Paper short abstract:

Berlin has been reinventing itself for more than a decade. Numerous schemes have been thought up to bring Berlin’s future into being. Focusing on Alexanderplatz, a controversial square in East Berlin, I explore how incomplete and postponed landscapes and empty spaces speak of futures yet to come.

Paper long abstract:

Berlin is a city that has been busy re-inventing itself for more than a decade. It seems to be at once a place that has fulfilled its purpose and a place of new beginnings. Pipes, cables, roads, and train lines have been reconnected; plans and schemes have been thought up to bring Berlin's future into being. What is to be materialised in the city's landscape is a vision of unity and prosperity. I focus on the planning for Alexanderplatz, a controversial square in East Berlin. In the 1960s, Alexanderplatz was rebuilt as the apogee of 'really existing socialism', foreshadowing a future socialist society. Today, this future does not match planners' vision for a central square in the German capital; and a new one is to be built in its stead. The paper considers various media, including plans, models, and participatory procedures, but questions how successful these are in inculcating in people a specific perception of the future Berlin. I highlight the significance of incomplete and postponed landscapes, and discuss the ways in which people invoke Berlin's unfinished constructions and empty spaces to speak of futures yet to come.

Paper short abstract:

An analysis is given of how futurities of the Mexican past are engineered and mediated by means of the pre-colonial material heritage (in this case the archaeological site Teotihuacán) in the context of the establishment of a subsidiary of the retailing giant Wal-Mart.

Paper long abstract:

In Latin American nations, pre-colonial monumental architecture often forms the context of struggles related to land property issues as well as identity-driven discourse on the supra-local national and international level. This paper examines discourses related to the construction in 2005 of a supermarket owned by the Wal-Mart Corporation in the direct vicinity of the pre-colonial archaeological site of Teotihuacán, Mexico. A large urban conglomerate occupied between 100 BC and AD 650 and covering 22 km², contemporary Teotihuacan can be seen as an architectural nexus of traditional regulated by supra-local mediators such as the national government and the UN, al of which impose a futurity of heritage on the site. Today, it is the quintessential materialization of Mexico's indigenous past, and 100,000s of national and international tourists visit this locality each year. Against the backdrop of heightening integration with the US, the location chosen for Wal-Mart subsidiary Bodega Aurrera generated a conflict, much-publicized on online, between the numerous stakeholder groups in Mexico's material past These include locally affected communities; the national archaeological institute (INAH); the national government; UN, as well as Mexican immigrants in the United States and the Mexican population at large. An analysis is given of how meanings regarding this pre-colonial material heritage are engineered and mediated in this context.

Paper short abstract:

Saturated by the past and pregnant with a future, the present remains the ground through which both are mediated. Inviting us to ask how memory work takes place, and how place makes memory work, Lisbon's Expo'98 offers key lessons in the imagined, discursive, and material work this mediation takes.

Paper long abstract:

Writing against Western society's faith in unlimited progress, Walter Benjamin stressed the contingent and open nature of the future amidst its multiple pasts. Yet, while the modern present is saturated by the past and pregnant with a future, it remains the ground through which both the past and future are mediated. Given that modern perception is as much an activity of exclusion as it is of inclusion, foregrounding the active making of meaning encourages us to look at how future horizons are being constituted and reconstituted today. That particular futures are highlighted and others are rendered seemingly impossible is often highly consequential.

World expositions have often been taken as paradigmatic sites of progress materializing a vision of tomorrow. However, their landscapes and visions are themselves sites of negotiation, struggle, and tension. The landscape may mean, but what it means and by what means is subject to revision. If meaning is made from and through, and is not simply found in or on landscapes, how memory work takes place (and how place makes memory work) in sketching out future horizons becomes highly relevant.

Celebrating the theme of "The Oceans, a Heritage for the Future" 500 years after Vasco da Gama placed Portugal at the height of the Western World, but occurring also 24 years after the revolution that ended a long dictatorship as well as the Portuguese Empire, and only 12 years after Portugal joined the EU (however now at the bottom of the European hierarchy), Lisbon's Expo'98 offers important lessons into the imagined, discursive, and material work that it takes to navigate the past enroute to making and managing the future. Expo'98 underscores how the temporal and spatial horizon of memory stretches both forwards and backwards as it selectively mediates the discursive, material, and embodied markers that make up the past, present, and future imagination of what it means to be Portuguese.

