“The mode of walking and wayfinding appropriate to the Anthropocene is . . . a respectful movement that puts emphasis on sensory, contingent and fragile encounters through making our way, alongside others through time and space, here and now.”
—Lesley Instone (2015: 137)
“Scientific method in western culture encourages us to see ourselves as outside the process we are observing. . . . Walking as wayfinding builds ‘different knowledges’ of rehabilitated lands, moving from an understanding of nature as commodity to a knowledge of new land as intrinsic, material and relational.”
—Penny Dunstan (2016: 592)
Landscapes exist in the mind as much as they do on the ground, being both cultural constructs and natural objects (Schama 1996). Landscapes are formed subjectively, assembled from bodies, perceptions, and conceptions developed along “emotional pathways” (Viik 2011). Because of this, ecopsychologists contend that landscape health dramatically influences personal wellbeing (Rozak et al. 1995). Moreover, according to geographers, landscape architects, and nature writers, this personal wellbeing is modulated through the direct experience of immersion (France 2003a; Gibson 1979; Kaplan and Kaplan 1989).
The literature on the “restoration design” (France 2007) of post-industrial sites as public parks has increased markedly since its development in contemporary landscape architecture theory at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design (Berger 2008; France 2008a, 2012; Kirkwood 2001). Notwithstanding that these reparation undertakings aim to regenerate damaged landscapes for people (France 2008b), the primary focus of this literature continues to be on them as biophysical spaces to be studied from afar rather than as experiential places to be directly engaged. The lack of an embodied perspective in these conceptual publications suggests that, as Christopher Tilley (2004: 28) remarked for landscape archaeology publications, “they can only provide us with abstract models for thinking landscapes rather than models of landscapes that are sensuously lived.” Consequently, scholarship concerning regenerated places has tended to portray them from a sensorial impoverished perspective, or, in Tilley's (2004) words, as “paper landscapes” that look good in photographs or design proposals but are uninviting to potential users.
In Western cultures, communities build up around industrial activities, and planners seize opportunities to reuse sites for public spaces. Therefore, the regeneration of post-industrial landscapes into public parks focuses on placemaking (Dubois and Braiden 2024; France 2024). In this process, sterile space becomes humanized and transformed into a value-laden place, there being an essential distinction between the quotidian terms (Tuan 2001). The continued focus on such sites from the mindset of space at their expense as inhabited and, therefore, embodied places must be regarded as problematic in judging the lasting success of such “restoration” projects, many of which depend upon public financing.
Fortunately, some scholars have recognized these shortcomings in restoration scholarship. For example, David Kidner (2007) cautions about letting restoration become a cognitive extension of the processes that produced the initial damage. For such healing practices to support nature, he believes that thinking of restoration and feeling it becomes necessary. The way to accomplish this, Lane Conn and Sarah Conn (2007) argue, is to engage restoration as a reciprocal relationship in which to experience our embeddedness in nature or, in William Jordan's (2003) words, as a “new communion with [restored] nature.” According to the Conns, by acting with our hearts in addition to our heads and hands, restoration becomes a process of healing both the outside and the inside worlds. Stephanie Mills (1995, 2007) believes that the way to accomplish this is through retelling personal accounts of reinhabiting damaged and now “restored” land. In this perspective, it is equally crucial for scholars to passionately “re-story” a place as it is to restore a space phlegmatically. Matthew Low (2020) agrees, emphasizing that restoration ecology must become more firmly grounded in the immersive experience of persons through practical narratology or storytelling. This is the autoethnographic approach employed by Caitlin DeSilvey (2017) in her investigations of heritage transformation. For Lesley Instone (2015: 134), the means to accomplish this type of scholarship is to confront and embrace the Anthropocene by emphasizing “the interrelation between body, knowing, place and feeling” garnered through the walking process of what she refers to as “respectful wayfinding.”
This article outlines a methodological approach to counter restoration design's paper landscapes based on the research tool of narrative scholarship and its constituent modes of thick description, immersive walking, and experiential phenomenology. Although scholars in landscape archaeology, autoethnography, psychogeography, and anthropology have used this methodology, it has rarely been purposefully applied in interpreting landscape disturbance and “restoration” per se (Dunstan 2016; Richards 2022; Valisena 2022). Following a short introduction to the deindustrialized literature of social historians and anthropologists, the article reviews the methodological concepts and illustrative examples from the broader literature about experiential narratives, followed by excerpts from the few case studies that have applied these approaches for post-industrial landscapes. The article concludes with a call for the inclusion of narrative scholarship as part of holistic restorative ecology.
