the links between cul­tural her­itage and the envi­ron­ment.

Her­itage Forum of Cen­tral Europe is the result of over four­teen years of Viseg­rad coop­er­a­tion in the field of cul­tural her­itage, mod­er­ated by the Inter­na­tional Cul­tural Cen­tre. This coop­er­a­tion has resulted in, among oth­ers, annual inter­na­tional train­ing pro­grammes ded­i­cated to the man­age­ment of UNESCO World Her­itage sites, as well as bien­nial Her­itage Forum of Cen­tral Europe.

We would like to use this oppor­tu­nity to express grat­i­tude to our Viseg­rad part­ners for such a long-stand­ing coop­er­a­tion, which, we hope, has con­tributed to build­ing and main­tain­ing friendly regional rela­tions between our respec­tive coun­tries. Our part­ners are: the Min­istry of Cul­ture of the Czech Repub­lic, World Her­itage Affairs Unit at the Prime Min­is­ter’s Office, Hun­gary, the Mon­u­ments Board of the Slo­vak Repub­lic, and the Min­istry of Cul­ture of Slo­vakia.

Finally, our very spe­cial appre­ci­a­tion should be extended to the Munic­i­pal­ity of Kraków for their gen­er­ous sup­port of the con­fer­ence and the book itself.

Part 1: Envi­ron­men­tal His­tory and Pro­tec­tion

Part 1

Envi­ron­men­tal His­tory and Pro­tec­tion

Lieux de Mem­oire: Geneal­ogy, Mem­ory, and Envi­ron­ment

Lieux de Mem­oire: Geneal­ogy, Mem­ory, and Envi­ron­ment

Adri­enne Wall­man

Uni­ver­sity of Lan­caster (The United King­dom)

In the intro­duc­tion to his sem­i­nal work Realms of Mem­ory Pierre Nora claims:

The atom­iza­tion of mem­ory (as col­lec­tive mem­ory is trans­formed into pri­vate mem­ory) imposes a duty to remem­ber on each indi­vid­ual. […] For the indi­vid­ual, the dis­cov­ery of roots, of “belong­ing” to some group, becomes the source of iden­tity […]. When mem­ory ceases to be omnipresent, it ceases to be present at all unless some iso­lated indi­vid­ual decides to assume respon­si­bil­ity for it.1

Accord­ing to Nora, “lieux de mémoire [sites of mem­ory] exist because there are no longer any milieux de mémoire, set­tings in which mem­ory is a real part of every­day expe­ri­ence,”2 also trans­lated as “real envi­ron­ments of mem­ory.”3 Nora attributes this absence to a num­ber of fac­tors, includ­ing the dis­ap­pear­ance of peas­ant cul­ture, increased glob­al­i­sa­tion, and the recent changes in soci­eties which have brought to an end the oral trans­mis­sion of mem­o­ries through, for exam­ple, churches and fam­i­lies. Thus “real mem­ory” is sep­a­rate from “his­tory.” In the case of frac­tured Jew­ish mem­ory, I would argue it is pos­si­ble to add as a rea­son the destruc­tion of whole com­mu­ni­ties in the late 19th and early 20th cen­turies, accom­pa­nied by flight from per­se­cu­tion by Jews try­ing to re-estab­lish lives in new envi­ron­ments and new coun­tries. In this arti­cle I use extracts from my inter­views with peo­ple research­ing Jew­ish geneal­ogy to show how the prac­tice of geneal­ogy can act as a form of search for those lost milieux de mémoire. I inter­pret “sites of mem­ory” as both phys­i­cal and emo­tional spaces, and cul­tural prac­tices as well as phys­i­cal places. I will show how geneal­o­gists employ both remem­bered and learnt cul­tural prac­tices to enable them to link to the lost envi­ron­ments of their ances­tors, as well as cre­at­ing their own memo­ri­als. Here, Hilary explains how her grand­mother’s fam­ily recre­ated their lost com­mu­nity of Plungé in Lithua­nia, in the East End of Lon­don:

I don’t think just kind of phys­i­cal place really gives you con­nec­tion. What­ever com­mu­nity my grand­mother and fam­ily lived in in Plungé, the com­mu­nity is not there. […] I mean it was depleted round the time they left and oblit­er­ated in the Holo­caust. So the peo­ple and the com­mu­nity are not there. Um, I think the com­mu­nity they kind of took with them in a way, to east Lon­don actu­ally.4

In 1902 the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion of Lon­don was about 150,000, of whom at least 100,000 lived in the East End.5 They had fled their home­lands in Rus­sia and East­ern Europe, fol­low­ing pogroms and eco­nomic hard­ship, and set­tled in an area which already had an estab­lished Jew­ish com­mu­nity and cheap lodg­ings. The tra­di­tional food from their coun­tries of ori­gin and the com­mon Yid­dish lan­guage were the cul­tural sig­ni­fiers that were impor­tant to this com­mu­nity, as indi­cated by these quo­ta­tions from res­i­dents of the Char­lotte de Roth­schild Build­ings in Spi­tal­fields in East Lon­don, inter­viewed by Jerry White in the early 1970s. The first quo­ta­tion is from a Lithuanian immi­grant speak­ing about being invited to a meal with a fam­ily from Poland:

We used a great deal of pep­per and sea­son­ing. The Pol­ish used sugar. The essen­tial test was when you had boiled fish. Ours was pep­pery and theirs was sweet.6

Yid­dish was spo­ken through­out the com­mu­nity “in shops, at work, at union meet­ings, among neigh­bours and friends and in fam­i­lies,”7 as another of White’s inter­vie­wees tes­ti­fied:

My mother used Yid­dish all the time. She could [ital­ics in orig­i­nal] speak Eng­lish but she didn’t want to.8

While these com­mu­ni­ties did become more Angli­cised and accul­tur­ated dur­ing the first half of the 20th cen­tury, in the 1950s and 1960s when Hilary was grow­ing up and as I myself expe­ri­enced when grow­ing up dur­ing the same period in a sim­i­lar com­mu­nity in north Manchester, tra­di­tional East Euro­pean food would still have been eaten and Yid­dish words would still have been used. For Hilary it was this com­mu­nity that she knew as a child in the 1950s which became a lieu de mémoire:

I think prob­a­bly where they ended up liv­ing, in the east end of Lon­don, […] I think that was the com­mu­nity that I did have some affin­ity with, and I iden­tify with. You know the sort of east Euro­pean immi­grant com­mu­nity of my child­hood, um, which was prob­a­bly quite like the place they left – but they brought the place with them so it’s not the kind of the land or the ter­ri­tory or the geog­ra­phy I think that’s impor­tant but what­ever it was that was impor­tant to them I think they pretty much upped sticks with it and imported it.9

Places have impor­tant mnemonic and ethno-cul­tural func­tions, as David Cesarani noted when he inter­viewed three Jew­ish writ­ers who had grown up in the East End of Lon­don:

Place was con­sti­tuted sen­su­ally and recon­sti­tuted from mem­ory in the lan­guage of the senses. A “sense of place” was lit­er­ally assem­bled out of sights, sounds, smells, and feel. The adult self recov­ers the child­hood self as a recep­tor of inputs that are embod­ied and car­ried through life.10

How­ever, might these mem­o­ries not also become ide­alised over the years? Saul Iss­roff grew up in South Africa but, like Hilary, he now lives in Lon­don and his ances­tors also came from Lithua­nia. He had grown up lis­ten­ing to his pater­nal grand­mother talk­ing about her life there, but acknowl­edges these were prob­a­bly ide­alised images and wist­fully, with a long pause and a sigh, he con­tem­plates how peo­ple’s per­cep­tion of a place may become more rose-tinted as the years pass:

[…] she used to tell me sto­ries in her bro­ken Eng­lish with a bit of Yid­dish thrown in and what­ever other lan­guage came to mind, about what it was like liv­ing back in Lithua­nia […] I had the sort of ide­alised image […] won­der­ful forests, rivers and a really lovely life. On the other hand [laughs] when you look at the wooden houses and how they lived at that point in time, and par­tic­u­larly in some of the more remote areas, um, she gave a very ide­alised image. It was 40, 50 years since she’d left Lithua­nia and [pause and sigh] I won­der what mem­ory does to peo­ple over a period of time.11

In 1994 Saul vis­ited Lithua­nia him­self and went to look for his great-grand­mother’s tomb­stone, which his father and aunt had erected in 1923. Although he had taken a pho­to­graph of the tomb­stone with him, it was ini­tially hard to locate it in the ceme­tery. How­ever, within a few minutes he lit­er­ally tripped over it. He explained the effect that being in this lieu de mémoire had on him:

