Jessica Matloch examines the importance of regional cultural landscape for their residents using the approach of willingness to pay. She identifies that almost each resident of every region prefers water landscapes. Furthermore, landscape perception is often influenced by education and by the resident’s relationship with nature. The impact of the relationship to the region differs between regions and resident groups. Regarding the involvement in or for the landscape, the results suggest that specific groups of residents are more willing to volunteer in and for regional landscapes than others. The analyses illustrate that the region is used the most to relax and the least for cultural purposes.
One of the most powerful nationalist ideas in modern Europe is the assertion that there is a link between people and their landscape. Focusing on the heart of German romanticism, the Rhineland, Thomas Lekan examines nature protection activities from Wilhelmine Germany through the end of the Nazi era to illuminate the relationship between environmental reform and the cultural construction of national identity. In the late nineteenth century, anxieties about national character infused ecological concerns about industrialization, spurring landscape preservationists to protect the natural environment. In the Rhineland's scenic rivers, forests, and natural landmarks, they saw Germany as a timeless and organic nation rather than a recently patchworked political construct. Landscape preservation also served conservative social ends during a period of rapid modernization, as outdoor pursuits were promoted to redirect class-conscious factory workers and unruly youth from "crass materialism" to the German homeland. Lekan's examination of Nazi environmental policy challenges recent work on the "green" Nazis by showing that the Third Reich systematically subordinated environmental concerns to war mobilization and racial hygiene. This book is an original contribution not only to studies of national identity in modern Germany but also to the growing field of European environmental history. Table of Contents: Introduction 1. Nature's Homelands: The Origins of Landscape Preservation, 1885-1914 2. The Militarization of Nature and Heimat, 1914-1923 3. The Landscape of Modernity in theWeimar Era 4. From Landscape to Lebensraum: Race and Environment under Nazism 5. Constructing Nature in the Third Reich Conclusion Abbreviations Notes Sources Acknowledgments Index Writing squarely within the idiom of the 'invented tradition' and the 'imagined nation,' Thomas Lekan argues that in the wake of belated unification and at a time of rapid industrialization, the German landscape came to be seen as a touchstone of national identity. He questions the idea that those engaged in landscape preservation were simply 'antimodern,' and he challenges both scholars who have seen a straightforward continuity from pre-1933 preservationist sentiment to Nazism and those who have made exaggerated claims for the Third Reich as the progenitor of modern green politics. This is a welcome contribution to the literature on local and national identity, joining works by Celia Applegate and Alon Confino, and on the environmental history of modern Germany. Both scholarly and original, Imagining the Nation in Nature is an impressive achievement. --David Blackbourn, Harvard University This important and timely book contributes to our understanding of German identity as well as to modern concepts of environmentalism and nature. Lekan's valuable contribution elucidates the modern, technocratic, and therapeutic vision of preservation that linked Weimar and the Third Reich. His analysis of Nazi bio-nature is significant and thought-provoking. --Alon Confino, University of Virginia
In a globalizing and expanding world, the need for research centered on analysis, representation, and management of landscape components has become critical. By providing development strategies that promote resilient relations, this book promotes more sustainable and cultural approaches for territorial construction. The Handbook of Research on Methods and Tools for Assessing Cultural Landscape Adaptation provides emerging research on the cultural relationships between a community and the ecological system in which they live. This book highlights important topics such as adaptive strategies, ecosystem services, and operative methods that explore the expanding aspects of territorial transformation in response to human activities. This publication is an important resource for academicians, graduate students, engineers, and researchers seeking a comprehensive collection of research focused on the social and ecological components in territory development.
The cultural landscapes of Central European cities reflect over half a century of socialism and are marked by the Marxists' vision of a utopian landscape. Architecture, urban planning and the visual arts were considered to be powerful means of expressing the 'people's power'. However, since the velvet revolutions of 1989, this urban scenery has been radically transformed by new forces and trends, infused by the free market, democracy and liberalization. This has led to 'landscape cleansing' and 'recycling', as these former communist nations used new architectural, functional and social forms to transform their urbanscapes, their meanings and uses. Comparing case studies from different post-socialist cities, this book examines the culturally conditional variations between local powers and structures despite the similarities in the general processes and systems. It considers the contemporary cultural landscapes of these post-socialist cities as a dynamic fusion of the old communist forms and new free-market meanings, features and democratic practices, of global influences and local icons. The book assesses whether these urbanscapes clearly reflect the social, cultural and political conditions and aspirations of these transitional countries and so a critical analysis of them provides important insights.
