Paper short abstract:

The paper scrutinizes the heterogeneous legacy of the National Spatial Planning in Sweden, in order to counter a naturalization of the landscape as a clean slate for planning interventions. It reveals a legacy of a rational planning ideology, but also contested and lingering ideas of landscape.

Paper long abstract:

Landscape and planning scholars alike have claimed landscape as an integrative approach for sustainable planning. However, while they acknowledge the importance of landscape history, they tend to overlook or simplify the troubled legacies of past planning. By doing so, the landscape can be treated as a clean slate for novel planning interventions. However, to facilitate sustainable transitions we need to unpack the heterogeneous legacies of past planning, as it effects institutional frameworks, planning practices, planning regulations and the actual land use. This paper explores the heritage of the Swedish National Physical Planning, initiated in the 1960s, institutionalized in environmental and planning law in 1987, and currently a topic for a national enquiry (2022 – 23). While this planning is in part recognized, I aim to tease out some of its forgotten heritage and naturalized effects in order to discuss its ambiguous and modern enactment of the environment. Importantly, this planning also included a rational planning approach to landscape, which affects not only the contemporary landscape but also contemporary methodologies. Theoretically, the study draws on landscape theory with relational ontology/STS. Empirically, it relies primarily on national enquiries and reports from the Environmental Protection Agency, combined with reports on pilot projects on Landscape planning, with a special focus on the 1970s. The paper concludes with a discussion on how previous planning is entangled (and yet partly invisible) in the contemporary landscape, but also by discussing how contemporary approaches to landscape are mirrored in this history, which calls for a revised landscape approach.