I’m walk­ing in this ceme­tery which must have been 20–30 acres, hold­ing the photo. Within three, four minutes I actu­ally trip over a fallen stone, the bricks had weath­ered and gone, and this is my […] great-grand­mother’s tomb­stone. And it’s the most eerie sen­sa­tion […] almost as though some­body was guid­ing me to fall over this. And what was your reac­tion then? We cleaned it up, said Kad­dish.12

What is inter­est­ing here is that Saul, who describes him­self as a “sec­u­lar Jew,” turned to an estab­lished reli­gious memo­r­ial prac­tice, the say­ing of the Kad­dish prayer, in this last rest­ing place of his great-grand­mother. While Saul turned to a prac­tice that he has always remem­bered, Jane Clu­cas has had to learn about the cus­toms of her Jew­ish father’s fam­ily. Jane lives in Bolling­ton, a small town in the north of Eng­land, and has mixed Jew­ish and non-Jew­ish ances­try. Although her father’s par­ents were Ger­man Jews, she her­self was bap­tised and was not brought up with any Jew­ish prac­tices. Jane has been research­ing her fam­ily his­tory for over forty years. She now describes her­self as an athe­ist and sees her Jew­ishness as an eth­nic or racial iden­tity which she expresses through her own forms of reli­gious rit­ual and cul­tural prac­tice, such as eat­ing chal­lah, the spe­cial plaited loaf eaten on the Sab­bath, col­lect­ing Jew­ish reli­gious arte­facts, and light­ing can­dles on the eve of the Sab­bath:

[…] it cer­tainly has impacted my life far more than I antic­i­pated. If you’d told me 20, 30 years ago that I would have Judaica in my home I would have said, “why? I’m not Jew­ish.” Which I keep say­ing, I keep say­ing that. But now it’s impor­tant to me and the mak­ing of the chal­lah, it’s impor­tant to me, the light­ing of the can­dles – impor­tant to me. I can’t explain it because I am an athe­ist. […] It’s my way of link­ing with my Jew­ish ances­try […].13

Much of what she has learnt has come from what she describes as “casual absorp­tion” or read­ing Jew­ish cook­ery books, as she lacks the cul­tural mem­ory that would enable her to per­form these rit­u­als in the accepted way. Accord­ing to Jan Ass­mann and John Czaplicka:

The con­cept of cul­tural mem­ory com­prises that body of reusable text, images, and rit­u­als spe­cific to each soci­ety in each epoch, whose “cul­ti­va­tion” serves to sta­bi­lize and con­vey that soci­ety’s self-image.14

Jane makes up for this lack in her own way:

[…] what I do now, and have done for sev­eral years, is I light two can­dles on a Fri­day night. I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m the first to admit I don’t know what I’m doing, but I do wave my hands over the can­dles and I say “Shab­bat, Shab­bat shalom” and then some­times I think, is it that way round or is it “Shalom Shab­bat?” So then I’ll say “Shalom Shab­bat” because I don’t know which way round it is […]15

In fact nei­ther of these ver­sions is cor­rect as “Shab­bat Shalom” is a greet­ing between peo­ple and lit­er­ally means “a peace­ful Sab­bath”, and there is an actual bless­ing which is said when light­ing the can­dles on the eve of the Sab­bath. How­ever, I would argue that lack­ing this cul­tural mem­ory does not pre­vent Jane from employ­ing her own per­sonal inter­pre­ta­tion of an already com­plex reli­gion, which together with the dis­play of reli­gious arte­facts and expres­sions of cul­tural prac­tice enables her to iden­tify with her ances­tral her­itage and ensure that her father’s Jew­ish iden­tity is pre­served.

Jan Ass­mann has also dis­tin­guished between mem­ory and knowl­edge, argu­ing that:

Indi­vid­u­als pos­sess var­i­ous iden­ti­ties accord­ing to the var­i­ous groups, com­mu­ni­ties, belief sys­tems, polit­i­cal sys­tems, etc. to which they belong, and equally mul­ti­far­i­ous are their com­mu­nica­tive and cul­tural, in short: col­lec­tive mem­o­ries. […] [T]here are always frames that relate mem­ory to spe­cific hori­zons of time and iden­tity on the indi­vid­ual, gen­er­a­tional, polit­i­cal, and cul­tural lev­els. Where this rela­tion is absent, we are not deal­ing with mem­ory but with knowl­edge. Mem­ory is knowl­edge with an iden­tity-index, it is knowl­edge about one­self […] be it as an indi­vid­ual or as a mem­ber of a fam­ily, a gen­er­a­tion, a com­mu­nity, a nation, or a cul­tural and reli­gious tra­di­tion.16

Geneal­ogy enables peo­ple to acquire knowl­edge about their fam­ily, but in the case of those who have lost many fam­ily mem­bers in the Holo­caust there is no mem­ory to under­pin this. Dominique Dubois, who lives in Lon­don, was born and brought up as a Catholic. He always knew that his mother had come to Britain from Aus­tria just before World War II and that her par­ents had died dur­ing the war, but it was not until he was 54 and began research­ing her fam­ily his­tory that he learned that her fam­ily were Jew­ish. He has now writ­ten a very detailed and mov­ing mem­oir about the fam­ily’s life in Vienna, and the sub­se­quent deaths of fam­ily mem­bers in Tre­blinka, Auschwitz, and There­sien­stadt. Speak­ing slowly, and choos­ing his words care­fully, he explained its memo­ri­al­i­sa­tion func­tion:

I wrote it for two rea­sons. One, um, as I lis­tened to my mother and what she had been through […] I wanted to pay trib­ute to what she’d been through, er, as a refugee, er, as a Holo­caust sur­vivor, um, all that she had lived through, before flee­ing Aus­tria, and after com­ing here. Um, and then sec­ondly, I wanted to pre­serve the mem­ory of her fam­ily […]17

The mem­oir also acts as a form of lieu de mémoire. Pierre Nora had sug­gested that when col­lec­tive mem­ory is no longer passed on, it becomes nec­es­sary for indi­vid­u­als to find ways to recap­ture those mem­o­ries in order to main­tain cul­tural iden­tity. As Dominique describes his own feel­ings you can sense the emo­tion in his voice – he speaks slowly, with delib­er­a­tion, some­times hes­i­tat­ing, as he strug­gles to find the appro­pri­ate expres­sion:

I was first of all just shocked, stunned, and then, very angry about what had hap­pened to my fam­ily. Er, but I think much more so is an immense sense of sad­ness, um, [slight hes­i­ta­tion] yes, there’s a cer­tain sort of, to put like this, a righteous anger, but I think it’s much more the sad­ness that’s the pre­vail­ing feel­ing, er, of pro­found loss, pro­found loss in rela­tion to so many peo­ple who were mur­dered because, because they were Jew­ish. […] Um, [pause, and then speaks with hes­i­ta­tion] I have moments of enor­mous des­o­la­tion, um, and I would say that increases rather than decreases as the years go by. Um, I pushed myself to write the mem­oir, um, it wasn’t an easy thing to do.18

While Saul Iss­roff was able to visit and say Kad­dish at the grave of his great-grand­mother, Dominique has no graves he could visit where he could remem­ber his Jew­ish fam­ily mem­bers. Instead, he has par­tic­i­pated in an alter­na­tive form of memo­ri­al­i­sa­tion which takes place in cities in Aus­tria and Ger­many. Descen­dants of peo­ple who were mur­dered in the Holo­caust arrange for small square memo­r­ial plaques to be placed into the pave­ment near the for­mer homes of their mur­dered ances­tors. These Stolper­steine [lit­er­ally “stum­bling stones”] or Steine der Erin­nerung [stones of remem­brance] act as lieux de mémoire which will con­tinue to be seen by peo­ple pass­ing by. One of the aims of the Stones of Remem­brance project in Vienna is: "[…] to remem­ber the des­tinies of the mur­dered Jew­ish peo­ple thereby pro­vid­ing a place for them in their for­mer home dis­tricts."19

In this way the mur­dered res­i­dents are sym­bol­i­cally returned to their for­mer homes. Dominique has already had plaques laid for four mem­bers of his fam­ily out­side the Jew­ish com­mu­nity cen­tre in Vienna’s 2nd dis­trict and in Sep­tem­ber 2019 he arranged a stone-lay­ing cer­e­mony in mem­ory of his great aunt Katha­rina Weiss out­side her for­mer home, where he spoke about her life and that of other mem­bers of the fam­ily. I was priv­i­leged to attend the cer­e­mony. Katha­rina was deported on 28 June 1942 from Vienna to Terezin, and just under three months later she was sent by train to Tre­blinka, where she would have been killed within hours of arrival. The cer­e­mony sur­round­ing the plac­ing of the stones is also a per­for­ma­tive act rep­re­sent­ing the bur­ial that could not take place at the time of death, and the stones rep­re­sent both the cof­fin and the grave­stone, as Dominique explained. His wist­ful­ness is evi­dent in his tone:

[…] none of these rel­a­tives had graves, and I think, [slight sigh] look­ing back, they are, for me, like graves, in a sense that there is a spot some­where where their names, their dates of birth, um, are recorded, um, the dates of death are, yeah, most of them one knows the year but, er, the actual day, no. And I say grave because, um, it has a func­tion of [slight sigh] some­where where one can go to, which rep­re­sents them.20

The memo­r­ial func­tion within the phys­i­cal envi­ron­ment, where the mur­dered rel­a­tives had lived, is of great impor­tance to descen­dants. In his speech at the cer­e­mony Dominique cited the Holo­caust sur­vivor Primo Levi, who believed that “mem­ory is not only a gift, but also a duty.”

