Landscape justice

Landscape justice asks who a landscape is for. Access, ownership, rights of way, planning gain, designation and dispossession all distribute something valuable, and they distribute it unevenly. The question is not only who benefits from a place, but who is recognised as belonging to it and who gets a hearing when it changes.

The theme has a particular history in this group, which marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2017 with a debate on landscape justice bringing together researchers, landscape architects, archaeologists, artists, writers and politicians, and which took the questions raised there into its research fund the following year. Work in it spans colonial and postcolonial land relations, indigenous claims and knowledge, racialised and class-based patterns of exclusion, the position of displaced people, and the argument over landscape citizenship: whether a right to shape one’s surroundings can be claimed through residence rather than ownership.