Landscapes Of Desire Research Articles

Illustrating the future

In the early 1900s, Sweden looked to its north, to “Lappland” as its “land of the future” – an optimistic, utopian vision that tied Sweden’s emergence as a nation-state both to the north’s untapped resources as well as to its open, pristine landscape as a place of symbolic regenerative potentiality – a Nature in which Swedes could re-create themselves. At the same time, the Swedish publishing industry was emerging as a social force, and with it the proliferation of mass-produced images. Photographs, illustrations, engravings, and facsimiles, circulating with scant reference to an original, were powerful political and commercial agents in creating competing mythologies of space and place – one a “found”, natural paradise, one an invented utopia, ripe for development. This article examines the discursive formation of Lapland as it was transformed into such a landscape of desire through the mass production and circulation of visual images – in particular photographs – that were continuously recontextualized, recirculated, remediated, and consumed.

How does urban landscape pattern affect ecosystem health? Insights from a spatiotemporal analysis of 212 major cities in China

Healthy ecosystems are the foundation of sustainable urbanization. While scientists have long understood the ecological benefits of healthy landscapes, there is still limited understanding of how urban landscape patterns affect ecosystem health. To fill this gap, we systematically investigated the spatiotemporal relationships between different urban landscape patterns and ecosystem health in 212 major cities in China from 2000 to 2020 using Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression. Results show that cities with poor ecosystem health are mainly concentrated in central-eastern China and show a long-term trend of degradation. There is spatial and temporal variability in how landscape patterns drive ecosystem health changes. The size, density, and perimeter of urban patches, along with the degree of interspersion between urban land covers with other land covers, are more important for ecosystem health than other spatial pattern measures, but these patterns also have greater temporal variation. Over the past two decades, the negative impacts of urban area growth have diminished in cities in lower-lying plains areas, but remain a major cause of local ecological degradation. The ecological health of mountain cities is more sensitive to changes in the shape and spatial arrangement of urban patches because of the intertwined distribution of natural ecosystems and urban land that often characterize these cities. This work not only confirms the advantages of spatiotemporal analytical thinking in the study of driving mechanisms of ecosystem health but also provides important guidelines for creating desirable landscape patterns for sustainable urban development.

‘They sure do have a pretty colour palette!’: the problematic promotion of invasive species as tourism icons

ABSTRACT The tourism sector has a role in environmental stewardship, including the responsible representation of tourism destinations. However, tourism stakeholders may, willingly or unwittingly, through uninformed or irresponsible promotion, support the perpetuation of environmental problems. We explore how tourism stakeholders portray a serious environmental problem in New Zealand – invasive species – using the case of Russell lupin. Lupins are an example of a ‘charismatic’ but highly invasive weed that tourism stakeholders may perceive as contributing to destination attractiveness. We document how 17 regional/national tourism organisations portray this invasive species in their Instagram accounts, employing an analysis of the imagery and accompanying commentary of 94 exhibits. We found overwhelming evidence of lupin being represented both by tourism organisations and their audiences as a highly desirable landscape feature. Where negative impacts were alluded to, these were embedded within a broader positive narrative underplaying the seriousness of the ecological threats. Uncritical acceptance and incorporation of invasive species as destination attractions may complicate future efforts for control or eradication. Tourism organisations have a role in sustainable destination management that includes the need to responsibly re-present environmental problems in their promotion activities to foster awareness and action among their audiences and visitor markets.

The eroticization of Tibetan monks in shōnen-ai and yaoi manga

Men have historically dominated the artistic production of cultural exotifications. This article flips the script by analysing how two prominent female Japanese manga artists – Kuranishi and Shinsan Nameko – erotically illustrate Tibetan men, specifically Tibetan Buddhist monks. Through textual analysis and fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2021, we show how their manga depictions of Tibetan young men, in particular monks, tend towards eroticization and sexual innuendo. This discursive and aesthetic trend in manga parallels ethnographic data on how Japanese women – facing unprecedented social precarity, seeking spiritual healing and self-transformation and desiring alternate masculinities – look elsewhere, outside of Japan and the perceived inadequacies of Japanese masculinities. We explore how liberative erotics, especially homoeroticism and love between boys, fuses with Buddhist and alternative spiritualities in yaoi and shōnen-ai genres and gestures towards a changing landscape of female desire.

Discover the Desirable Landscape Structure of Urban Parks for Mitigating Urban Heat: A High Spatial Resolution Study Using a Forest City, Luoyang, China as a Lens.