The cer­e­monies to install the Stones of Mem­ory are essen­tially pri­vate cer­e­monies organ­ised by the fam­i­lies of the vic­tims, although some mem­bers of the local com­mu­nity also attend, and they take place out­side pri­vate homes. There are of course many pub­lic sites of Holo­caust remem­brance, often cre­ated at the sites where the atroc­i­ties took place. Peo­ple whose fam­ily mem­bers were mur­dered in the Holo­caust have some­times con­tributed in a per­sonal way to these pub­lic sites of mem­ory. Mer­i­lyn Moos dis­cov­ered that her mother’s sis­ter, Anna Marie, did not die of liver dis­ease as she had been told, but had been mur­dered by the Nazis at Bran­den­burg in June 1940, as part of the T4 euthana­sia pro­gramme in which some 300,000 peo­ple with men­tal and phys­i­cal dis­abil­i­ties were mur­dered. The pro­gramme was coor­di­nated from a secret office at Tier­garten­strasse 4 in Berlin. Mer­i­lyn has now had a pho­to­graph of her aunt placed at the memo­r­ial on the Tier­garten site, “so she is marked there.”21 Unlike some of the more sym­bolic Holo­caust memo­ri­als, such as Rachel Whiteread’s Name­less Library in the Juden­platz in Vienna, the memo­r­ial at Tier­garten utilises both text and images to indi­vid­u­alise those who were mur­dered, thus encour­ag­ing a deeper con­nec­tion with the peo­ple com­mem­o­rated.

Lau­ra­jane Smith has noted:

Her­itage is a mul­ti­lay­ered per­for­mance – be this a per­for­mance of vis­it­ing, man­ag­ing, inter­pre­ta­tion or con­ser­va­tion – that embod­ies acts of remem­brance and com­mem­o­ra­tion while nego­ti­at­ing and con­struct­ing a sense of place, belong­ing and under­stand­ing in the present.22

Under­stand­ings of home, belong­ing, and rela­tion­ship with place were shat­tered by the Holo­caust, but these under­stand­ings change over the gen­er­a­tions and can be recon­structed through memo­r­ial prac­tices. Anh Hua has argued:

Mem­o­ries or nos­tal­gia for home­lands, or wounds of dis­lo­ca­tions and dis­pos­ses­sions have become impor­tant polit­i­cal nar­ra­tives or metaphor­i­cal tools to imag­ine iden­tity and com­mu­nity and to rewrite the nation of both ori­gin and of set­tle­ment. The mem­ory of per­sonal and group expe­ri­ence is essen­tial par­tic­u­larly for oppressed groups.23

Hua is refer­ring here to the nation as an “imag­ined polit­i­cal com­mu­nity,” in Bene­dict Ander­son’s phrase.24 In some cases mem­bers of oppressed groups rede­fine their self-iden­tity in ways that do not relate to their cul­tural, eth­nic, or reli­gious ori­gins. Mer­i­lyn Moos’s par­ents were of Jew­ish ances­try, but she explained that they were athe­ists who had fled the Nazi regime in Ger­many as polit­i­cal refugees rather than because they were “his­tor­i­cally Jew­ish.”25 While Mer­i­lyn has been will­ing to visit Ger­many and to con­tribute to that coun­try’s memo­ri­al­i­sa­tion of her mur­dered fam­ily mem­bers, she was emphatic that her par­ents had wanted noth­ing fur­ther to do with their coun­try of birth after they had made their home in Britain. Dominique’s mother Elfriede, on the other hand, had a more sub­tle and nuanced rela­tion­ship with her places of birth and sub­se­quent res­i­dence. Elfriede came from a Vien­nese Jew­ish fam­ily. Her mother Valerie had been suc­cess­ful in arrang­ing for her to escape to Britain in May 1939, on her own, on the trainee nurses scheme.26 While she con­tin­ued to live in the coun­try for most of the rest of her life, work­ing as a lec­turer at New­cas­tle Uni­ver­sity for thirty years, Dominique said she never defined her­self as British:

Cul­tur­ally, she was immensely attached to France, […] it was a great pas­sion for her, her hus­band was French, she just loved Paris. […] I said […], at one point late in her life […], did she feel British and she said “no.” She said “I’m grate­ful that the coun­try took me in,” but she felt an out­sider. […] She was very grate­ful that they accepted her, that she could live here, but she never said she belonged. Once she departed in May ’39 she was an out­sider for the rest of her life. In quite obvi­ous, in obvi­ous ways but in quite sub­tle ways too.27

Some months after record­ing this first inter­view I met Dominique again and he told me he had been given some let­ters that his mother had sent to friends in Aus­tria just after the war. These show that, in spite of hav­ing to flee, she still felt an immense attach­ment to what she described as “our coun­try.” In Feb­ru­ary 1949 she wrote to her friend Rein­hild:

Your beau­ti­ful card for Christ­mas is a ten­der mem­ory of my coun­try such as I now rarely receive […] I can eas­ily imag­ine what the dif­fi­cult post-war years have meant for every­one in our coun­try.28

Dominique explained that read­ing these let­ters had led him to what he described as an “unfold­ing under­stand­ing” of his mother’s Aus­trian her­itage. As he put it to me, there is a dif­fer­ence between “home,” the place where one lives now, and “belong­ing,” the place or home coun­try where one has one’s roots.29 He had described a visit to Vienna with his mother in 1961 when he was twelve years old:

[…] we were on a tram, and sud­denly my mother stood up and said “we used to live over there” and […] it stayed with me all my life, you know, um, fifty-eight years later I can remem­ber like yes­ter­day, […] so the let­ters […] have brought home to me […] this very deep attach­ment to what she called her home coun­try.30

In this sense Aus­tria is the “home coun­try,” where Dominique believed his mother felt she belonged. How­ever, Dominique is ambiva­lent about his own rela­tion­ship to Aus­tria and Aus­trian iden­tity. He explained his con­flicted feel­ings when, after an ear­lier visit to Vienna with his wife Ruth, she asked him if he would like to live there:

Ruth asked me after about a week – we spent a fort­night in Vienna – would I like to live there, and I strug­gled. It’s, it’s my mother’s roots, um, on the other hand I feel so sad that, how my mother had to leave, and indeed my grand­par­ents and other mem­bers of the fam­ily, and at the moment there’s an attempt going through par­lia­ment, in Aus­tria, to give peo­ple like myself Aus­trian nation­al­ity, and I really don’t know what I want. […] Whether I would wish to apply for Aus­trian nation­al­ity, I don’t know.31

Setha M. Low has iden­ti­fied “six kinds of sym­bolic link­age of peo­ple and land,” includ­ing “genealog­i­cal link­age to the land through his­tory or fam­ily lin­eage” and “link­age through loss of land or destruc­tion of com­mu­nity.”32 Low goes on to define the memo­r­ial processes which enable indi­vid­u­als to reclaim this attach­ment to lost envi­ron­ments in the future:

Place attach­ment through loss or destruc­tion is acti­vated ret­ro­spec­tively, through the process of los­ing the place and the sub­se­quent rem­i­nisc­ing and re-cre­at­ing through mem­ory of a place that is now destroyed, unin­hab­ited, or inac­ces­si­ble.33

