Views,use and reception of visualisations of development proposals impacting cultural heritage

Visualisations of land-use projects have become an important part of the planning process. Using a survey of heritage professionals’ attitudes towards visualisations as a starting point, this article addresses tensions between the expressed usefulness of visualisations and critical attitudes towards the lack of ‘objectivity’ of visual representation and the risk of manipulation for strategic purposes. Moving from the survey, the article discusses how visual representations of development proposals became part of a Norwegian public dispute over the expansion of a shopping centre in a historic town. Furthermore, our aim is to introduce a social semiotic approach for analysing visualisations at historic sites. Finally, we discuss some theoretical implications of negotiating visualisations, with emphasis on the recent debate about representational and non-representational theories in heritage studies.     

Land-Use Planning in Norwegian Mountain Areas: Local Development or Nature Protection?

This article discusses how land-use planning and management can combine the aim of local development with the protection of mountain areas. The basis for this double approach comprises protected areas and the land-use element of the Municipal Master Plan according to the Nature Diversity Act and the Planning and Building Act (PBA), respectively. Case studies performed in six mountain municipalities show that the planning processes in general are performed by a combination of rationalistic and communicative rationality based on consensus and with little awareness of power structures. Today's two-part system is dominated by the interests backing protection, not only in the protected areas, but also in the buffer-zones. Though the conflicts are rather few, they nevertheless often seem deep-set and rooted in national–local power relations. We argue that a more agonistic and decentralized approach where the protection-area management is transferred to the PBA will, to a larger extent, be able to combine both use and protection and to stimulate local development in mountain municipalities.     

中、日城市内部空间结构比较研究

本文从城市土地利用和生活空间结构两个方面,对中、日城市内部空间结构进行了对比,并从职住关系的视角解释了其形成机制。     

Land-Use Conflict and the Rate of the Transition to Agricultural Economy: A Comparative Study of Southern Scandinavia and Central-Western Korea

Although the forager–farmer interaction model successfully explains the gradual transmission of farming technology to foraging groups, it fails to explain rapid, abrupt transition to agricultural economies. This paper suggests that interaction between farmers and foragers often includes conflict and competition over land and that this conflict between different land-use strategies may lead to a rapid, discontinuous transition of subsistence economy. Comparing southern Scandinavian and central-western Korean cases, this paper suggests that the rapid transition to an agricultural economy in central-western Korea was a consequence of the appearance of territoriality of farmers in mobile, land-sharing context, resulting in a decrease in number of resource patches available to foragers.     

Farmer-fishermen: interior lake fishing and inter-cultural and intra-cultural relations among coastal and interior Sámi communities in northern Sweden AD 1200–1600

Although the productive fishing grounds had long attracted the Crown and the Church to northern Sweden, it was not until the sixteenth century that the judicial and fiscal powers of the Swedish Crown were exercised in full. Records show that the regular fishing in interior lakes formed a prominent enterprise among coastal farmer communities. This paper examines the social and economic context of farmers engaged in interior fishing with respect to the internal organization of village communities, principles of private and collective ownership, land-use strategies and inter-community relations. There are no a-priori assumptions about the coastal population being “Swedish”. Instead of applying ethnonyms, the terms “farmer” and “coastal” are used throughout the paper. The main area of investigation includes the coastal area of northernmost Sweden and the western parts of Finnish Lapland. The study shows that interior lakes fitted into village resource areas, long sanctioned by usage, and that usufruct belonged to village members collectively. A large part of the fishing lakes are situated in interior Sámi territory. Fishermen were internalizing Sámi place names, implying close relations between the groups. Archeological investigations point to subsistence strategies including systemic interior lake fishing being established before AD 1200. The authors propose that coastal and interior communities should be perceived as two economic strategies representing indigenous and pre-colonial land-use schemes.     

Identifying the Impacts of Land-Use Spatial Patterns on Street-Network Accessibility Using Geospatial Methods

While the land use-street network nexus is well acknowledged, evidence for the one-way impacts of land-use patterns on street accessibility is still inadequate. The measurements of land-use patterns and street accessibility lack systematic knowledge. Their empirical correlations also lack geographical variability, constraining site-specific land-use practices. Therefore, this study overcame the aforementioned limitations by examining the two-level spatial models to formulate accessibility-oriented land plans, using a well-developed Chinese city as an example. Firstly, two landscape metrics—Euclidean Nearest-Neighbor Distance (ENN) and Similarity Index (SIMI)—were used to quantify the intra- and inter-land-use configurations, respectively. Both city-level and local accessibility were measured using spatial design network analysis. Performing both ordinary least squares (OLS) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) models, results identified the statistically significant effects of inter-land-use patterns on two-level street accessibility. An exception was that land-use configurations within residential and industrial regions were irrelevant to street accessibility. We also found GWR was a better-fitting model than OLS when estimating locally-varied accessibility, suggesting hierarchical multiscale land-use planning. Overall, locally heterogeneous evidence in this study can substantialize land use-street network interactions and support the decision-making and implementation of place-specific accessibility-oriented land use.     