Paper short abstract:

I examine the clash between the 'green' utopian landscape of (N)GOs and the contradictory idea of blighted cityscapes as experienced by residents in polluted urban areas, particularly the ways in which different actors make strategic use of various media to impose their visions of the island.

Paper long abstract:

Islands such as Jamaica and Curaçao are recognized for the intrinsic value of their diverse ecologies, while their tourism-based economies are strongly dependent on pristine natural landscapes and an Edenic image of the Caribbean that can be traced back to colonial times. This paper examines the clash between the 'green' global ideological landscape of NGO and government actors attempting to preserve paradise, and the contradictory idea of blighted cityscapes as experienced by residents in polluted urban areas. An analysis is given of the ways in which different actors have made strategic use of various media to impose their visions of the city and the island.

Paper short abstract:

The paper will investigate how representations of space, landscape and history in schoolbooks are used strategically by settlers (colonos), the nation state, indigenous communities (the Federation of the Shuar and Achuar), and NGOs to design images of the past and the future.

Paper long abstract:

The paper will investigate how representations of space, landscape, and history in schoolbooks are used strategically by settlers (colonos), the Nation State, indigenous communities (the Federation of the Shuar and Achuar), and NGO`s to design images of the past and the future. It will concentrate on visual representations of landscapes and historic events in the province of Morona Santiago (Ecuadorian Amazon region), and analyse maps, photos, drawings and emblems of various districts and towns. This region has been marked for several centuries by conflictive interests of colonial enterprises and indigenous life worlds, as well as by hybridization and the continuous negotiation about space and culture involving changing actors and interests. In such a setting various groups of people produce divergent sets of meaning that are related to particular aspects of power relations in the region.

I will argue that the representations of landscape form important elements in the production of meaning in the context of the struggle about land and power in the arena of a colonial frontier. They are connected to specific interests in and perspectives on this space, and are closely related to the communication and mediation of differing futurities.

Paper short abstract:

Throughout Asia a resurgent middle class identifies with a cosmopolitan consciousness that no longer exclusively duplicates Western culture but instead celebrates a future pan-Asian identity. Health spas, new age music and slow-living Asian style are building blocks of this post-national landscape.

Paper long abstract:

The current presentation is part of a larger project, The Poetry of Portable Places, which deals with the rapidly changing landscape of 21st century Indonesia and particularly how such changes are reflected and fed by various media practices, the arts and ecological activism. Within the Indonesian context it has become apparent how over the past decennia disintegration of the nation state has led its citizens to question how cultural landscapes other than those propagated by 35 year Suharto regime might be instrumental in re-imagining the nation. New order rhetoric habitually employed the metaphor of a shared Water-Land (Tanah Airku) urging its people to respect Mother Earth (Ibu Pertiwi), while at the same time constantly exploiting its natural resources for the sake of development. In Post Suharto Indonesia this ambiguous attitude towards the environment is increasingly being questioned.

Here I will focus on one particular case, which consists of a new sort of Green Thinking which presently circulates in many of Southeast Asia's metropolises but particularly gains momentum against the background of wider Indonesian political developments. The New Green thinking consists of a vastly increasing environmental awareness, ideas on using natural resources in alternative ways but also reflections on a future post national landscape that yet has to be realized. These ideas are commercially exploited in advertising, media, even fashion and are thus contributing to the lifestyle toolkit of Indonesia's growing middle class. Beng Huat (2003) and others have shown how throughout Asia the resurgent middle class is identifying itself with a new cosmopolitan consciousness which is no longer solely fixed on duplicating and incorporating Western culture. In this case a new green lifestyle is loosely composed of health spa's, new age like harmonious sounds and slow living Asian style: a bricolage of re-invented and 'real' but often romanticized Oriental traditions that ironically enough are not seldom imported through the West. In the aftermath of much discussed Asian Values, or as some argue amidst an era of Asian Renaissance, the new green thinking seems one of the most successful ways of celebrating an imagined regional identity and a Neo Asian futurist landscape that is composed and experienced throughout the media.

Minority cosmopolitanism, a revival of ancient cosmologies or merely fashion?: this paper will conclude by looking at the possible local effects of Asia's Green renaissance.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is an investigation of contemporary trends in the memorialisation of infants who died around the time of birth and some of the ways parents use (manipulation of material culture and landscape in particular) to cope with such loss within the context of Irish cultural history.