Deindustrialization and the Romance and Landscape Architecture of Ruinous Sites
Beginning with the Roman geographer Pausanias and flourishing through the period of Grand Tours and the nineteenth century, when atmospheric paintings fired imaginations from the likes of Giovanni Piranesi and David Roberts (Moatti 1993; Vercoutter 1992), we have long been deeply fascinated with ruins (Macaulay 1953). Part of the attraction, poets well understood, was due to ruination fostering rumination about the impermanence of human hubris, for example, Shelley's “The lone and level sands stretch far away” (Ozymandias, 1818) and Kipling's “Is one with Nineveh and Tyre” (Recession, 1897). Ruins, therefore, often symbolize expansive abjection and catastrophic loss, and through being storehouses of memory, can evoke feelings of curiosity, melancholy, and nostalgia (MacDonald 2014; Stoler 2008).
Today, industrial ruins are widely recognized for their ability to evoke feelings of reflection, remembrance, and romanticism (High and Lewis 2007). Much of the voluminous literature on deindustrialized zones, often about large and inhabited metropolitan and peri-urban regions, focuses on human responses to the experience of economic decline and social change (High 2013; High et al. 2017; Linkon 2013). Residents often have complex relationships with the industrial history of these areas, with memory and nostalgia confounding the past and the present (Mah 2009). Here, reminiscences of the “emotive bonds of family, community and class” (High 2013: 995), involving both mourning and celebration, can run counter to the aims of regeneration given the latter's potentiality in erasing history (Mah 2010). Overshadowing all is the danger of viewing decay as a spectacle; in other words, the voyeuristic perspective of “ruin porn” (Linkon 2013).
It is necessary to look beyond aesthetics when considering the place identity of deindustrialized zones (High 2014). Superficial photojournalism efforts, often undertaken by outsiders, can all too easily veer into dereliction tourism (Mah 2010). Photography, especially when employing artistic techniques, can be a helpful aid in site interpretation and benefits when accompanied by oral histories of residents in the form of life-story interviews (High and Lewis 2007) or micro-autobiographies (Linkon 2018) that provide emotion and lived experience. Nevertheless, is this enough to escape the trap of romanticization?
Recently, several scholars of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene have considered it necessary to purposely immerse themselves in real, not paper, landscapes of deindustrialized zones by employing the enacted wayfaring of psychogeography. One such modern-day flaneur set out to explore his family heritage in a coal extraction region of Pennsylvania that has suffered industrial collapse (Long 2020). Autoethnographic “aimless ramblings” navigated by foot and bicycle, during which he had spontaneous interactions with residents and strangers, allowed Andrew Long to peak his imagination and to obtain a depth of understanding unavailable to desk-bound scholars: “Onto the buildings and landscapes left to decay, I map a potential awareness – a web of insight capturing abuse, traumatic histories and shaping the spaces between industry, a people, and an environment.” In the same spirit, ethnographers Tricia Toso and colleagues (2020) employ the “multi-sensorial experience of walking” along the ghostly traces of a one-time river through an industrialized section of Montreal. These urban ambulations enable them to uncover palimpsest layers of the area's complex history of interactions between colonial settlers and Indigenous peoples: “Offering a range of possible routes, connections, and digressions or detours, it [the river] brought us into contact with marginal, often inaccessible places, histories, and narratives, unsettling, but not resettling, our perceptions of the city.”
Given that romantic enthusiasm is a problem with respect to objectively interpreting de- industrialized zones, it is doubly so for post-industrial sites regenerated as visually attractive public parks. The reason is that landscape architects and environmental scientists have conflicting approaches (Ryan 2008) that can sometimes counterpoise aesthetics, ecologies, and histories to a degree as to compromise the execution of restoration projects (Mozingo 2008). For example, quoting Rüsen, that “the shadow of the aesthetic splendor is a de-historized past,” Stefan Berger and colleagues (2017: 43) caution that “industrial heritage, reduced to an object of tourism and a commodity [in such regenerated parks], runs the risk of sanitizing history.”
