Mari Hvattum, Brita Brenna, Beate Elvebakk and Janike Kampevold Larsen eds, Routes, Roads and Landscapes, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2011, 266 pages, colour illustrations. £ 65.00, hardcover, ISBN: 978-1-4094-0820-8.

See Julian Baker's most recent Society & Space contributions: Darkness, travel and landscape: India by fire- and starlight, c1820–c1860

“Roads”, wrote J.B. Jackson, “belong in the landscape”. They do not “merely lead to places, they are places” (1997: 249). Yet human geographers, it seems, have an uneasy relationship with roads. Between transport geography’s calculation of regional flows and the recent ‘mobilities turn’, few choose to engage the ubiquitous paved pathways that crisscross our landscapes. The roads we see, travel down and live by remain acutely absent from socio-spatial publications.

Four Norwegian scholars, Mari Hvattum, Brita Brenna, Beate Elvebakk and Janike Kampevold Larsen, address this plain but rather profound lacuna in an engaging and generously illustrated collection that examines the “intimate and reciprocal connection between the landscape and the moving subject” (page 1). Access, pathway and movement are thus preeminent themes that cut across (mainly) historical and contemporary chapters. If landscape is “culturally configured nature” the editors contend, “then infrastructure may be considered the single most important factor generating it” (page 2). Contributions are thus guided by two principal questions: how have routes shaped conceptions and representations of landscape? And, what is the route’s role both as material object and as setting for a range of material, cultural and aesthetic practices? Aesthetics is the predominant concern, with questions of epistemic practice, phenomenological encounter and national identity  to the fore. The editors openly align their collection with the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, yet they envision its archival emphasis will challenge any alleged newness by examining the “intricate ways in which movement and mobility have informed peoples’ perceptions of the world around them for centuries” (page 3).

The sixteen chapters are divided into three sections. Section I, ‘Movement through the landscape’, takes up eighteenth and nineteenth-century representations of landscape in topographical literature, painting and cartography, scientific expeditions and colonial tourism. Architectural historian Vittoria Di Palma investigates the development of a novel “fluvial aesthetics” in eighteenth-century Britain, “an aesthetics of a moving eye on a winding route” (page 28). She uses the words and painting of William Gilpin and chorographical images to show how movement informed the experience and representation of landscape, offering  glimpses into dynamic precursors to Google Maps. The dynamism she reveals also challenges caricatures of Gilpin’s picturesque pronouncements as founded on or promoting a static aesthetics. Finola O’Kane examines road construction in eighteenth-century Ireland to demonstrate how aesthetic, economic and colonial imperatives were impressed upon the land to facilitate foreign visitors’ preconceptions of a pleasing and productive landscape, physically transforming Ireland and perspectives of it.

Section II, ‘The route as icon and occurrence’, transitions from attitudes and representations to the ways in which late nineteenth and early twentieth-century transportation infrastructure engendered new practical engagement and aesthetic encounter with landscape, mainly in American contexts. Historian David Nye uses three key moments in the evolution of American transportation—the brief spread of canal networks, the proliferation of the railway and the transition from regional parkways to interstate highways—to craft a tidy, erudite overview of the competing aesthetic ideals and vehicular practices which informed different experiences of mobility. Thomas Zeller compares the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina with its German counterpart, the Deutsche Alpenstrasse, describing the ideologies underpinning each road’s topographical placement and socio-political function. He demonstrates how particular roads and their presentation—and concealment—of surroundings helped to construct and choreograph national identities. Art historian Even Smith Wergeland pens perhaps the collection’s most unorthodox chapter by tracing aesthetic links over time in three examples of utopian futurist imagery: Albert Robida’s illustrations (1890), Norman Bel Geddes’ Futurama exhibition (1939)  and Dutch architects MVRDV’s Skycar City project (2007). Wergeland shows how ‘autopian’ depictions have influenced twentieth-century architecture and urbanism, charting a genealogy of contemporary mobile design.

Section III, ‘Landscapes of mobility’, moves from infrastructural experience and aesthetic practice to processes of movement and mobility in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Cultural geographer Tim Cresswell describes vital aspects of mobilities research and encourages future work to go beyond mobility-immobility dichotomies by tracking the historical lineages of contemporary manifestations. In the following three chapters Janike Kampevold Larsen, Lars Frers and Beate Elvebakk examine contemporary Norwegian road design, construction and use, discussing curatorial practices, founding aesthetic principles and embodied encounters. Peter Merriman closes the section with an investigation of England’s M1 in the mid-twentieth-century. He employs the metaphors ‘gathering’ and ‘enfolding’ to show how this principal road network engendered a topological and relational spatial development along the motorway, from local socio-automobile practices to national representations.

If the ‘mobilities paradigm’ is responsible for making roads a relevant topic of landscape research, then Routes, Roads and Landscapes is the welcome fruit of this scholarly vogue. The collection may be seen as a revival of efforts by J.B. Jackson and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, and a continuation of Peter Merriman, Tim Cresswell and Thomas Zeller’s work. Its strength lies in the relationships explored between historical and contemporary mobilities, and the interpretations, experiences and representations of landscape they provoked. And its large (240 x 220mm) ‘landscape’ layout gives space to many absorbing illustrations. Overall, it is a successful addition to edited collections on cultural-historical aspects of landscape.

A quibble or two, however, remain. More attention might have been paid to vehicles, for example. Apart from Nye and Zeller’s historical detail, the mobile means by which roads were actually used play a curiously trivial role. And not uncommonly for Western-authored mobilities-themed research, the roads and landscapes lying beyond Europe and America do not appear on scholarly route maps. Finally, several authors use this collection to present in condensed form empirical or conceptual topics published elsewhere (e.g. Nye, Zeller, Merriman, Cresswell). In these cases, turn to the original monographs or articles. 

References

Jackson JB (1997) Landscape in Sight: Looking at America. New Haven: Yale University Press.