Landscape playground

Hannes PalangCenter for Landscape and Culture

Tallinn University

Drivers of landscape change

• accessibility• urbanisation• globalisation• Natural calamities

Urbanisation

Urbanisation in Estonia

Urbanisation

• Third generation urbanites• Fears of darkness, being alone, sounds etc• Countryside as a foreign country• Instead of working the land we play it

Accessibility

• Difficult to get a tourist further than 50 m from the parking lot

• Mental mapping of the 1970s: three fields matter – travel, information and IGNORANCE

• How to get access?

Landscape as representation

• One can sell through representation

• Representation starts shaping the reality

• What about authenticity?

“The Treason of Images, later version” by René Magritte

Two cases: 1. Estonian bogs• 22% of the country• Hostile and useless land• Refuge, berries• “one of the mysterious and

awesome communities is definitely the mire. /…/ A sinister wasteland, that – according to ancient beliefs – leads people and animals astray, creates deadly diseases and evil thoughts. Psychologically mire can be seen as a secluded place, concealing some unknown forces and plotting revenge. /…/ Mire is a link between the mystical and the real world, a place where supernatural creatures dwell.“

• Draining started in 1890s, more intensively in 1950s, then in 1970s

• Images of bogs as wasteland in movies

• BUT: 30 mire reserves were founded in 1981; 31 out of the 40 nature reserves in Estonia were mires in 1987

Bogs these days:

• 106 nature trails in all protected areas with total length of 746,835 km

• 56 looking towers • 924 information boards. • Boardwalks are not

separately counted.

For what purpose do you visit mires?

What are the main five keywords connected with mires? (All written keywords were taken into account.

The general amount of words was larger than the amount of respondents).

• mires are not inhabited, but visited. • Boardwalks and view towers limit the perception

to just visual, auditory and olfactory, erasing the direct contact with the quaggy, hardly passable ground and therefore problem with the soft ground is eliminated.

• However, this better access gives more people a chance to get direct experience from this unique ecosystem and allows them to live through the images shaped by school textbooks and stories in media.

• Controlled movement, no freedom of wandering

• Mediated (interpreted) stories

• Standardised knowledge

GeocachingA game like Geo-Caching is a simple example in which people leave items to be found in the landscape and give clues to their location. A review of the GeoCaching web site reveals many comments along the lines of: thanks for choosing this location, it was a beautiful place to break out journey. A plausible extension to GeoCaching would be to extend the game to also require answers to questions (either factual or perceptual) about the location before crediting the ‘find’. /…/ Playing such an extended game provides the player with advanced knowledge about the landscape. More importantly, since all interactions can be recorded on the game server, this also can provide decision makers or researchers with a body of response sets relating to perceptions and preferences.

Ian Bishop 2011, Landscape Urban Planning, vol 100, no 4

A reference in ISI• Title: Czechia - the Geocaching Power

Author(s): Remes Rudolf; Vitek OndrejEditor(s): Fialova JConference: Conference on Recreation and Conservation Location: Kritiny, CZECH REPUBLIC Date: MAY 05-06, 2010 Sponsor(s): Mendel Univ, Forestry & Wood Technol Source: RECREATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION Pages: 5-7 Published: 2010 Times Cited: 0 (from Web of Science)

Geocaching

• Caches for easy scoring• Caches that ask for

some sort of activity• Caches to show a place

Cache 1

Cache 2

• Change the container• When I was young the

system worked like this …

The influence of the game

• Sport for some• Memories for some• Reason to step off the

official track• Spread of stories – not

controlled

The accessibility question

conclusions

• One cannot control a landscape

• Due to urbanisation the landscape turns into a playground

• How the playground approach influences those still working the land?