Paper long abstract:

Encounters with death are moments of cultural and psychological adjustment and are often marked on landscapes. In this paper, I explore one particular and striking example of this: the death of infants. When a child dies parents adjust to loss, including the unfulfilled potential of a life that was not lived. Thus, there is a temporal problem marked by a lack of shared memories, which parents attempt to resolve. The problem, if not the resolution, is often articulated through objects and the cemetery landscape itself. The example that I employ is Dublin's Glasnevin National Cemetery. I set contemporary trends in memorialisation to the backdrop of Irish cultural history: a history encompassing the exclusion of the unbaptized and "illegitimate", of disciplinary regulation of the cemetery landscape and, more recently, the accumulation of material culture and the elaboration of visiting rituals.

Today, parents bring gifts to the Angels' plot—as the area dedicated to children is known—often on occasions in which the children would have received them had they been alive. Children's spirits are imagined to grow, play together and keep company with each other. The landscape is alive in the temporal imagination, as reflected in hundreds of wind chimes and windmills left by visitors that animate the otherwise-still landscape with movement and sounds.

Paper short abstract:

I examine how meaning is created and mediated through signboards and oral narratives at former slave sites in Ghana. How do different futurities become associated with the sites – from psychological healing to prospects for community development?

Paper long abstract:

In the wake of increasing international attention to the history of the slave trade and recent African American heritage tourism to West Africa, the Ghanaian state and local entrepreneurs alike have begun to identify more and more landmarks as part of the slave route network. Natural features such as rivers, trees or rocks, which in themselves cannot be clearly distinguished from their surroundings by the uninitiated, now become explicitly associated with camp-sites, slave markets or places of refuge. Along the roads throughout the country one finds signboards that point out formerly hidden or forbidden places to potential tourists. They form part of a pilgrimage circuit by which the contemporary landscape is assigned deep historical significance. At the sites themselves, other signboards have been erected which serve to interpret the landscape along the lines of a dominant tourism narrative. This narrative is mainly aimed at African American visitors. It is presented in such a way that the more recent experiences of inner-continental slave-raiding and -trading appear as part of the transatlantic slave system and therefore as relevant to Diasporans.

This paper examines the processes through which meaning is created and mediated through signboards and oral narratives for both visitors and local communities at those former slave sites. It looks at the way in which different "futurities" become associated with the sites - ranging from the potential healing of psychological wounds to prospects for investment and community development - and asks about their mutual overlapping and fierce contestation.

Paper short abstract:

I address signs, websites and leaflets of nature conservationists and landscape managers in the Netherlands. I will argue that recent policies gave rise to a past/future temporality – primeval nature equated with a potential future – that should create a public in anticipation of a nature experience.

Paper long abstract:

Spatial planners in the Netherlands continuously face new demands and priorities for the designations of the land. Besides the usual controversies over infrastructure, agriculture and urbanisation, the role of nature areas have began to play a particular part. In their quest for an ecologically sound country, nature conservation and governmental organisations are constructing a Main Ecological Structure, a sort of nationwide interconnected 'nature web' in which 50.000 hectares of 'new nature' should interconnect and expand existing nature reserves. This new nature is often a recreation of 'primordial nature' inspired by the 'original' situation in the Netherlands before human habitation. Agricultural lands reengineered, the topsoil is removed, 'natural gradient' is created and afterwards, special large herbivores (konik horses or highland cattle) are introduced to maintain the vegetation. Besides this reinvented primordial nature, areas that are seen as 'agricultural nature' (peat meadows, chalk meadows etc) have come to be seen as a romantic artefact of history with additional natural value. Different stakeholder groups (ecologists, farmers, animal right movements) are continuously at loggerhead with each other over what kind of nature should be implemented where.

In my presentation I will focus on a particular outcome of these contestations, notably through which media the ideas on nature and the landscape are conveyed. As I will show, nature areas are to an increasing extent signposted with boards and banners that aim to inform people what they ought to see and experience. In stead of the usual 'nature reserve, no free access', signs now contain comprehensive statements that convey to the visitor that the area they are watching is in a certain way related to a larger whole and how all sorts of elusive ecological processes are occurring or are about to occur. Hereby the areas themselves are presented as the unfinished or partial instance of more encompassing and abstract futurities.