Cultural landscapes are created by people, and used by people, but still decidedly rich in biodiversity, and in harmony with nature. The landscapes of fairy tales, without dragons. Socio-economic complexity on top of biological diversity is the challenge nature conservation faces in the context of cultural landscape. This book is an attempt to approach this complexity and provide a theoretical background as well as guidelines and examples for hands-on solutions. It draws on inputs from scientists, administrators, independent consultants and politicians from Europe and the United States. With a particular emphasis on agriculture it attempts to merge disciplines such as philosophy, law, planning, economics and conservation biology toward a common goal: nature conservation and the preservation of biological diversity in landscapes under the pressure of human usage.
The basic problem is to what extent we can know past and mainly invisible landscapes, and how we can use this still hidden knowledge for actual sustainable management of landscape's cultural and historical values. It has also been acknowledged that heritage management is increasingly about 'the management of future change rather than simply protection'. This presents us with a paradox: to preserve our historic environment, we have to collaborate with those who wish to transform it and, in order to apply our expert knowledge, we have to make it suitable for policy and society. The answer presented by the Protection and Development of the Dutch Archaeological-Historical Landscape programme (pdl/bbo) is an integrative landscape approach which applies inter- and transdisciplinarity, establishing links between archaeological-historical heritage and planning, and between research and policy.
Thinking about and relating to the environment – what the Germans call Umwelt, i.e., the world that surrounds us – in the way that we do today has a long tradition within modern German culture. German scientists were among the many European explorers that left Europe in the late eighteenth century on voyages of discovery to then unknown parts of the world. For some explorers, discovery meant the fundamental confirmation of their own superiority vis-à-vis primitive peoples and primitive natures; for others it resulted in a shake-up of their belief in the superiority of European civilization in the face of the achievements of other civilizations, or in the face of spectacular nature scenes that outperformed the temperate European landscapes in terms of scale, sublimity, and grandeur. The documents that contain these stories of discovery left an important impression not only on German culture, but on European civilization at large, defining it vis-à-vis other civilizations and other natures. Europe today is the product of these encounters, including the way we conceive of our Umwelt, the environment that surrounds us. The story told in this book is the story of the rise of the modern German environmental imagination with particular emphasis on its narrative and visual components, complementing and expanding Barbara Stafford’s important work in her seminal study of the illustrated travel account from 1984. Chapters on Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, Albert Bierstadt, Leni Riefenstahl, and Werner Herzog unfold the key stages in a process that constitutes the unfolding of the modern German environmental imagination.
In this multi-authored book, senior practitioners and researchers offer an international overview of landscape character approaches for those working in research, policy and practice relating to landscape. Over the last three decades, European practice in landscape has moved from a narrow, if relatively straightforward, focus on natural beauty or scenery to a much broader concept of landscape character constructed through human perception, and transcending any of its individual elements. Methods, tools and techniques have been developed to give practical meaning to this idea of landscape character. The two main methods, Landscape Character Assessment (LCA) and Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) were applied first in the United Kingdom, but other methods are in use elsewhere in Europe, and beyond, to achieve similar ends. This book explores why different approaches exist, the extent to which disciplinary or cultural specificities in different countries affect approaches to land management and landscape planning, and highlights areas for reciprocal learning and knowledge transfer. Contributors to the book focus on examples of European countries – such as Sweden, Turkey and Portugal – that have adopted and extended UK-style landscape characterisation, but also on countries with their own distinctive approaches that have developed from different conceptual roots, as in Germany, France and the Netherlands. The collection is completed by chapters looking at landscape approaches based on non-European concepts of landscape in North America, Australia and New Zealand. This book has an introductory price of £125/$205 which will last until 3 months after publication - after this time it will revert to £140/$225.
