Paper short abstract:

In landscape dynamics different social groups can read as well create social and even ideological messages, through which a social position can be craved for and or derived. In the process of the creation of a new landscape in the salt marshes of coastal Flanders, comital power had a unique opportunity to organise space, society and environment. Their concepts were adopted and transformed into more subtle dynamics in the landscape in the centuries that followed. The coastal landscape of Flanders and its direct and indirect symbolic features were and are as such active means of constructing continuously changing realities.

Paper long abstract:

Landscapes are the dynamic result of how subsequent changing social contexts and their spatial features, from the management of the environment to architectural elements, as well as dependent senses of place constitute society and one's position in society. As such in the dynamic of landscape different social groups can read as well create social and even ideological messages, through which a social position can be craved for and or derived. In the process of the creation of a new landscape in the salt marshes of coastal Flanders, comital power had a unique opportunity to organise space, society and environment. In doing so, the counts communicated their princely, neo-Carolingian ambitions, amongst others through the construction of comital castles and collegiate churches in Bruges and other towns, but also the construction of sluices and water-infrastructure. Comital agency also resulted in the creation of dependent social groups with their own imprint upon the landscape, making subtle distinctions to appropriate landscape-ideology, i.c. moats, churches and so on. These subtle distinctions however were reinterpreted after the adoption and transformation of their messages by free farmers from the late medieval period on, signifying the shift in society from comital power base to commercial agro-system.

The coastal landscape of Flanders and its direct and indirect symbolic features were and are as such active means of constructing continuously changing realities. It shows the complexity of landscape dynamics and our understanding of them.