Undoubtedly, devastated landscapes can have an inescapable, awe-inspiring allure (Berger 2002; Burtynsky 2009), influencing how designers approach their tableaux. Four extraordinary parks built from the 1970s through to the late 1990s on former industrial loci emphasize the role of industrial aesthetics and ruins in landscape architecture at the time. Land artist Robert Smithson prefigured the regeneration of manufactured sites—“contaminated and derelict lands that have been left by post-industrial activity” (Kirkwood 2001: 3)—with his earthworks in the 1960s and early 1970s (Krinke 2001). His most famous project, the Spiral Jetty, was built in 1970 in Utah's Great Slave Lake, and accentuates the vast and terrifying sublimity of the landscape, including that of a nearby abandoned oilfield. Landscape architect Richard Haag simultaneously shocked and transformed the profession in 1975 with his provocative decision to preserve the industrial ruins of a coal gasification plant admix the rolling hills of greenery he created for Seattle's Gas Works Park (Saunders 1998). Two decades later, Hargreaves Associates, like Smithson before them, used art to showcase desolation in their minimalist design for a landfill in Palo Alto. The firm transformed a capped landfill into Byxbee Park, with recreational trails that run through huge, treeless swathes of grass punctuated by a gridiron of towering metal poles (Krinke 2001) designed to highlight the starkness and unsettling alienness of the terrain. Finally, in the early 1990s, Peter Latz extended this concept in his design of Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord in Germany's industrial Ruhr Valley (Latz 2001). The park preserves numerous fragments of previous industry, including the blast furnace, noted for its “haunting visual qualities . . . [that] acknowledge and celebrate the site's history” (Krinke 2001: 137–138). Significantly, Latz infused old buildings with new life by repurposing them as recreational spaces rather than museums, creating a novel utilitarianism characterized by what Storm (2014) calls “alternative beauty.” These are rare examples of designed landscapes that balance the messiness of each site's industrial heritage with establishing a sense of place in a contemporary context free of romanticization or Disneyfication (Wilson 2019).
The rest of this article shifts to approaches that employ experiential immersion to study and, through the process, enliven degraded landscapes. Undertaking such restorative work is known to provide the additional benefit of fostering personal wellbeing among participants (Marsh et al. 2023).
Narrative Scholarship in Landscape Research
Theory
Narrative is the practice of storytelling. It “gains its power from its ability to change form easily and repeatedly” and by remaining “recognizable over time and across mediums” (Altman 2008: 1). A change in Western landscape philosophy, design, use, and appreciation occurred in the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century, evidenced by royal and estate gardens in England and Europe that invited varied, diverse, and natural scenery into focus rather than the earlier ordering and taming approach to nature (Rogers 2001). Romantic landscape narratives—the pastoral, the sublime, and the picturesque—drew from Rousseau's philosophy, Pope's poetry, and Lorrain's paintings and occupied the minds of English landscape designers like Kent and Capability Brown, who framed views within a garden as scenes within a larger regional context. Landscape scholars generally agree that the definition of landscape limited its associations to a “view or delimited area of ground, and its painted representation” throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century (Cosgrove 1998; Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; Di Palma 2016: 47; Jackson 1986).
Consequently, cultural landscape scholars widened the scope of the narrative by engaging with additional fields of study (ecology, real estate, resource extraction, architecture, or urban planning) as a way of seeing landscape (habitat, property, commodity, site, or zone) (Meinig 1979). Landscape architecture scholars appropriated the approach by studying the “understanding of relationships between process and material, form, and space” (Spirn 1998: 6). They structured the language of landscape to “the units of story, event, sequence, place, character, agency, point of view, and so on, [that] all work as a system of signification to conjure and sustain a coherent and believable story” (Potteiger and Purinton 1998: 41). The order of the landscape narrative sequence, like a walk through an English garden, remained relatively consistent yet with an increasingly expanding language (Finke 2014) to describe the diversity of sites and varying cultural layers inscribed. Therein lies the “pluralities” (Barthes 1975) of landscape narrative.
The postmodern landscape turn called for an in-depth contextual framing (Harris 1999) and detailed positionality (Birkstead 2012), which were used to “recover” landscape narrative from longstanding tropes (Corner 1999) and critically engage with designed landscapes (Elkins 1993). Landscape scholars are re-evaluating the values, beliefs, and ideologies around landscape aesthetics and positionality to engage more thoroughly with the history of wastelands (Baird 2022; Di Palma 2014) and landscapes devastated by human action, such as mines, dams, and nuclear fallout zones (Belanger 2018; Nye 2021) and the consequence of environmental injustice (Boone 2020; Hood and Tata 2020; Hutton 2019; Waldron 2021). Equally, landscape narratives increasingly acknowledge Indigenous contributions to shaping the land and take steps toward decolonizing landscapes and their narratives (Dang 2021; Raxworthy 2018). By challenging the once-dominant narrative of landscape power (Mitchell 2002; Zukin 1991) and expanding the repertoire of familiar storylines, landscape narrative cultivates value systems and behaviors for engaging with and experiencing the restored landscape.
