Paper short abstract:

This paper links landscape, risk and memory in the German chemical centre of Ludwigshafen. I draw on Ingold’s dwelling perspective to illuminate the importance of cultural memory of past ‘taskscapes’, with their associated risks and dangers, in reckoning the present safety of home and workplace.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the connections between landscape, risk and memory in an old industrial town in Germany. Ludwigshafen is associated with a single industry, chemicals, and to a scarcely lesser degree with a single corporation, BASF. Major arteries of communication - above all the Rhine, but motorways and huge pipelines too - themselves form part of an industrial landscape which nowadays has few parallels in Europe. The 'risk potential' of such a setting is enormous. Yet this is a town where risk concerns about chemicals are played down rather than magnified, and a striking confidence is apparent in the safety of an industry which elsewhere enjoys a dubious reputation. Building on recent work, this paper takes further an examination of the merits of Tim Ingold's dwelling perspective to make sense of this public mood, arguing for the importance of cultural memories of past 'taskscapes', with their associated risks and dangers, in reckoning the safety of home and workplace in the present. To date, little attention has been paid to the ways in which memory informs shared judgements about risk (Beck's work for instance highlights the relationship between present and future rather than past and present). Ingold's ideas provide a valuable key here to understand how familiarity across generations helps to render potentially unsafe landscapes safe.