Abstract
The presence of ‘unintentional landscapes’ invites reflection on the difficulties in defining marginal or interstitial spaces, or indeed the concept of landscape itself. In some cases, so-called wastelands or terrain vague have been appropriated as spaces of adventure, creativity or discovery. In other cases, these anomalous spaces have been the focus of anxiety or disdain, or simply erased on account of their putative ‘emptiness’ to make way for more lucrative forms of land use. In recent years, however, fragments of spontaneous nature have been incorporated into landscape design, or even mimicked through the adoption of a ‘wasteland aesthetic’. Marginal spaces appear to transcend existing Eurocentric circuits of landscape discourse by offering multiple meanings and manifestations. Indeed, the cultural and scientific interest in these spaces lies precisely in their complexity and uncertainty.
Highlights
What is there in these theoretically empty spaces? What phenomena have been judged too vague or complex for cartographic representation?
What are we to make of any putative distinction between landscape and ‘non-landscape’? And how is any space that is conceptually enframed as a landscape related to its constituent cultural, historical and material elements? I am especially interested in cultural and scientific discourses that appear to work against the grain in relation to more narrowly utilitarian approaches to marginal spaces
The presence of unintentional landscapes connects with a myriad of zones of neglect that have proliferated alongside human activities at a global scale
Summary
What is there in these theoretically empty spaces? What phenomena have been judged too vague or complex for cartographic representation?. This might include an array of spontaneous spaces of nature that hold cultural or scientific interest as part of an explicitly counter-utilitarian discourse even if such spaces can be designated a putative role in terms of ‘ecological services’ or as a vernacular form of public space.
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