Long-term land-use changes in small/medium-sized cities. Enhancing the general trends and local characteristics

Small and medium-sized cities represent the backbone of the European territory, promoting cohesion and an economic base for development. The study compares the spatial and temporal trajectories of land use in three small/medium-sized cities located in central Portugal, between 1958 and 2011. The cities of Viseu, Leiria and Castelo Branco were chosen because they are located in different urban sub-systems and because of the different factors that frame their alterations in land use, occupation and consequent urban development. The research evaluates the transformations, supported by indicators to explain the spatial dynamics of losses and gains and a principal component analysis compares the land-use trajectories for the three cities. The general results reveal an increase from the central part of the study areas to the periphery, contrasting with a continuous decrease of the agricultural parts, illustrating peri-urbanization and rururbanization processes. The study allows identification of the dynamics in the three analysed areas, highlighting the different rhythms of change and relating them to the particularities that exist in each city. The methodology represents an advantage for the analysis and evaluation of territorial dynamics related to land-use change, and made possible the identification of the different forces.     

基于生态敏感性评价的城市土地利用模式研究——以长春净月经济开发区为例

生态敏感性高的城市地域的土地利用是城市规划、建设、管理过程中比较"棘手"的问题之一,经常因为环境保护与建设发展的矛盾而使之处于两难的境地。本文在总结和思辨一般性城市土地利用模式的基础上,借助GIS技术对长春市净月经济开发区的土地利用现状进行生态敏感性评价。结果显示,因特定的水域和人工林环境导致净月区总体上生态敏感性较高,按照划分的极高、高、中、低、非敏感5种生态敏感区,其中度及以上生态敏感区占全区50%左右。作者进一步以生态敏感性分区为前提,总结提出其土地利用的空间结构模式、类型结构模式和管理模式,并指出其中后二者尚在不断完善过程中。     

From ‘Traditional’ to Collectivized Reindeer Herding on the Kola Peninsula: Continuity or Disruption?1

Abstract

The article turns critical attention to the process of Kola Sami land-use changes that had occurred in the century immediately preceding Soviet collectivization drives of the mid-1930s. Particular attention is turned to influences brought by Izhma Komi settlers at the end of the 19th century. The overall argument is that Kola Sami land-use adaptive patterns had shown signs of orienting towards reindeer-driven, market-oriented form of husbandry well before collectivization. In this sense, there are grounds to see collectivization – in its expansive strategy for ever-rising production of reindeer meat – as part of a sufficiently long period of continuous changes, rather than an abrupt disruption of ‘traditional’ patterns – the latter reading occurring as a popular theme in Kola Sami related literature. Attention is turned also to post-Soviet forms of re-orientation in land-use. Here the problematic point of intra-community tendencies for ‘hidden privatization’ of extant collective assets is discussed in its current local controversy with foreign-supported experiments in private, clan community (obshchina) reindeer-husbandry.     

Testing micro-regional variability in the Holocene shaping of high mountain cultural landscapes: a palaeoenvironmental case-study in the eastern Pyrenees

Previous research acknowledges the ancient and complex land-use history of European mountainous areas, which are characterised by a remarkable regional variability in terms of human practices and patterns of occupation during the Holocene. However, the combined palaeoenvironmental and archaeological study of highland human management at a micro-regional scale remains a largely unexplored research field, especially in the Pyrenees. A combined pollen, stomata, non-pollen palynomorphs (NPPs) and macrocharcoal study was carried out at three nearby alpine and subalpine peat basins from a relatively small territory (ca.1700 ha) at the Madriu valley (Andorra, eastern Pyrenees), following a fine spatial-resolution strategy. The purpose was to test the suitability of high altitudinal palaeoecological sequences when reconstructing past small-scale land-use variability. The palaeoecological results of those peat records are compared and further integrated with archaeological local data, and together underline the marked complexity of high mountain land-use system over the Holocene period. Main phases of micro-regional land-use and landscape variability can be distinguished from the middle Neolithic to the early Bronze Age and from the Roman Period to the Modern Era. Conversely, several phases of homogeneous landscape management are distinguishable during the early Neolithic, and from the late Bronze to the late Iron Age. Results drawn from this study show that landscape variability is not necessarily connected to topographic or climatic parameters, and underline the role of social, economical and cultural parameters in the land-use organisation and the landscape shaping of high mountain spaces since Prehistory.