Elfriede Dubois can be said to have been ret­ro­spec­tively acti­vat­ing her attach­ment to Aus­tria and Vienna through the acknowl­edge­ment of the loca­tion of her for­mer home. Karen Lebon has ret­ro­spec­tively acti­vated her attach­ment to her fam­ily’s lost home­land in Tarnow, Gali­cia, through genealog­i­cal research. Karen lives in Benen­den, a small town in rural Kent in South East Eng­land, and she is a bell-ringer in her local church. She is the daugh­ter of a Jew­ish father and non-Jew­ish mother. When she was a child her father had told her that she was half-Jew­ish, a term she did not really under­stand at the time. She now describes her iden­tity as “[…] prob­a­bly Church of Eng­land but with Jew­ish ances­try, and I def­i­nitely feel a pull towards the Jew­ish ances­tral roots.”34

Karen had known her pater­nal great-grand­fa­ther as James White­field, a man who had owned a choco­late fac­tory in Eng­land. How­ever, she had been told that he was orig­i­nally from Aus­tria and that his sur­name was a trans­la­tion of the name Weiss­feld. Her genealog­i­cal research later revealed that he was born Jakob Weiss­feld in Tarnow, Gali­cia, which was then part of the Aus­tro-Hun­gar­ian Empire. In her metic­u­lously researched fam­ily his­tory, Karen has repro­duced a copy of the entry for Jakob in the pop­u­la­tion reg­is­ter for the Kraków dis­trict, list­ing his birth as 1872 in Tarnow, as well as a copy of his nat­u­ral­i­sa­tion cer­tifi­cate of 1913, when he was liv­ing in Essex in Eng­land. She also lists entries for his sib­lings.35

There had been a Jew­ish pres­ence in Tarnow since the mid-15th cen­tury. In 1939 the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion was about 25,000, almost half the pop­u­la­tion of the city.36 This pop­u­la­tion was destroyed in the Holo­caust. In 1942 sev­eral hun­dred peo­ple were mur­dered by machine gun fire in the main square, while hun­dreds more were sent to the exter­mi­na­tion camp at Belzec. Dur­ing this same period sev­eral thou­sand Jews, includ­ing 800 chil­dren from the Tarnow orphan­age, were shot to death in the Buczyna for­est a few miles out­side the city. Over the next two years there were fur­ther depor­ta­tions and mur­ders, and in Feb­ru­ary 1944 the city was declared Juden­rein [cleansed of Jews].37 Jonathan Web­ber mov­ingly describes the oblit­er­a­tion of the mem­ory of the 800 chil­dren mur­dered in Tarnow:

Not only were those eight hun­dred chil­dren bru­tally mur­dered; their killers achieved the com­plete and inten­tional era­sure of their inno­cent lives from all mem­ory. We shall never know any­thing about those eight hun­dred chil­dren; their mem­ory is lost for ever [sic].38

While Karen and her fam­ily can­not replace the lost Jew­ish com­mu­nity of Tarnow, her genealog­i­cal research has pro­duced evi­dence from which oth­ers can learn and she her­self, liv­ing in a rural town in south­ern Eng­land and ring­ing the bells in her local church – where she says she often thinks about her Jew­ish ances­try – has “assumed respon­si­bil­ity,” as Pierre Nora puts it, for main­tain­ing the mem­ory of a part of Gali­cian Jewry.

Con­clu­sion

By gath­er­ing fam­ily sto­ries from older mem­bers of the fam­ily, col­lect­ing and col­lat­ing infor­ma­tion from archives, writ­ing mem­oirs based on their research, and learn­ing and car­ry­ing out rel­e­vant memo­r­ial and cul­tural prac­tices, these geneal­o­gists have assem­bled their own lieux de mémoire. Low and Alt­man have iden­ti­fied two cru­cial hall­marks of place attach­ment:

[…] place attach­ments are inte­gral to self-def­i­n­i­tions of indi­vid­u­als, as well as to com­mu­nity mem­bers’ sense of group iden­tity [and] affect, emo­tion and feel­ing are cen­tral to the con­cept.39

These hall­marks have been in evi­dence within the tes­ti­mony cited. Geneal­ogy is an affec­tive prac­tice which pro­vides a cru­cial emo­tional link between indi­vid­u­als and the wider social and cul­tural envi­ron­ment of its prac­ti­tion­ers and that of their ances­tors. The prac­tice and tools of geneal­ogy enable a spe­cific form of place attach­ment to be realised, by bring­ing about a less­en­ing of tem­po­ral and spa­tial dis­tanc­ing between gen­er­a­tions.

As Lau­ra­jane Smith has noted,

The real sense of her­itage, the real moment of her­itage when our emo­tions and sense of self are truly engaged, is […] in the act of pass­ing on and receiv­ing mem­o­ries and knowl­edge. It also occurs in the way that we then use, reshape and recre­ate those mem­o­ries and knowl­edge to help us make sense of and under­stand not only who we ‘are’, but also who we want to be.40

In the case of all five inter­vie­wees, the prac­tice of geneal­ogy has enabled them to reach this real moment of her­itage and to ful­fil Pierre Nora’s “duty to remem­ber,” thus ensur­ing that the lost envi­ron­ments of their ances­tors will be pre­served in mem­ory.

Water His­to­ries and Her­itage: Spaces, Insti­tu­tions, and Cul­tures

Water His­to­ries and Her­itage: Spaces, Insti­tu­tions, and Cul­tures41

Car­ola Hein, Tino Mager, Roberto Rocco, Henk van Schaik, and Diederik Six

Delft Uni­ver­sity of Tech­nol­ogy (The Nether­lands)

Intro­duc­tion

Over cen­turies, peo­ple have devel­oped and care­fully refined spaces and cul­tures in rela­tion to water. Their knowl­edge of nature has helped them sur­vive over thou­sands of years and cre­ate arti­facts that have sus­tained soci­eties around the world. Liv­ing with water has involved the cre­ation of a sys­tem of insti­tu­tions and prac­tices, as well as build­ings, cities, and land­scapes that embody the lived his­tory of water her­itage and its adap­ta­tions to local geo­gra­phies, his­to­ries, and cul­tural norms and con­ven­tions.

Today’s insti­tu­tions and prac­tices are embed­ded in his­toric phys­i­cal struc­tures and tra­di­tions. Spa­tial forms and intan­gi­ble cul­tures have cre­ated so-called path depen­den­cies, in line with his­torical insti­tu­tion­al­ism, which con­tinue to influ­ence our think­ing about the future.42 To give just one exam­ple: for many cen­turies and in many parts of the world, the pre­dom­i­nant approach to com­bat­ting floods has been resis­tance. As notably seen in the Nether­lands, large and strong sys­tems of coastal defenses, dykes, and other engi­neer­ing struc­tures have been devel­oped to keep water under con­trol. While largely pro­tect­ing the coun­try against floods, in some cases this approach has proved increas­ingly inef­fec­tive and has been slowly replaced by a dif­fer­ent type of think­ing based on the con­cept of resilience, in which nat­ural sys­tems are pre­served and often rebuilt in order to allow for a more har­mo­nious inte­gra­tion of urban life and land­scape.43 The ques­tion of how con­tem­po­rary soci­eties are going to address water-related chal­lenges is just one exam­ple of the com­plex rela­tion­ship between water, insti­tu­tions, and tan­gi­ble and intan­gi­ble her­itage.44

Beyond a lim­ited num­ber of case stud­ies, the role of water in shap­ing insti­tu­tions, ter­ri­to­ries, spaces, and cul­tural prac­tices is still rel­a­tively under­stud­ied.45 His­tor­i­cal research can con­tribute to under­stand­ing how water man­age­ment has shaped power struc­tures, social biases, and eth­i­cal val­ues related to water, as well as the role of build­ings, infrastruc­tures, and land­scapes. Such inves­ti­ga­tion is linked with var­i­ous fields of inquiry, such as dis­cus­sions on plan­e­tary urban­i­sa­tion, the His­toric Urban Land­scape approach, hydro-biogra­phies, or deep map­ping.46 Water-related her­itage pre­serves and passes on the (neglected) best prac­tices and the mem­ory of catastrophic events. It har­bors the long his­to­ries of water sys­tems and adds to the cul­tural mem­ory for gen­er­a­tions to come. In the fol­low­ing sec­tions, we will offer an overview on how water shapes her­itage, while also shap­ing cul­tures and ter­ri­to­ries.

