Water Lane

This series, documenting various environments surrounding the Water Lane neighbourhood in Exeter, contributed to a research project on the same area, in which the photographs were used as prompts in focus group scenarios. The images contain ‘traces’ to various landscape histories and futures, and require context from other sources (oral history, archive material) for different meanings to unfold. From the research project, “Landscape Stories; Towards a ‘Culturally-Geographic, Landscape Biographical’ Approach to mediating landscape heritage in urban development”, for which I received the Dean’s Commendation for Academic Performance, and the Outstanding Dissertation in Geography Award, University of Exeter, 2021.

 Abstract

This is a landscape research project harnessing the creative-critical potential of geographic storytelling (Ward, 2014) in mediating landscape heritage, in the context of an urban brownfield site due to be developed in Exeter, UK. Traditional assessment techniques, often employed to inform developers of landscape heritage in such circumstances, are argued here to be to be inadequately equipped to deal with the processual, subjective nature of landscape, and so an alternative is posited: In this ‘culturally geographic landscape-biographical’ approach, rooted in philosophies of dwelling and landscape citizenship, it is mediation, rather than assessment, that is the main objective. The landscape biography is formatted as a selection of ‘landscape stories’, straddling representational, phenomenological and performative indexes, and recognises the authorial agency of both human and non-human story makers. The stories highlight how time and place interact to produce an emergent, relational cultural landscape of the present, with processual heritages of nature-culture relations, landscape sensoria, global connectivity and mixed experience of place identified as key attributes. Crucially, the biography itself is positioned as an open-ended storytelling event, making the approach well equipped for mediating a more processual, democratic landscape heritage between planners and publics. In this respect, it is also recommended that feedback from publicly engaged exhibitions and events could inform how the scope and efficacy of the methodology could be developed in future projects.