Urban parks can mitigate the urban heat island (UHI) and effectively improve the urban microclimate. In addition, quantifying the park land surface temperature (LST) and its relationship with park characteristics is crucial for guiding park design in practical urban planning. The study's primary purpose is to investigate the relationship between LST and landscape features in different park categories based on high-resolution data. In this study, we identified the land cover types of 123 parks in Luoyang using WorldView-2 data and selected 26 landscape pattern indicators to quantify the park landscape characteristics. The result shows that the parks can alleviate UHI in most seasons, but some can increase it in winter. While the percentage of bare land, PD, and PAFRAC have a positive impact on LST, AREA_MN has a significant negative impact. However, to deal with the current urban warming trend, a compact, clustered landscape configuration is required. This study provides an understanding of the major factors affecting the mitigation of thermal effects in urban parks (UP) and establishes a practical and feasible urban park renewal method under the idea of climate adaptive design, which provides valuable inspiration for urban park planning and design.

“The Place Where My Body Longed to Go”: Metaphors of Sexual Desire in André Aciman’s Prose

Sexual desire is one of the fundamental components of human personality and is seen as an important research object in contemporary Humanities. Its relevance for Linguistics lies in the increasing interest in the verbal representation of various forms of subjective experience, as well as in a large-scale discursivization of sexuality in contemporary culture and the need for developing a highly promising line of research known as ‘Language and Sexuality’. The present research focuses on metaphor with the aim of proving that it is an efficient mechanism of objectifying, structuring, interpreting, and verbalizing the subjective experience of sexual desire. The research is carried out on the basis of three thematically relevant novels by the contemporary American writer André Aciman (“Call Me by Your Name”, “Enigma Variations”, and “Find Me”). It is based on a sample of 364 contexts. Methodologically the research rests upon the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which facilitates the analysis of the ways fragments of subjective experience are comprehended and provides systematicity in the study of this phenomenon. The specific methodological instruments employed in this research include: the career of metaphor theory, which substantiates the inclusion of similes in metaphor analysis; the metaphoric landscape theory, which enables us to systematize metaphors by identifying central and peripheral elements and defining their conceptual load; the metaphorical creativity theory, which proves the possibility of metaphorical innovations both at the conceptual and verbal levels. The paper identifies and analyzes ten groups of metaphors, nine of which regularly occur in Aciman’s prose and one of which is made up of unique isolated forms. It has been shown that contrary to the popular belief that sexuality discourse is dominated by the fire metaphor, the central element of the metaphoric landscape of sexual desire in Aciman’s texts turned out to besexual desire is movement in space. Among the most creative and regularly occurring ones are the metaphorssexual desire is a financial transactionandsexual desire is music. Within each of the identified groups the paper pinpoints the properties of the source domain that are being profiled, analyzes ways of their verbal representation, and discusses the possibility of conceptual and verbal variation. The research is qualitative and does not presuppose a statistical analysis of the metaphors.

A Complex Landscape of Fun, Queerness and Desire in China: Introducing Three Films by He Xiaopei

This article documents He Xiaopei’s work as a film activist who contributes significantly to feminist and queer movements in contemporary China. Trained as a social scientist, He Xiaopei then went on to become the director of the civil organization Pink Space Research Center in the mid-2000s as well as an independent filmmaker. Since 2010, she has produced more than ten documentary movies. However, despite the greatness of her contribution, the range of the topics she has covered, and her position in the feminist and queer movement in China, she has yet to receive the attention she deserves in English-speaking academia. This article selects three movies by He Xiaopei, i.e., The Lucky One, Playmates, and Bad Women of China, and provides an intersectional analysis of gender, friendship, migration, sexuality and intimate relationships, as seen through the lens of an ever-changing China on the global stage. At first glance, the three movies focus on different figures and themes, but they share the same core spirit – breaking through boundaries and limits, maintaining humour and positivity even when facing predicaments, embracing desire and depicting humanity as it manifests in complicated modern life.