Methodology
Table 1 outlines the multi-faceted or “layered” framework we adopted (Braiden et al. 2023) to assess regenerative landscapes comprehensively (see Table 1). The emphasis in the various approaches taken varies from top to bottom along covarying spectra of progressing from more quantitative to more qualitative, more scientific to more artistic, more objective to more subjective, more distant observations (i.e., “paper landscapes”) to more immersive accounts (i.e., sensorial embodied landscapes), more about the work of others to more concerning personal reflections, and more involving hands/head to more focusing on the heart.
Research framework for the comprehensive “layered” assessment of regenerative landscapes (Braiden et al. 2023)
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Part 1: Quantitative physical and social science surveys |
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Ecological restoration methodologies |
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Landscape architecture methodologies |
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Part 2: Qualitative layered thick descriptions |
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Referential site-learning |
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Literature reviews |
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“Go-along” or “walk-with-me” interviews |
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Experiential site-writing |
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Visual narratives |
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Phenomenological immersions |
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The quantitative surveys in Part 1 comprise standard methodologies used in ecological science (Clewell and Aronson 2008). The critical point is that the all-to-common presentation of photographs of, for example, bioengineered shorelines by landscape architects, in the absence of quantitative scientific data, is not indicative of the success of any “restoration” project. In recent years, there has been a shift from scientific metrics that describe form to those that gauge the function of “restored” landscapes (Fraser et al. 2015; Vander Zanden et al. 2016). The quantitative surveys in Part 1 also comprise standard case-study methodologies used by landscape architects (Francis 2001). This approach follows a logical and detailed series of steps involving inquiry, analysis of use, and interpretation. It is deemed essential to the ecological design of regenerated places (Palazzo and Steiner 2011) and critical to delivering restored ecological ser- vices (France et al. 2019).
Part 2 of the multi-faceted assessment framework develops thick qualitative descriptions subsumed from various layered approaches. The first couplet of these involves site-learning based on reference to the work or opinions of others. Referral to previous work, rather than being limited to only the final end-products as is frequently done, needs to focus on the entirety of the regenerative process. Such detailed attention to history, planning, technique, design, and construction practices—in a sense, generating a biography of the project (Kolen and Renes 2015; Samuels 1979)—is required to fully assess the success of post-industrial public spaces repurposed for recreation and ecotourism (France 2012). Another part of this layer of referential site-learning approaches engages with the qualitative ethnographic research tool of the “walk-with-me” or “go-along” method of in situ conversations with practitioners prompted by landscape features (Doring and Ratter 2021; Kusenbach 2003). This approach, which explores everyday experience related to environmental perception, spatial practices, and social expressions of assessment (Carpiano 2009; Evans and Jones 2011), has been used to evaluate the restoration of agroecological services (France and Campbell 2015) and the performance—both ecological and sociological—of former mine sites (Braiden and Dufresne, in prep.).
The second couplet of thick-layered descriptions involves personal or autoethnographic writings that focus on the experience of visiting sites. The broader literature reviewed below discusses the complementary approaches of visual narration and experiential phenomenology as facilitated through immersive walking. In this respect, specifically regarding restoration studies, Dunstan's (2016) account of her intimate exploration of a re-naturalized and rehabilitated open-cut coal mine is the gold standard to emulate.
Thick Description
There is a need to develop alternative forms of scholarship that are more imaginative and responsive to the intertwined geographies of people and places in the Anthropocene (Gibson et al. 2015; James 2022). The standard practice in academic journals has been to portray landscapes analytically and dispassionately as sensorially sterile, disembodied spaces studied from a distance rather than through direct immersion (Tilley 2004; Wylie 2012). Thick descriptions, in contrast, use self-reflective essays to impart a sense of place. Such an approach employs evocative language to enable readers to vicariously experience a site through showing rather than merely telling (Geertz 1973). A well-established tool in autoethnography research (Adams et al. 2015; Humphries 2005), thick description “moves beyond presenting facts and overt appearances, and instead provides details, context, emotions, and underlying meanings and intentions” (France 2022: 41) in its attempt to describe the interactions of people and place. Thick description is a form of “site-writing” (Ponterotto 2006) often based on switching from first-person and second- person narration in multi-voiced “layered accounts” (Hermann 2012). When coupled with more traditional research approaches and analyses (Table 1), such layered thick description supports the scholarly investigation of landscape phenomenology (France 2022; Tilley 1994, 2004; Wylie 2012). Because thick description is rooted in a desire to paint a realistic picture of a site or situation, it customarily depends on linking words and photographs. Such participant perception is the standard modus operandi of autoethnography (Harper 1987; Kharel 2015) and has been employed in visual narratives of cityscapes (reviewed in France 2022), but only occasionally of post-industrial ruins or regenerated landscapes (Chan 2009; DeSilvey 2017; Edensor 2007; France 2012; Storm 2014). Photography, albeit in the absence of thick description, has been employed in visual studies of mining landscapes (reviewed in Bélanger 2018; Laly 2020).