Water wis­dom

A deeper knowl­edge of the spaces and prac­tices around water is key to under­stand­ing how soci­eties face the chal­lenges con­nected to life on this planet. This under­stand­ing is also inti­mately linked to the devel­op­ment of cre­ative prac­tices around water that will allow soci­eties to thrive in the future. Devel­op­ing a cli­mate-adapted water sys­tem requires col­lab­o­ra­tion and action among diverse pub­lic, pri­vate, and civic part­ners, as well as open and par­tic­i­pa­tory prac­tices based on a col­lec­tive (rather than merely pro­fes­sional) under­stand­ing of water sys­tems. Stake­holder engage­ment is rel­e­vant to cre­at­ing more sus­tain­able soci­eties, as it allows for the build­ing of sup­port for poli­cies and mea­sures that ensure good water man­age­ment, as well as the gath­er­ing of non-pro­fes­sional knowl­edge that sup­ports effec­tive pol­icy-mak­ing and design. Intan­gi­ble her­itage in the form of cul­tural prac­tices con­nected to how soci­eties tra­di­tion­ally man­age and live with water is a basic ele­ment of sus­tain­abil­ity.

Around the world peo­ple are fac­ing urgent chal­lenges in terms of their rela­tion­ship with water – how they live with it, man­age it, and engage with water-related cul­tural her­itage. Some of the most press­ing chal­lenges involve cli­mate change, rapid urban­i­sa­tion, envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion, and migra­tion. Sev­eral of the UN Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment Goals are directly (6, 14) and indi­rectly (3, 13, 15) linked to water chal­lenges.47 World­wide, pol­icy mak­ers, pro­fes­sion­als, aca­d­emics, and cit­i­zens are grap­pling with huge uncer­tain­ties posed by sea-level rise, storm surges, drought, salin­i­sa­tion and soil sub­si­dence, drink­ing water short­ages, water pol­lu­tion, and increased demand for agri­cul­tural irri­ga­tion. Care­ful analy­sis and com­pre­hen­sive under­stand­ing of the spaces and prac­tices of the past can help to bet­ter assess cur­rent risks and ulti­mately also to design sus­tain­able water futures.

Water and Her­itage for the Future

The Water and Her­itage for the Future ini­tia­tive – a coop­er­a­tion between Delft Uni­ver­sity of Tech­nol­ogy, the Lei­den-Delft-Eras­mus Cen­tre for Global Her­itage and Devel­op­ment, and ICO­MOSNL – researches water her­itage sites and their poten­tial con­tri­bu­tion to cur­rent and upcom­ing water needs. For the pur­pose of this research, it was nec­es­sary to define water her­itage broadly. Water her­itage is not just related to engi­neer­ing struc­tures, build­ings, or land­scapes, nor to tra­di­tions and cul­tural prac­tices. It is a com­plex sys­tem inti­mately con­nected to the ques­tions of how soci­eties organ­ise their socio-spa­tial prac­tices, care­fully nego­ti­ated over time. Many of these struc­tures cross admin­is­tra­tive and some­times national bor­ders. The theme thus con­nects to the issues of democ­racy, par­tic­i­pa­tion, and power. His­tor­i­cal knowl­edge about more or less suc­cess­ful water related strate­gies can help to iden­tify sus­tain­able processes, under­stand their pre­req­ui­sites and para­me­ters, and thus opti­mise future deci­sions. Tra­di­tional ways of gov­ern­ing and man­ag­ing water can teach us about har­mo­nious coex­is­tence between peo­ple and nat­ural sys­tems, which must be pre­served and pro­moted.

New inves­ti­ga­tions of water his­tory and her­itage can help us move for­ward with sus­tain­able and resilient water man­age­ment; they are rel­e­vant to the rede­vel­op­ment, redesign, and reuse of exist­ing and ancient water sys­tems, as well as to the design of new sys­tems. His­tor­i­cal sys­tems can make an impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion to the resilience and qual­ity of life of com­mu­ni­ties, and to their sense of place and iden­tity. Finally, under­stand­ing and analysing the diverse aspects of water-related her­itage can also help us refine our under­stand­ing of her­itage more broadly. It also holds impor­tant advice and inspi­ra­tion for future devel­op­ment.

A thor­ough and struc­tured under­stand­ing of cen­turies-old, tan­gi­ble struc­tures and intan­gi­ble prac­tices can pro­vide insight into ear­lier moments of water tran­si­tions and the long-term impli­ca­tions of poli­cies and struc­tures, focus­ing on access as well as oppor­tu­ni­ties for the design of every­day life spaces. Of course, around the world there are many dif­fer­ences in terms of geog­ra­phy, cli­mate, cul­tural and polit­i­cal con­texts, eco­nomic and social set­tings, soci­etal mod­els, and also dif­fer­ent atti­tudes towards present and future threats. Schol­ars and pol­i­cy­mak­ers must closely exam­ine these dif­fer­ences to under­stand water pol­i­tics, pol­icy, and man­age­ment, as well as future design oppor­tu­ni­ties. When research into the past is closely linked to for­ward-look­ing prac­tices in engi­neer­ing, archi­tec­tural design, and plan­ning, her­itage can become an inte­gral part of future solu­tions and a means through which the design of future sus­tain­able prac­tices can be achieved. A mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary, cross-tem­po­ral, and global analy­sis is needed to explore the rela­tion­ship between water and her­itage based on thor­ough the­o­ret­i­cal and method­olog­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tion and care­fully exe­cuted case stud­ies.

In addi­tion to study­ing his­tor­i­cal water struc­tures and iden­ti­fy­ing exam­ples of best prac­tice, it is also cru­cial to close the insti­tu­tional gaps between her­itage and water organ­i­sa­tions. Three con­fer­ences have been impor­tant mile­stones in our col­lab­o­ra­tion so far: Pro­tec­tion Deltas: Her­itage Helps, Ams­ter­dam 2013, Water and Her­itage for the Future, Delft and Fort Vechten 2016, and the 2019 Inter­na­tional Con­fer­ence “Water as Her­itage,” Chi­ayi 2019, where water engi­neers, plan­ners, pol­i­cy­mak­ers, and her­itage pro­fes­sion­als began to engage in a con­tin­u­ous dia­logue – a pre­req­ui­site for open­ing up the his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence embed­ded in water her­itage sites and prac­tices. The con­fer­ence pub­li­ca­tions48 are impor­tant step­ping stones in the process of devel­op­ing inter­na­tional sci­en­tific inter­est and an inter­na­tional sci­en­tific agenda on water and her­itage. They bring into dis­cus­sion water and her­itage issues through the lens of inter­na­tional cases, while pro­vid­ing deeper insight into the Dutch case. The pub­li­ca­tions are com­ple­mented by a spe­cial issue of the Euro­pean Jour­nal of Cre­ative Prac­tices in Cities and Land­scapes,49 focus­ing on water resilience.

Types of water her­itage

Five the­matic areas related to water her­itage are explored in Adap­tive Strate­gies for Water Her­itage: infrastruc­ture designed for drink­ing water; agri­cul­tural sites engi­neered for irri­ga­tion and drainage; areas gained by polder­ing (the act of mak­ing pold­ers) and other land recla­ma­tion in agri­cul­ture, set­tle­ment, and defence sys­tems; river and coast­line plan­ning; and urban and engi­neered struc­tures in ports and on water­fronts. They are out­lined in the fol­low­ing sec­tion.

Infrastruc­ture designed for ser­vices: drink­ing water and sewage

Ser­vice water infrastruc­tures are largely under­ap­pre­ci­ated in their role as her­itage. Drink­ing water sys­tems are impor­tant both as phys­i­cal struc­tures and in light of social and soci­etal prac­tices. Some his­toric struc­tures and prac­tices, such as Indian stepped water tanks, and the com­mu­nal water prac­tices that cre­ated and sus­tained them, have attracted schol­arly atten­tion (Fig. 1). While these and other struc­tures, such as the Roman aque­ducts and sewage canals, are famous, few peo­ple may appre­ci­ate the her­itage qual­ity of the New York water sys­tem.50 Partly due to their char­ac­ter of invis­i­ble under­ground infrastruc­ture, these sys­tems, dis­tin­guished for their util­ity, have received less atten­tion than World Her­itage Sites listed for their aes­thet­ics, even though infrastruc­tural sites can teach us much that will help us respond to future crises. Areas in which the pro­vi­sion­ing of water suf­fers from ongo­ing or accel­er­ated deser­ti­fi­ca­tion are equally threat­ened. Inge­nious sys­tems such as the qanat of the Mid­dle East and north­ern Africa (a type of under­ground water trans­porta­tion sys­tem) are often extremely vul­ner­a­ble to rel­a­tively small changes in cli­mate, pre­cip­i­ta­tion, polit­i­cal and social organ­i­sa­tion, and the exchange and trans­mis­sion of local spe­cialised knowl­edge.51 Water man­age­ment inter­ven­tions, such as the drilling of deep wells after World War II, have larger gov­ern­men­tal and cul­tural impli­ca­tions, which hold impor­tant lessons for future prac­tices.

