Abstract
This paper is focused on selected units of casemates with enhanced fortification in the military fortification complex of the Czech borderlands landscape as specific forms of brownfields. They represent a functional system that interacts with surrounding nature, landscape character, and human society. Four approaches were chosen to study the function and potential of selected individual abandoned casemates with enhanced fortification, where each of them corresponds to one of the four landscape layers: genius loci, socio-economic sphere, functional relationship (between human and the landscape), and natural conditions. There is a corresponding research method for each of the landscape layers (guided interview with respondents, data analysis on abandoned casemates with enhanced fortifications as brownfields, analysis of their landscape functions, and zoological survey of interior). The main results could show that abandoned casemates with enhanced fortifications can play important roles in all landscape layers: stories and genius loci, abandoned casemates with enhanced fortification as a special type of military brownfield but also as a semi-natural ecosystem, and the same time as a habitat for invertebrates. The analyses and surveys conducted clearly demonstrate that abandoned casemates with enhanced fortification as units of military fortification complex of the Czech borderlands landscape perform several hidden important functions in the landscape for which they cannot be viewed as brownfields. This hidden functional potential is most likely best described by the concept of hidden singularity, which offers itself for integration into basic approaches to brownfields.
Highlights
Brownfields in general can represent one of the key environmental problems
We look at post-military sites (A-CEFs as brownfields) as purely anthropogenic habitats but as semi-anthropogenic to natural habitats
During the implementation of the research aimed at finding the functions that SACEFs respectively Abandoned Casemates with Enhanced Fortifications (A-CEFs) fulfill in the landscape, a set of results was obtained from all determined four approaches
Summary
Brownfields in general can represent one of the key environmental problems. They may not always be associated with ecological burden, they always interact with the human, the landscape, and with the surrounding nature. The regeneration of brownfields is one of the basic strategies for improving conditions in the urban environment (regeneration strategies vary across Europe, as does the definition of brownfields itself) [1]. It is the interactions between people, brownfields and their associated stories, landscape, and nature which this paper addresses. After the departure of the Soviet army and following the fall of the Iron Curtain (in 1991), abandoned military buildings became a major issue in the Czech Republic, e.g., complexes of buildings such as barracks, shooting ranges, and other buildings and lands too [2]
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