Immersive Walking
Walking enables landscapes to be experienced, described, and understood (Ingold 2004, 2011), fostering a different form of academic writing in which personal experiences can invoke more comprehensive commentary (Wylie 2012). Some have emphasized the parallelism of the fluidity of motion, fostering a fluidity of prose (Coverley 2012; Solnit 2000). However, it is essential to recognize that, just as for memorable jazz and comedic jokes, it is the moments of pause during memorable walks where the senses can be most receptive to appreciate the entirety of the compositions. Task-based walking therefore involves more than kinesthetics; it “requires time to stop and listen” (Thomson 2013), and because of this, the practice is often utilized as a research method in social science investigations (Bates and Rhys-Taylor 2017). Through “place-learning” (Springgay and Truman 2018), pedestrianism scholars have provided thick descriptions of experiencing cityscapes (Aoki and Yashimizu 2015; Coles 2014; France 2022; Middleton 2010, 2011; Svensson 2020; Vergunst 2010) and rural paths (Clarke and Jones 2001; Edensor 2000; Wylie 2002, 2005), but have rarely done so with respect to rewilded or regenerated landscapes (DeSilvey 2017; Dunstan 2016; Richards 2022; Valisena 2022). As an elemental way to perceive place (Wunderlich 2008), the sensate and kinaesthetic attributes of walking allow it to become a placemaking practice (Ingold 2011; O'Neill and Roberts 2020). The ensuing “walkscapes” can be regarded as aesthetic creations of architectural form (Careri 2017), wherein the embodied experience of the act weaves together lives and landscapes (Tilley 1994). Dunstan (2016) recognized such epiphenomena in her concept of walking as performance art: “The very fact that I was walking in the land was an act of rehabilitation, making attachments grow, and creating special places.” As a form of “circumambulatory knowing” (Ingold 2002, 2004), walking fosters peripatetic ponderings (Solnit 2000). Being a multi-sensorial experience (O'Neill and Roberts 2020), walking as a methodology in landscape phenomenology research is much more than visual scanning; it is an embodied haptic undertaking that integrates the senses of sight, sound, smell, and touch (Lund 2006; Tilley 2004).
Experiential Phenomenology
By employing the coupled methodologies of thick description and immersive walking (Dunstand 2016: 597), landscapes, born from subjective experience, can be studied through phenomenology. The latter is a relational philosophical approach that utilizes the senses to interact with and acquire knowledge about the world (Brown and Toadvine 2003; Wylie 2012). It is based on considering the body's immediate relations with its surroundings through deliberate intent rather than casual impression (Bannon 2016). Landscape phenomenology research, therefore, derives from “a mind that is embodied, bound up with the sensorial world” (Tilley 2004: 26).
We recognize and remember places because their stories, as experienced and expressed through multiple senses, touch us by resonating with our memories. Layered landscapes open the story to multiple readings, references, associations, and constellations of stories—the control of meaning shifts from the author's intentions to the readers’ role within cultural contexts (Kimmerer 2003, 2013).
Limitations
The need to develop alternative forms of writing based on personal expressions to effectively capture the emotive and affective experience of our geographies of place has long been argued (Cosgrove and Domash 1993; Wylie 2010). The gap has led to debates about the representation of personal experience in qualitative research (Crang 2005). Part of this is due to the tension between the traditions of academic scholarship and creative writing (Ward 2014), with some criticizing phenomenological prose for being too introspective and, therefore, self-centered. Vivid richness and authenticity of textual details about thoughts and emotions do not, on their own, constitute thick description (Ponterotto 2006). Interpretation is needed to provide relational and linked context and meaningfulness (Younas et al. 2023).