Design pro­pos­als can build on and derive from his­toric water sys­tems. In Monte Albán, a site which orig­i­nates in ancient Oax­aca in Mex­ico, and has been a UNESCO World Her­itage Site since 1993, the sup­ply sys­tem of water – con­sist­ing mainly of nat­ural rivers and trib­u­taries – has defined the infrastruc­ture of set­tle­ments while serv­ing as ves­sels of rit­ual mean­ing. Look­ing ahead, Araceli Rojas and Nahuel Bec­can Dávila52 sug­gest that design solu­tions based on the his­toric water sys­tem can inspire design­ers to for­mu­late new strate­gies for pre­serv­ing the nat­ural envi­ron­ment and archae­o­log­i­cal her­itage, while improv­ing liv­ing con­di­tions for local peo­ple.53 Under­stand­ing Dutch her­itage in fresh­wa­ter man­age­ment pro­vides insight in terms of the spa­tial and social impact of changes from tra­di­tional decen­tralised prac­tices of pub­lic and pri­vate rain­wa­ter har­vest­ing that have largely dis­ap­peared, replaced by cen­tralised water sup­ply sys­tems. This her­itage con­tains poten­tial for cre­at­ing an inte­grated approach to water sup­ply, land­scape con­ser­va­tion, and water-secure liv­able cities.54

Agri­cul­tural sites engi­neered for irri­ga­tion and drainage

Ques­tions of access to and dis­tri­b­u­tion of water are also part of many irri­ga­tion sys­tems around the world, such as water mead­ows (see John Con­sta­ble’s paint­ing Water-mead­ows near Sal­is­bury, 1820, Fig. 2). Other his­toric engi­neered water infrastruc­ture sys­tems include those that improved agri­cul­tural land, like mead­ows and rice pad­dies – struc­tures that are inti­mately related to modes of soci­etal organ­i­sa­tion and nar­ra­tive con­struc­tion. Restora­tion of derelict water mead­ows in north­west­ern and cen­tral Europe, Slo­va­kia, and Nor­way can help cre­ate and advance regional iden­tity on a Euro­pean scale and, at the same time, restore bio­di­ver­sity, improve water reten­tion capac­ity, and pro­mote tourism and local under­stand­ing of his­torical cul­tural val­ues. Sim­i­larly, the ways in which Dutch land recla­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy expanded through­out Europe in the form of the Holler colonies pro­vide tan­gi­ble evi­dence of a com­mon Euro­pean eco­nomic and social his­tory.55

Com­mu­ni­ties that have grown around shared water prac­tices such as rice grow­ing have had to develop prac­tices of con­flict res­o­lu­tion. Under­stand­ing how water man­age­ment shapes soci­ety is an impor­tant theme for coun­tries around the world. The role of pub­lic and pri­vate his­to­ri­ans in writ­ing about these inter­ven­tions is a theme for analy­sis in itself.56 Many his­tor­i­cal water struc­tures both addressed the water-related needs of a loca­tion and cre­ated social com­mu­ni­ties. Mod­ern tech­no­log­i­cal inter­ven­tions have often ignored this intri­cate bal­ance. Recent cli­mate shifts have empha­sised the short­com­ings of these sys­tems, as illus­trated by the case of the Taoyuan Table­land, where a pond and canal sys­tem orig­i­nally built under the influ­ence of gen­er­a­tions of for­eign colonists, immi­grants, and experts has dete­ri­o­rated. Using what authors Sinite Yu, Chung-His Lin, Hsiaoen Wu, Wenyao Hsu, and Yu-Chuan Chang57 call “par­tic­i­pa­tory nar­ra­tive weav­ing,” the locals have suc­cess­fully chal­lenged fur­ther devel­op­ment plans for the area.

Polder­ing and land recla­ma­tion in agri­cul­ture, set­tle­ment, and defence sys­tems

Water man­age­ment on land can take on var­i­ous forms: cre­at­ing land for agri­cul­ture or urban­i­sa­tion and defend­ing that land against attacks. In coastal and allu­vial low­lands all over the world58 his­toric water man­age­ment projects blocked water from some areas of land and con­trolled water lev­els arti­fi­cially so that peo­ple could live and work on the reclaimed land. This often cen­turies-old inter­ac­tion between humans and water has pro­duced a rich vari­ety of polder land­scapes. Increas­ing flood risk due to sea level rise and increased cli­mate tur­bu­lence, ongo­ing sub­si­dence due to intense drainage, and rapid urban­i­sa­tion all call for pro­tec­tive action.

The con­struc­tion of the Hachi­rogata polder in North­ern Hon­shu, the largest and most highly pop­u­lated island of Japan, exem­pli­fies the ways in which her­itage is a result of his­tory writ­ing.59 The polder is cel­e­brated as an impor­tant indus­trial her­itage; how­ever, its nar­ra­tive rarely acknowl­edges the tra­di­tional fish­ing prac­tices destroyed by its very con­struc­tion. The preser­va­tion and devel­op­ment of the Dutch Noor­doost­polder – built in the 20th cen­tury – and its con­se­quent devel­op­ment as a cul­tural her­itage land­scape tells a par­al­lel story.60 The con­struc­tion of pold­ers, which notably involved Dutch exper­tise, is a Europe-wide phe­nom­enon and one that may sup­port the cre­ation of a com­mon iden­tity. The Europolder pro­gramme show­cases the con­tem­po­rary ben­e­fits of these her­itage sites for tourism and regional iden­tity.61

Other human inter­ven­tions in water man­age­ment were designed to pro­tect land against inva­sion. A unique exam­ple of such a large-scale his­tor­i­cal water-related site that has been pre­served and redesigned is the New Dutch Water­line, an his­toric defense line.62 The preser­va­tion of this large mon­u­ment has pro­vided an inno­v­a­tive design con­nec­tion between water, her­itage, and tourism at entirely new scales of inter­ven­tion.

River and coast­line plan­ning

Peo­ple around the world have cre­ated a broad range of her­itage prac­tices along river­banks and on river water­fronts. Andrew Law exam­ines the Yangtze River as an evolv­ing land­scape, what he calls a “her­itage of becom­ing.” His con­tri­bu­tion raises the mat­ter of new dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies, includ­ing aug­mented real­ity tools and their poten­tial to shape her­itage debates. The neces­sity of con­ceiv­ing of her­itage as part of a long-last­ing cre­ative process in spa­tial trans­for­ma­tion and pub­lic and pri­vate par­tic­i­pa­tion also involves con­struc­tion and recon­struc­tion, use and reuse, pub­lic and pri­vate stake­hold­ers, and civil soci­ety over time.63 A detailed analy­sis of indus­try clo­sures and under­val­ued her­itage, along with recent attempts at revi­tal­i­sa­tion, show both the power and oppor­tu­ni­ties of artis­tic and cul­tural projects and of par­tic­i­pa­tory approaches. The story of Alblasser­dam is just one exam­ple; a broader study of river­front her­itage in urban and rural set­tings remains to be done. It is impor­tant not to limit atten­tion to indi­vid­ual spaces of select water­front rede­vel­op­ment, but to con­sider the entire river with its mul­ti­ple her­itage ques­tions as a sin­gle entity. Such a com­pre­hen­sive inves­ti­ga­tion needs to exam­ine cul­tural prac­tices as well as depic­tions – such as in this depic­tion of Europe through its rivers.

Dutch engi­neers have responded to the results of cen­turies of water man­age­ment by pro­vid­ing new spaces for rivers in the Nether­lands, thus address­ing the ques­tions of both safety and spa­tial qual­ity.64 These include the gen­e­sis of an attrac­tive liv­ing envi­ron­ment and a valu­ing of the pres­ence of cul­tural his­tory. Coastal regions in Europe need to work together to address the com­mon chal­lenges and shared oppor­tu­ni­ties of coastal tourism. As Linde Egberts65 appro­pri­ately reminds us, old coastal towns were bet­ter con­nected to other port cities over the sea than to some of their neigh­bours on land. Water is linked to con­flict also in other ways. The fortress of Suomen­linna in Fin­land has a rich his­tory of peri­ods under Swedish, Russian, and Finnish gov­er­nance.

