From Heroes' Groves to Parks of Peace: Landscapes of remembrance, protest and peace

Abstract

The public space surrounding war memorials and military monuments has always been important in the iconography of remembrance. In the 19th century these spaces often took the form of garden cemeteries and memorial plantations; after the First World War large tracts of former battlefield were preserved as sacred spaces which were essential to the process of ritual pilgrimage. After 1945 there was a considerable shift in the landscapes of war: memorial schemes more often took a pragmatic and utilitarian form, and desolated cities such as Hiroshima (and to a lesser extent Dresden and Coventry) became the cornerstone for anti-war movements in the late 1950s and 1960s. This period saw the emergence of a symbolic landscape of protest, which often co-existed uncomfortably as a place of tourism. Through a study of such sites the various types of 'peace landscape' are analysed, from environmental schemes such as trans-border parks to political interventions in the form of peace gardens. In the final section a recent design competition for a peace park in Turkey is examined and compared with similar complex environments in the US and Northern Ireland.