The Year 2021 in Poetry: Landscape of Desire

The Year 2021 in Poetry: Landscape of Desire

Exploring trade-offs in agro-ecological landscapes: Using a multi-objective land-use allocation model to support agroforestry research

Finding the optimal land allocation for providing ecosystem services, conserving biodiversity and maintaining rural livelihoods is a key challenge of agricultural management and land-use planning. Agroforestry has been widely discussed as a sustainable land-use solution and as one strategy to improve the provision of multiple ecological and economic functions in agricultural landscapes. In this study, we use the backdrop of agroforestry research to evaluate a method from the multi-criteria decision analysis toolbox: robust multi-objective optimization. The key feature of this modelling approach is its capacity to integrate uncertain ecological and socio-economic data. We illustrate the optimization model with a case study from eastern Panama, showing how the model can bring together scientific and practical knowledge to provide potentially desirable landscape compositions from the perspective of farmers, a public perspective, and a compromise solution. Example results of our case study show how to assess whether agroforestry is a desirable component in a landscape composition to satisfy multiple objectives of different interest groups. Furthermore, we use the model to demonstrate how different objectives influence the optimal area share and type of agroforestry. Due to its parsimonious nature, the model could be used as a starting point of an interactive co-learning process with decision-makers, researchers and other stakeholders. The model, however, is not yet suitable for an exact prediction of future land-use dynamics, for questions of spatially explicit land-use configuration, studies going beyond the regional scale or for socio-economic interactions of agents. Therefore, we outline future research needs and recommendations for other types of models or hybrid approaches.

Discover the desirable landscape structure for mitigating urban heat: The urban-rural gradient approach for an ancient Chinese city

Urban heat is one of the most prominent challenges of urbanization. The nature of extraordinarily spatially heterogeneous landscape in cities may provide nature-based solutions to solving the urban heat problems. Here we aimed to discover the most desirable landscape structure vividly demonstrated in urban areas that we can adopt for heat mitigation. We conducted our study in Xi'an, an ancient capital of China, using land surface temperature (LST) retrieved from Landsat8, landscape features interpreted from SPOT6 along with the urban-rural gradient. We found that large LST variability (as high as 18.11 °C) existed within the same urban intensity (UI) and it is very promising to see that potential of heat mitigation broadened with increasing urbanization. This is very likely thanks to the archaic urban design of Xi'an, which incorporates and preserves the wisdom of the ancients in the urban landscape layout. We revealed two landscape composition associated desirable cooling landscape structure models (i.e., the enhancement of blue spaces and the enhancement of green spaces) generally applicable for all urban environments, and three landscape configuration related desirable cooling models, that are the complex grey infrastructure model, the aggregated green space model, and the connected and regular model of both grey and green infrastructures, which can be exquisitely adopted at low, high and intermediate urban intensity gradients.

Buddhist monasteries facilitated landscape conservation on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

ContextThe Sanjiangyuan region of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau—also known as the “Three Rivers’ Headwaters”—is the origin of the Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong Rivers and therefore the key water source for hundreds of millions of downstream residents. Protecting this region’s ecosystems is a key priority for sustainable development in China and Asia. An important social dimension of Sanjiangyuan is the long-established and widespread presence of Tibetan Buddhism, particularly as manifested in the large number of monasteries throughout the region. However, the influence of cultural factors on environmental change remains largely understudied here.ObjectiveWe focus on two types of spatial associations—point-point and point-area features—to quantitatively investigate the effects of Buddhist monasteries on land use/cover change (LUCC) in surrounding landscapes.MethodsWe conduct a spatially-explicit analysis of Sanjiangyuan for two periods, 1990–2000 and 2010–2015, to identify and quantify the influence of the presence and spatial distributions of Buddhist monasteries on LUCC compared to village communities that lack monasteries.ResultsWe found that the presence of monasteries is highly correlated with the preservation of natural ecosystems, specifically of grasslands and forests. Within monastery buffer zones with radii between 1 and 10 km, 7.13–9.30% more grassland area and 7.14–7.47% more forest area remained around monasteries compared to villages. This contrast decreased with increasing distance to the monastery/village. Overall, built-up areas were also much smaller around monasteries than around villages, while unused land was more commonly transformed to forests and grasslands around monasteries.ConclusionsThese findings strongly support the idea that Buddhist culture, as manifested through its physical institutions and communities, are instrumental in achieving desired landscape conservation outcomes.

