The railway landscape and more-than-human heritage
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A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
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17
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Fabrik & Bolig, Volume 42, issue 1, pp. 75-91
Abstract
In the contemporary Finnish inventories and discussion on cultural heritage and heritage environments, it has become somewhat commonplace to distinguish three discrete, yet interrelated aspects: Architectural history, history itself and the value of the landscape. Within these three different aspects of heritage values listed above, the landscape-related one are apparently the most vaguely elaborated, and generally accepted and satisfactory criteria have not been developed so far. In this essay I will be focusing on landscape-related heritage values as a category, that has the potential to transcend the nature-culture dichotomy, thus also paving the way for a new understanding of “culture” in cultural heritage studies. I will employ the concept ”more-than-human”, notably proposed by David Abram in 1996, simply as a substitute for “nature”. In the mainstream environmental philosophy of the recent decades, the latter has been seen as increasingly problematic, as it appears to imply humanity as being separate from the rest of nature (and historically has been used exactly for the purpose of such demarcation). These recent post-humanist critiques, questioning the culturenature dichotomy, have also echoed through heritage discourses during the recent years. Especially inspired by the concept of ruderal heritage developed by the human geographer Caitlin DeSilvey, heritage is here understood as products of human – non-human relations, past and present, that are manifested in the landscape. I will ask, how the more-than-human heritage becomes visible in the Finnish railway landscapes, through selected case examples presented through photographic material. This photographic material has been mostly produced during the ongoing heritage inventories of the Finnish railway network carried at the Finnish Railway Museum, while also accompanied by examples produced in relation to my arts-based doctoral research project, still undergoing in the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Finland. Firstly, I will discuss the relation between heritage and landscape, and then move on towards heritage dimensions of the (Finnish) railway landscape. I will begin by noting the difference between landscape as a panoramic view from the train, and the railway as tangible heritage environment, or landscape. It is claimed that these two are interlinked, and the connection is made visible through Wolfgang Schivelbush’s notion of ‘foreground’, as well as that of ‘proximity’, proposed by Finnish geographer J.G. Granö already in the early 20th century. The emergent qualities in the proximity of railway, especially vegetation in the railway embankment and its surroundings, are seen as important contributors of landscape heritage values – both as the foreground of the passenger’s view, and as material and living “objects” or properties in the railway environment as a heritage landscape. I will discuss their connections, before finally taking on examples of more-than-human heritage in some more limited, distinctive heritage “sites” related to the railway, such as abandoned alignments and railway guard’s cottage sites. These may not be relevant to the passenger experience of landscapes, but they still offer an insightful, parallel perspective to the more-than human heritage in railway landscapes. My methodological orientation also emphasizes the importance of the visual and photographic medium. Photographs are not innocent “windows” to the reality of things, although under certain conditions they may enable the sensory, material world to speak for itself, through its own forms. The assertive, argumentative power of photographs, however, seems dependent on the visual qualities of the photographs themselves. This essay emphasizes the connection between heritage and landscape. My main argument in this essay is that heritage in general, but especially that of the railway, involves a strong more-than-human dimension, which suggests looking at heritage in new ways, to make sense of the historical relations between human and non-human worlds, while also embracing change, emergence and resulting temporal depth, that is constantly being produced by temporal processes and non-human agencies, at work in the landscape. This kind of dynamic understanding of heritage also opens towards a utopian, future-oriented view; that of an increasing awareness of coexistence between human and nonhuman worlds. The structure of this essay is the following: before discussing empirical cases, I will set the ground by discussing the landscape dimension of railway heritage, by briefly addressing the landscape in the railway journey experience, and how railway landscape has been addressed in Finnish heritage discourse thus far, moving then on to recent critiques of anthropocentric heritage understandings, that also seem to underline the fundamental connectedness of heritage and landscape. Then I will discuss the concepts of landscape and the related notion of proximity or foreground, as that is the spatial range where material qualities of the railway environment and the panoramic view from the moving train are interlinked. Then, through a set of empirical cases, I finally turn towards the railway as heritage landscape, as well as to a few heritage ‘sites’ related to the railway – the typical heritage approach – and discuss the more than human aspects and processes like vegetation and ruination for their landscape-related heritage values.Description
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Itälahti, M 2025, 'The railway landscape and more-than-human heritage', Fabrik & Bolig, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 75-91. < https://tidsskrift.dk/fabrikogbolig/article/view/156185/198642 >