Landscape and Environment Programme

Landscape and environment are currently of compelling cultural significance.

The AHRC Landscape and Environment Programme was launched in 2005 to develop an arts and humanities understanding of landscape and environment in distinctive, innovative and engaging ways.

The programme covered over fifty different projects which together have expanded our knowledge and understandings of the cultural views of landscape and environment, the many ways the world has been imagined, experienced, designed, made and managed, and the complex meanings landscape and environment have for everyone, whether living in them or viewing them from afar.

(See Secrets of the Sands story on the LWEC website)

Projects have enriched understanding of landscape and environment on topics such as:
•    images, values and knowledge
•    representing, making and meaning
•    time, space and narrative
•    settlement and movement
•    elements and ecologies
•    authority and access

Selected projects

- Contested Common Land

The project has regular involvement from Natural England, the Countryside Council for Wales, Welsh Government, the National Trust, and several commoners organisations. The project hosted two events which attracted academics, stakeholders, policy makers from the UK and Japan and the general public. The project has also developed a website as an important resource for members of the public, stakeholders and academics who have an interest in the research findings regarding land ownership issues.

- Militarized Landscapes in the twentieth-century: Britain, France and the United States

This project involved a comparative analysis of the emergence, management and meaning of militarized landscapes. Drawing on geography, history and the natural sciences, the project has shown how militarized landscapes have become sites for competing claims and conceptions of landscape and environment, natural value and historical value, and national defence and national heritage. Militarized Landscapes: Comparative Histories and Geographies was published by Continuum in May 2010. The edited collection is the first book to explore the comparative histories and geographies of militarized landscapes, and the environmental history of war and war preparation.

- Inca Ushnus: landscape, site and symbol in the Andes

This project examined how the Inca Empire (c. AD 1400-1532) met the challenge of appropriating and modifying the Andean landscape to enhance its productive capacity and political power to create the largest native state in the Americas. Working in collaboration with the British Museum, the trans-disciplinary project team studied Inca architectural constructions known as ‘ushnu platforms’ to explore the relationship between landscape, site and symbol in the Andes.

Evocative finds of conical stones have confirmed the role of the platforms in sun worship, increasing our understanding of Inca culture. The team has also put together a new display at the British Museum and a portable exhibition in Peru.
 
- The future of landscape and the moving image - Robinson in ruins

This was a collaboration between three researchers – a geographer, Professor Doreen Massey of the Open University; a cultural historian, Professor Patrick Wright of Nottingham Trent University and a film-maker, Patrick Keiller of the Royal College of Art – that set out to locate economic, social and political aspects of the current global predicament in the UK's landscape.

The project investigated ideas about belonging and other, related subjects, by exploring part of a familiar though not always sympathetically viewed landscape – the southern English ‘countryside' – equipped with a 35mm ciné camera.

The project film Robinson in Ruins was first screened at the Venice Film Festival in September 2010 and was released on DVD in June 2011.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/nov/20/robinson-ruins-patrick-keille...

A list of follow-on awards to these Researching Environmental Change projects is attached as a pdf document below.

Researching Environmental Change Networks

13 networks were funded under the scheme, to recognise the fact that arts and humanities research on environmental change was still largely absent from dominant narratives and policy documents addressing our changing environment.

A series of workshops explored specific themes to ensure that the dimensions and dynamics of human livelihood are fully embedded in future discussions and considerations of the consequences of environmental change.

Networks worked with non-academic institutions and individuals to enhance the research, dissemination and public value of the networks.

Partner organisations have included English Heritage, National Trust, Royal Meterological Society, Royal Geographical Society, AONB management teams, Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute, British Library, and Cornwall Wildlife Trust.

The main themes addressed by the networks were:
•    Histories of environmental change and the ways they are told
•    Representations of environmental change
•    Knowledge and values

A workshop for the network leaders was held at the Royal Geographical Society in June 2011 under the theme of ‘Narrating Environmental Change’.

Representatives from LWEC and the National Ecosystem Assessment also attended and contributed to discussions on the importance of arts and humanities perspectives on environmental change, and on strengthening the connections between the networks and LWEC. Participants were also asked to provide and explore images of environmental change.

Impact Fellowship

In 2010, the programme was awarded a Director’s Impact Fellowship by the AHRC to allow further dissemination of the research to both public and academic audiences, extending the public value of the Programme. Relationships with external partners: English Heritage, Landscape Research Group, Le Notre, National Trust, Royal Geographical Society, and Tate play a key role here in providing ‘pathways to impact’, alongside advice and support.

The three main outputs of the fellowship will be:
•    A book authored by the programme directorate
•    A new website
•    A site-specific performance ‘Warplands’ by Professor Mike Pearson (University of Aberystwth)

PROGRAMME FACTS AND FIGURES

Total investment: £5.5 million

Start and end dates: September 2005 to 31st May 2013

Website: www.landscape.ac.uk

Contact:

Programme Director - Professor Stephen Daniels
Programme Coordinator - Mrs Charlotte Lloyd
Research Fellow – Dr Lucy Veale

Sir Clive Granger Building,
University of Nottingham,
University Park,
Nottingham,
NG7 2RD,
UK.

(0)115 8466071

landscape@nottingham.ac.uk