The Symbolism of Clothing: The Naked Truth About Jacques Lacan

In the work of Jacques Lacan there exists an extended metaphor of clothing, whereby the ‘naked’ truth is always ‘clothed’ in deception. For Lacan, clothing functions at the intersection of the symbolic and the imaginary, with outward appearance shaping what we imagine to be underneath in order to determine the landscape of symbolic desire. Joan Copjec considers the political implications of this metaphor, arguing that utilitarianism, in particular, divides desire into a false dichotomy of rational, naked desire, and the ornamental clothing of irrationality, a mindset woven into both capitalism and French colonialism. The article then examines two examples from Lacan’s commentary on ethics: the story of Saint Martin and the beggar, and the myth of Actaeon and Diana, further demonstrating how clothing metaphors are entwined with notions of truth and deception. The article concludes by considering whether Lacan’s words are similarly clothed in deception, and ponders whether he should be telling us the naked truth. Lacan weighs both options and concludes that the most effective form of communication constitutes a double bluff in which he strategically pretends to lie, not for the sake of deception, but in order to ‘clothe’ (and thus protect) the naked truth concealed underneath.

Evaluating pathways to social and ecological landscape resilience

Rapid environmental changes challenge the resilience of wildlands. The western portion of the Lake Tahoe Basin in California is an important ecological and cultural hotspot that is at risk of degradation from current and future environmental pressures. Historical uses, fire suppression, and a changing climate have created forest landscape conditions at risk of drought stress, destructive fire, and loss of habitat diversity. We prospectively modeled forest landscape conditions for a period of 100 years to evaluate the efficacy of 5 unique management scenarios in achieving desired landscape conditions. Management scenarios ranged from no management other than fire suppression to applying treatments consistent with historical fire frequencies and extent (i.e., regular and broadscale biomass reduction). We developed a decision support tool to evaluate environmental and social outcomes within a single framework to provide a transparent set of costs and benefits. Results illuminated underlying mechanisms of forest resilience and provided actionable guidance to decision makers. Sixteen attributes were assessed in the model after assigning weights to each. We found that removing forest biomass across the landscape, particularly when accomplished using extensive fire-based removal techniques, led to highly favorable conditions for environmental quality and promoted overall landscape resilience. Environmental conditions resulting from extensive fire-based biomass removal also had nominal variation over time, in contrast with strategies that had less extensive and/or used physical removal techniques (e.g., mechanical thinning). Our analysis provides a transparent approach to assess large datasets with complex and interacting variables. Ultimately, we aim to provide insights into the complexities of maintaining optimal conditions and managing landscapes to promote ecosystem resilience in a changing world.

Landscapes of desire: between the land and sea

Landscapes of desire explores the necessity and the desire to reimagine and valorize the discredited landscapes, between the land and water, along the Portuguese coast: from Cova do Vapor to Cabo Espichel. Vulnerable urban landscapes in the face of contemporary climate challenges. In the landscapes, which circumscribe the sea, there are different fragments of discourse that due to abandonment by the destruction caused by extreme climatic events, such as flooding and coastal erosion, need a new history.
 This period of increasing segregation between the city and the sea, urges us to rethink a new way of connecting human beings and the sea. The decoding of the morphological characteristics of the space between land and sea, of the architectural elements that compose it, is possible through the reading of the forms that resist over Time. The abstraction of forms allows us to interpret the contemporary coastal territory and to define new urban and architectural paradigms for desired landscapes between land and sea. 
 We consider it is important to explore new approaches and methods to enhance and transform these landscapes because of their architectural value. A possible path for the physical and emotional repair of the ruined landscapes along the coastline.

Parrot Free-Flight as a Conservation Tool

The release of captive-raised parrots to create or supplement wild populations has been critiqued due to variable survival rates and unreliable flocking behavior. Private bird owners free-fly their parrots in outdoor environments and utilize techniques that could address the needs of conservation breed and release projects. We present methods and results of a free-flight training technique used for 3 parrot flocks: A large-bodied (8 macaws of 3 species and 2 hybrids), small-bodied (25 individuals of 4 species), and a Sun Parakeet flock (4 individuals of 1 species). Obtained as chicks, the birds were hand-reared in an enriched environment. As juveniles, the birds were systematically exposed to increasingly complex wildland environments, mirroring the learning process of wild birds developing skills. The criteria we evaluated for each flock were predation rates, antipredator behavior, landscape navigation, and foraging. No parrots were lost to predation or disorientation during over 500 months of free-flight time, and all birds demonstrated effective flocking, desirable landscape navigation, and wild food usage. The authors conclude that this free-flight method may be directly applicable for conservation releases, similar to the use of falconry methods for raptor conservation.

