landscape & identity

The way the first world war is remembered closes as well as opens doors to the past (archive)

Stockholm's woodland cemetery is a landscape whose democratic ideals serve a universal sense

The author of "Waterlog" and the forthcoming "Wildwood" explored the natural landscape in fresh, surprising and influential ways. Ken Worpole pays tribute to Roger Deakin, and introduces his openDemocracy "swimmer's journey" article from July 2001.

John Davies' beautiful panoramic photographs of the British landscape capture an industrial world now lost and a modernity running away from its past, says Ken Worpole.

Can architecture be democratic? Jeremy Till warns against empty gestures and sticking handwritten notes on technical drawings, and welcomes Lift's mold-breaking project to design a New Parliament.

The London International Festival of Theatre wants your vote in its architecture competition to design the Lift New Parliament, a travelling performance and meeting space – preview the designs and cast your vote.

The landscape artist Ian Hamilton Finlay created an extraordinary fusion of sculpture, inscription and philosophy in his Little Sparta garden. Ken Worpole considers a complex figure.

"When we get down to swimming, we get down to democracy." Ken Worpole finds a political challenge in the revival of a public arena where sensuous and spiritual pleasures combine: the lido and open-air swimming pool.

A journey through the coastal landscape of Essex, eastern England, convinces Ken Worpole that human beings in the 21st century must relearn how to live with water.

Landscape is both imagination and livelihood, the setting for human stories that are made as well as inherited. From farming to floods, from photography to hunting, the debate on Landscape & Identity has revealed the vital importance of human attachment in giving meaning to place.

The way we think of the landscapes we live among is deeply influenced by the meanings – practical, symbolic, even spiritual – given to them by successive generations. Travelling to Ireland from his native Scotland, a teacher of the human ecology of place finds a more holistic understanding of landscape that has its roots in ancient wisdom.

The Dutch urban planner and political scientist Maarten Hajer wrote the pioneering work in environmental theory, ‘The Politics of Environmental Discourse’ (1995). His and Arnold Reijndorp’s new book, In Search of New Public Domain, is likely to offend many traditional landscape sensibilities (perhaps especially in the UK, the land that modernity forgot) – for Hajer finds not only virtue, but occasionally beauty, in the new public spaces of the 21st century: airports, shopping malls, theme parks and popular festivals. Here he asks some searching questions about the social and civic importance of these new landscapes.

The picturesque is a vehicle of ruthless sentiment, but the greatest English artists offer a more humane, realistic vision of landscape.

Commercial and professional pressures have reduced nature photography to a tedium of airless familiarity. The practice desperately needs a wider and more truthful depiction of its subject – not just an evolution of style, but of fresh things to say.

The phrase ‘how you see is who you are’ attractively ties the experience of landscape to personal identity. Yet our connection to landscape is also a mirror of our relationships with each other. As politics, technology and media suffuse our lives, can landscape painting still offer a way of extending our sense of ourselves?

In this continuing exploration of the relationship between landscape and identity – whether personal or national identity, often both simultaneously – Jonathan Meades evokes childhood memories of a working landscape, before the shades of prettification set in. Meades is adamant that the English disease is really an urban longing for the picturesque – that way of seeing the countryside as a stage set or a painting, rather than a place where many people work and live.

Romania’s Saxon farming and housing settlements have survived for almost a millennium. Now the country’s authorities see the Dracula cult as a lucrative branding opportunity to put the region on the international map. Can local ecotourism help avert the threat of sadotourism?

How is the sense of place, essential to people’s ability to find meaning in the world, being affected by transformations of landscape in the age of globalisation? openDemocracy’s City&Country editors introduce a new debate.