Urban and engi­neered struc­tures in ports and on water­fronts

In recent years inter­ac­tions between ports and their cities have led to debates on the reuse of for­mer port areas and old har­bor her­itage. The his­tory of the for­mer ship­build­ing com­pany RDM (Rot­ter­damsche Droog­dok Maatschap­pij) and the city’s renewal of the water­front to attract cruise ship tourists are one exam­ple (Fig. 3).66 Cruise ships have a major impact on port cities and water­front her­itage. Super­su­daca have demon­strated this through their research on the his­tor­i­cal and con­tem­po­rary log­ics of the emer­gence of Caribbean her­itage and recent fake her­itage build­ings in Caribbean cruise des­ti­na­tions.67 Sus­tain­able devel­op­ment plays an impor­tant role in the redevel­op­ment of water­fronts such as that of Lis­bon; José Manuel Pagés Sánchez and Tom Daa­men68 have empha­sised the switch from an object-based to a land­scape-based approach to her­itage. This strat­egy is based on a gov­er­nance process that facil­i­ties col­lab­o­ra­tion between port and city author­i­ties.

Cul­tural her­itage is con­structed on our selec­tive under­stand­ing of the past, as Han Meyer69 points out. He asserts the need to recog­nise that build­ings, deltas, and nature itself are adap­tive and evo­lu­tion­ary; in other words, to over­come a nar­ra­tive of human engi­neer­ing resist­ing nature, as it has emerged in the 20th cen­tury, mov­ing towards one of dynamic adap­ta­tion. Such a recon­sid­er­a­tion of cul­tural her­itage is par­tic­u­larly nec­es­sary at this time of cli­mate change and the many atten­dant chal­lenges it holds for urbanised delta regions. Exten­sive her­itage sites on urban water­fronts and work­ing ports and cities are of par­tic­u­lar con­cern. Meyer con­tends that the cul­tural and nat­ural her­itage of urban­is­ing deltas itself will help us develop an adap­tive approach, not as a com­plete depar­ture from the present ways of doing things, but as a new stage in a cen­turies-long tra­di­tion.

Per­spec­tives

Water her­itage sys­tems through­out the world are com­prised of phys­i­cal and func­tional struc­tures, con­cep­tual and organ­i­sa­tional prin­ci­ples, and cul­tural and spir­i­tual val­ues. This stands despite their many dif­fer­ences in geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion, cli­mate, cul­tural and polit­i­cal con­text, eco­nomic and social set­ting, her­itage, and future threats. Schol­ars and pol­i­cy­mak­ers must closely exam­ine these dif­fer­ences to under­stand and tune research designs and approaches in pol­i­tics, pol­icy, and man­age­ment, as well as future design oppor­tu­ni­ties.70 More­over, his­tor­i­cal and archae­o­log­i­cal stud­ies are often able to clar­ify when and why sys­tems are more or less effi­cient and what the con­di­tions of exploita­tion or overexploita­tion are in the past, writ large, and in the recent past.71 When research into for­mer times is closely linked to for­ward-look­ing prac­tices in engi­neer­ing, archi­tec­tural design, and plan­ning, her­itage can become an inte­gral part of the future as well as a means through which a design of future sus­tain­able prac­tices can be achieved. Rather than an end, our effort seeks to catal­yse inter­na­tional inter­est among pol­i­cy­mak­ers, plan­ners, archi­tects, and her­itage spe­cial­ists to inte­grate plan­ning with the man­age­ment of water-related her­itage. Since sub­stan­ti­a­tion is only in its begin­nings, this arti­cle does not con­tain def­i­nite con­clu­sions but rather ends with a promise that the work will be con­tin­ued.

The five themes listed above exam­ine sev­eral of the most impor­tant pur­poses of water man­age­ment: drink­ing water sup­ply and sewage, agri­cul­ture, land recla­ma­tion, pro­tec­tion, defence, trans­port, and trade. Many impor­tant sub­jects have not been touched upon fully (for exam­ple, the role of canals and sewage sys­tems in water her­itage) and merit fur­ther exam­i­na­tion. Canals have played a pio­neer­ing role in human cul­tural devel­op­ment. Their plan­ning and imple­men­ta­tion require exten­sive col­lec­tive effort as well as good hydraulic and topo­graph­i­cal knowl­edge that specif­i­cally includes that of the con­struc­tion of locks, dikes, bridges, and har­bours. Sewage sys­tems have also been of great impor­tance in the devel­op­ment of larger set­tle­ments. They have facil­i­tated the hygienic con­di­tions that are a pre­req­ui­site for the capac­ity of larger com­mu­ni­ties to live together in con­fined spaces. Today, dis­posal is a fun­da­men­tal prob­lem in many over­pop­u­lated and fast-grow­ing regions of the world. It is a prob­lem which can be seen in the state of many water­courses, ren­dered as abused flow­ing dumps that con­tribute to marine pol­lu­tion. This devel­op­ment itself often neces­si­tates restruc­tur­ing water­courses and con­struct­ing reser­voirs, which, in turn, entails envi­ron­men­tal risks.

Other, larger themes, such as water and energy gen­er­a­tion, nat­ural, indus­trial, and urbanised water­scapes, water nar­ra­tives, legal issues, and edu­ca­tion also merit addi­tional atten­tion. For exam­ple, water has been used for energy gen­er­a­tion for thou­sands of years, and even today water power can make a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion as a renew­able energy source. Fur­ther research into the var­i­ous ways that using water power can help regions solve local energy prob­lems while safe­guard­ing eco­log­i­cal bal­ance would be of great ben­e­fit. To date, the dis­cus­sion on water and her­itage has largely neglected the issues of the open sea. New schol­ar­ship is emerg­ing on the “urban­i­sa­tion of the oceans” (their increased use for ship­ping, raw mate­r­ial extrac­tion, energy pro­duc­tion, and the sit­ing of pipelines, cables, and other net­works are mate­r­ial con­cerns). How­ever, research and inves­ti­ga­tion into water her­itage can­not stop here. Issues of future her­itage, includ­ing con­tem­po­rary con­tainer ter­mi­nals and oil refiner­ies have to be con­sid­ered as well. The ques­tion of whether and how to pre­serve drilling rigs and other sea-based con­struc­tions as her­itage is also now being addressed.72 Reflec­tion on future her­itage is impor­tant as the energy tran­si­tion will (hope­fully) leave many aban­doned oil sites for which a nar­ra­tive needs to be con­structed. There is an excel­lent oppor­tu­nity to shape a new her­itage approach that engages crit­i­cally with our petro­leum addic­tion that is at the base of cli­mate change. These con­cerns all call for deeper research into his­tor­i­cally grounded solu­tions. The long-term con­se­quences of their con­sid­er­a­tion can be of help to plan­ners and pol­i­cy­mak­ers in inte­grat­ing his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence into future-ori­ented and sus­tain­able solu­tions that are resilient, bal­anced, and durable.

Fol­low­ing the activ­i­ties of actors in the Nether­lands, inter­na­tional inter­est has grown in the sig­nif­i­cance of water-related cul­tural her­itage for present and future water man­age­ment chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties. ICO­MOS is prepar­ing an Inter­na­tional Sci­en­tific Com­mit­tee on Water and Her­itage. The UNESCO Inter­na­tional Water Con­fer­ence, held in Paris in May 2019, called on the par­tic­i­pants to con­tinue and inten­sify the dia­logue between water and her­itage prac­ti­tion­ers and pro­fes­sion­als in order to increase knowl­edge of water-related her­itage in plan­ning and pol­i­cy­mak­ing in the con­text of the 2030 Agenda for Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment. That call was fol­lowed by the Inter­na­tional Sym­po­sium on Water and Cul­ture held in Tokyo on 3 Feb­ru­ary 2020, organ­ised by the United Nations Sec­re­tary Gen­er­als’ High Experts Level and Lead­ers Panel on Water and Dis­as­ters (HELP) and ICO­MOS The Nether­lands, and chaired by Dr. Han Seung-soo, Chair of HELP and the for­mer prime min­is­ter of the Repub­lic of Korea. The Tokyo sym­po­sium points to a new hori­zon for the local and global water dia­logue process, includ­ing the UN High-level Meet­ing on Water in 2021, and the UN Water Decade’s Mid-term Review in 2023. The fields, insti­tu­tions, and approaches to water man­age­ment and cul­tural her­itage man­age­ment are grad­u­ally start­ing to find each other. The UN Valu­ing Water Prin­ci­ples can help bring experts in water-related her­itage and cul­tural val­ues into con­ver­sa­tion with con­tem­po­rary prac­tices in line with its mis­sion to cre­ate a “con­cep­tual frame­work for mak­ing bet­ter deci­sions impact­ing water.”73 Hope­fully, the notion of “cul­ture-based solu­tions” for sus­tain­able water futures will be included in the SDGs by the UN Water Decade’s Mid-term Review in 2023.