Global convergence and geometric characterization of slow to fast weight evolution in neural network training for classifying linearly non-separable data

In this paper, we study the dynamics of gradient descent in learning neural networks for classification problems. Unlike in existing works, we consider the linearly non-separable case where the training data of different classes lie in orthogonal subspaces. We show that when the network has sufficient (but not exceedingly large) number of neurons, (1) the corresponding minimization problem has a desirable landscape where all critical points are global minima with perfect classification; (2) gradient descent is guaranteed to converge to the global minima. Moreover, we discovered a geometric condition on the network weights so that when it is satisfied, the weight evolution transitions from a slow phase of weight direction spreading to a fast phase of weight convergence. The geometric condition says that the convex hull of the weights projected on the unit sphere contains the origin.

Are Agrarian Areas in Mediterranean Mountain Regions Becoming Extinct? A Methodological Approach to Their Conservation

Mediterranean mountain regions have undergone several landscape changes since the end of the 19th century due to progressive depopulation and the abandonment of cattle rearing, forestry, charcoal production and agricultural activity. Such activity favored landscape dynamics by creating grassy habitats, which in turn resulted in greater landscape diversity. This is now being lost as the forest reclaims abandoned pastures. Thus, the purpose of this work was to identify those open habitats most in need of management action to maximize biodiversity and cultural heritage conservation and minimize fire risk and management costs. These analyses show a sharp decrease of open agriculture areas, which are the habitat of many endemic species (from 46.4% to 12.3%), currently overgrown with secondary forests. Multivariate analysis and the PGP (Patch Growing Process) heuristic model indicate the areas in which the restoration of open areas (by about 8%; about 500 ha) will be the most advisable and the most beneficial, taking into account environmental, social and economic factors. The use of PGP provides for a 21% improvement in total agriculture areas. Still, the natural state of the protected Mediterranean mountain area “Alta Garrotxa” (Catalonia, Spain) is almost continuous forest. However, the management models proposed in this study offer flexible precepts to achieve the desired landscape patterns and maintain biodiversity, while conserving cultural heritage and decreasing the risk of fire.

Beef Production in the Southwestern United States: Strategies Toward Sustainability

From grazing lands to meat packing, beef production systems in the United States are increasingly expected to meet new global demand without compromising environmental quality. These challenges and opportunities are manifest in the American Southwest and Ogallala Aquifer region, neighboring regions connected ecologically and socially through beef production. Each year most calves raised on extensive, arid Southwestern pastures are exported to the Ogallala Aquifer region for finishing on grains from the American Upper Midwest. Intensifying changes in climate, vegetation, and human demographics threaten the sustainability of the system. Heritage cattle genetics, precision ranching, and range finishing on Southwestern rangelands are three promising strategies for improving sustainability. However, major knowledge gaps exist. Desirable landscape use by Raramuri Criollo, a heritage cattle type, has been identified in several arid rangeland settings, but little is known about their performance in conventional feedyards. While precision agriculture is already prevalent in croplands, less is known about how these technologies can be cost effective in arid rangelands. Moreover, many perceive range finishing as environmentally friendly, but tradeoffs of greenhouse gases, increased rangeland use, and disruption of Ogallala Aquifer cattle feeding systems must be assessed. Here we introduce a new USDA-NIFA Coordinated Agricultural Project designed to fill these knowledge gaps and advance sustainability. With a boundary-spanning approach of education, participatory research, and extension, the project is identifying tradeoffs of the three strategies with explicit attention to pericoupling of the two adjacent regions and full consideration of the coupled ecological and social systems across those regions.

New Residential Districts Ordering: from Language of Smells Description to the Space Sensory Order

The article analyzes the sensory aspects of urban life in one of the districts in the outskirts of Moscow. Revising the concepts of sensory ordering of space, I analyze the ways how urban dwellers in this district order the space by smell perception. I define three components of sensory ordering: i) the language of sensory experience, ii) ascription of meanings to space and smells localization, iii) actions aimed at supporting the desirable olfactory landscape. The process of creating this language and negotiations about the desirable olfactory landscape are based on adopting the special terms and visualizing the smells. This language allows to interact with the various agents on different levels of power, to transform and control the space. The production of meanings, based on smells, influences the district identity. Both positive and negative smell perception produce the value of the district, while the negative smells acts differently and devalues the other city territories. Citizens actions support the sensory normativity: through sensory patrolling (different ways of detecting the smells) and microordering (creating the cleanliness and freshness within neighborhoods). These ways of ordering sensory experience and creating olfactory landscape help to explain the interaction between district dwellers, the principles of how their agency is formed, and the principles of being responsible for the space.

A Question of Time: HQ Trivia and Mobile Streaming Temporality

A Question of Time: HQ Trivia and Mobile Streaming Temporality