Com­mon-sense Dis­courses of Nature: A Gram­s­cian Analy­sis of Con­ser­va­tion Des­ig­na­tions in the Scot­tish High­lands

Com­mon-sense Dis­courses of Nature: A Gram­s­cian Analy­sis of Con­ser­va­tion Des­ig­na­tions in the Scot­tish High­lands

Zoe Rus­sell

The Uni­ver­sity of Stir­ling (The United King­dom)

Intro­duc­tion

There is no sin­gu­lar “nature” sim­ply out there wait­ing to be con­served74 and mean­ings of nature are mul­ti­ple, biased, and con­tra­dic­tory.75 Despite argu­ments for con­tex­tu­ally-spe­cific ways of know­ing nature, there remains a per­sis­tent nature–cul­ture dichotomy under­pin­ning nature con­ser­va­tion,76 prob­lem­at­i­cally sep­a­rat­ing human action from the nat­ural envi­ron­ment. Scot­land has a com­plex and lay­ered frame­work of statu­tory nature con­ser­va­tion des­ig­na­tions used to pro­tect and con­serve nature; in fact, over a quar­ter of Scot­tish land is cov­ered by such des­ig­na­tions.77 This paper exam­ines the dis­courses of nature pro­duced through such con­ser­va­tion des­ig­na­tions and the impli­ca­tions for human–envi­ron­ment inter­ac­tion. The research is based on a crit­i­cal doc­u­men­tary analy­sis of nature con­ser­va­tion des­ig­na­tions over time, using the Gram­s­cian con­cept of “com­mon sense” to cri­tique the nature–cul­ture dichotomy. The first sec­tion intro­duces con­tex­tual lit­er­a­ture on neo-lib­eral con­ser­va­tion and the Myth of the High­lands. The next explains the method­olog­i­cal approach taken before the main find­ings are pre­sented. It is argued that as else­where, nature con­ser­va­tion des­ig­na­tions in Scot­land have repro­duced the nature–cul­ture dichotomy through pre­scrib­ing desir­able lev­els and forms of human–envi­ron­ment inter­ac­tion. Addi­tion­ally, com­mon-sense dis­courses of nature are shown to emerge from within notions of nat­ural her­itage as a national asset tied to the Scot­tish state. Finally, there is a dis­cus­sion of alter­na­tive nature–cul­tures and sug­ges­tions are made for direct­ing future research in this area.

Neolib­eral nature con­ser­va­tion and the Myth of the High­lands

Fram­ing this crit­i­cal study of nature con­ser­va­tion des­ig­na­tions from a social, his­tor­i­cal, and polit­i­cal per­spec­tive are two main areas of study: neolib­eral con­ser­va­tion and the Myth of the High­lands. The first arises from the broader con­text of stud­ies con­cern­ing the “neolib­eralisation of nature” within con­tem­po­rary cap­i­tal­ism78 and is based on the argu­ment that nature pro­tec­tion and cap­i­tal­ism go hand-in-hand, with con­ser­va­tion as a site of cap­i­tal­ist accu­mu­la­tion.79 Specif­i­cally, natures are sub­ject to processes of com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion, mar­keti­sa­tion, finan­cial­i­sa­tion, and trans­for­ma­tion into nat­ural cap­i­tal as well as pay­ments for ecosys­tem ser­vices through nature con­ser­va­tion and eco-tourism ini­tia­tives.80 The notion of accu­mu­la­tion by dis­pos­ses­sion,81 a fea­ture of neolib­er­al­ism, reit­er­ates how accu­mu­la­tion occurs via enclo­sures of land through con­ser­va­tion as an ongo­ing process82 caus­ing dis­place­ment. The enclo­sures of land (includ­ing to cre­ate pro­tected areas) fence off phys­i­cal space, dis­plac­ing peo­ple in the process,83 but also cre­ate new ways of see­ing and being in the world.84 For exam­ple, cen­tral to neolib­eral con­ser­va­tion is the idea that nature can only be “saved” by its sub­mis­sion to cap­i­tal.85 In Gram­s­cian terms, neolib­eral con­ser­va­tion is a hege­monic prac­tice where elite inter­ests are uni­ver­salised, and alter­na­tives sup­pressed.86 Gram­sci’s ideas have been used in analy­ses of nature-soci­ety rela­tions87 and his con­cepts of the his­tor­i­cal bloc and hege­mony have been utilised to exam­ine bio­di­ver­sity con­ser­va­tion and cap­i­tal­ist expan­sion, sus­tain­able devel­op­ment, and con­ser­va­tion gov­er­nance.88 Few stud­ies have applied Gram­s­cian the­ory in the Scot­tish con­text, how­ever, despite its rel­e­vance to the “Myth of the High­lands.”

The Myth of the High­lands is a phrase that cap­tures the essence of the nature-cul­ture dichotomy. It refers to the ide­o­log­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Scot­tish High­land land­scapes as nat­ural and wild, which have been taken as real­ity rather than myth.89 This social con­struc­tion of the High­lands as untouched nature emerged through­out the his­toric peri­ods of eco­nomic and social “improve­ments,” roman­ti­ci­sa­tion, and Bal­moral­i­sa­tion, each deny­ing the actual con­di­tions of exis­tence, specif­i­cally the land­scapes’ social and cul­tural his­tory, and the lives of inhab­i­tants.90 In con­tem­po­rary Scot­land the con­ser­va­tion of seem­ingly nat­ural or wild land­scapes occurs exten­sively in the Gàidhealtachd91 in the same areas where the High­land Clear­ances dis­pos­sessed peo­ple of their lands. Hence, for some, nature con­ser­va­tion is under­stood through the lenses of inter­nal colo­nial­ism and cap­i­tal­ist expan­sion,92 while for oth­ers it is con­sid­ered an abuse towards Gaelic her­itage and cul­ture.93 This sit­u­a­tion is not unique to Scot­land, as evi­dent in the neolib­eral con­ser­va­tion lit­er­a­ture, but also the broader cri­tique of the ide­ol­ogy of wilder­ness94 and fortress con­ser­va­tion, the lat­ter sep­a­rat­ing peo­ple from nature through pro­tected areas and view­ing human use of nature as a threat to con­ser­va­tion efforts.95 Hence result­ing con­flicts over rights to nature, for exam­ple in Scot­land the strug­gle between crofters and con­ser­va­tion­ists over the right to use “wild” land.96 This can be con­tex­tu­alised by dif­fer­ent atti­tudes towards land use. Tra­di­tional views posi­tion land as a resource to make a liv­ing via agri­cul­ture (such as croft­ing), whereas post-roman­tic views per­ceive land as a refuge for nature, wor­thy of pro­tec­tion for its own sake.97 The for­mer tends to orig­i­nate with those liv­ing in the High­lands and the lat­ter from out­siders and vis­i­tors to the region.98 This draws atten­tion to the dynam­ics of con­flict between Gaelic cul­tural her­itage and the roman­ti­cised “back-to-nature” sen­si­bil­i­ties of mod­ern envi­ron­men­tal­ism held by out­siders and incom­ers to the High­lands.99

From the basis of the above lit­er­a­tures, nature-cul­ture rela­tions can be viewed as involv­ing the con­tin­ual social con­struc­tion of both nature and cul­ture within broader cap­i­tal­ist processes. There is a need for fur­ther analy­sis of the ways in which natures are being shaped ide­o­log­i­cally through con­ser­va­tion and dom­i­nant dis­courses in the Scot­tish con­text. Thus, the paper herein aims to under­stand dis­courses of nature pro­duced through con­ser­va­tion by draw­ing on a Gram­s­cian polit­i­cal ecol­ogy con­textualised his­tor­i­cally by the Myth of the High­lands.

Research con­text and method­ol­ogy

Whilst con­sid­er­ing national poli­cies, with rel­e­vance to the Scot­tish High­lands, a fur­ther regional focus on the North-West High­lands was adopted. The Wester Ross region is an excel­lent case study for explor­ing themes iden­ti­fied in the lit­er­a­ture, given the mul­ti­tude of des­ig­na­tions in the area. It has the largest National Scenic Area (NSA) in Scot­land, the first National Nature Reserve (NNR) des­ig­nated in the UK, and many Sites of Spe­cial Sci­en­tific Inter­est (SSSI), which are mapped for Scot­land in Fig. 1. It also has numer­ous Wild Land Areas (WLA), which are mapped for Scot­land in Fig. 2, a Marine Pro­tected Area (MPA), and UNESCO Biosphere Reserve (BR), the lat­ter shown in Fig. 3.

Addi­tion­ally, there are other Euro­pean des­ig­na­tions, and national park sta­tus has been dis­cussed for the area, but never des­ig­nated. Along­side nature con­ser­va­tion, the region has a his­tory of croft­ing,100