Going back to Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, architectural writing often depends on a tourist-like fixation of total concentration, even when imbued with experiential prose (Benjamin 2002). However, Grillner (2007: 138) argues for the purposeful inclusion of distracted experience, mainly through employing memory, since her “body holds a particular knowledge of the topography” of places arising from recurring visits. Jones addresses the importance of personal memory: “Can we go back,” he asks, “to the past territories and past encounters which are mapped inside us and colour our present in ways we cannot easily feel or say?” (2005: 206). These temporal distractions from the present—the echos of past encounters—can circumvent the limitations of ephemeral precision. In short, a memory makes a place out of space.
Some, recognizing the challenging task of putting perceptions into prose, have sought ways to augment textual communication. A thick description is more than analyzing context; it has an aesthetic quality that visualizes the experience (Freeman 2014). Because of this, many consider it necessary to look beyond words by articulating contemporary art practice, usually in the form of accompanying photography or film (e.g., Unwin 2008). Some use other innovative expressions of art as acute, concentrated ways of experiencing the environment (e.g., Thomson 2013).
Phenomenological Encounters with Post-Industrial Regenerative Landscapes
Three studies have notably explored using phenomenological approaches to study post-industrial regenerative landscapes.
Benjamin Richards and Per Haukeland (2020) and Benjamin Richards (2022) explored the “echos” of past industry (hydroelectric power generation, chemical fertilizer production) in a heritage landscape in Norway using the experiential method of psychogeography, wherein the natural forces of the geographic environment are understood to have shaped the structures of society in addition to continuing to influence the emotions and behavior of individuals in the present day. The process is described as random wanderings of the researchers to enable sensory encounters within landscapes, such as, for example, being exposed to “a gust of wind” or pausing to study “the slow growing of a branch on a tree.” As Richards (2022: 322) describes:
While moving through a landscape, we participate in both a bodily and an emotive exchange with the world around us, that I call intra-play, causing both effects and affect. Our path is through the effects our movement has on other forms. the smell of pollen released from a kicked flower, a footprint pressed into the mud on a rainy day, the snapping of a branch that had been slowly growing from a tree, the movement and chatter of birds aware of our presence. As such, rather than a line, our paths are perhaps better understood as the forces of movement that resonate out and are felt by other forms, the effects of which overlap in time and can still be felt within the landscape even after the physical traces have vanished.
The shift in focus from a distant viewing of the landscape, referred to as the “hylomorphic way of knowing,” as “exhabitants,” to studying the landscape from within, as inhabitants, through “haptic knowing,” allowed the authors to be attentive to “space-time” minutiae, such as patterns of plant growth admix the post-industrial traces (Richards and Haukeland 2020: 42):
In this encounter it is not me over here and the tree over there; we are connected through the earth, touching each other through the ground, the flow of the air, the light and sound. I perceive through the tree: I am able to experience something with the tree and draw insights and understandings from that experience: understandings that speak of heritage, of landscapes and the nature of the becoming together of forms, of intra-play; understandings that, in a continuing process, extend far beyond the nature of the tree, the [decaying remains of the] carriage, or the history of that moment in space-time.
Daniele Valisena (2022) undertook a walking ethnographic study through the Pays de Terril Landscape Park in southern Belgium, a terrain punctuated by the presence of spoil tips (terril) made of coal waste and refuse materials left over from coal mining (Valisena and Armiero 2017). He describes his methodology as “retracing past and present geo-historical trajectories and stories by moving through the environment [a]s a form of performative rememorating, one that makes visible new and old relationalities and meanings in the landscape(s) we traverse” (idem: 267). During one walk, Valisena became “enticed” by the numerous brown and black spots encountered along the trailside, and in the process flagged the highly personal nature of landscape phenomenology (idem: 272):
Was this coal or not? How could I tell? Deceived by my sight, I opted for my other senses, starting from smell. Yes, it smelled like wet coal. But the more I touched the fine grains of coal sand emerging amid the grass, the less I was sure about the odour of coal. The fact that I wanted to find coal might have worked as an unconscious form of autosuggestion. . . . Most of what I saw, smelled and touched was thus elicited by what I wanted to find. While the geo-historical layers that make terrils . . . are the result of complex geographical, geological and historical processes which are immediately there to be seen, smelled, touched and traversed by all wayfarers, there is an inherently subjective component to those landscapes. In fact, as per all sites of memory, the post-industrial scars embedded in terrils might elicit different memories, senses and significance depending on the relationship between those who area traversing those sites and the stories they convey. It is not so much a matter of singular or collective experiences, but rather a question of positionality towards the memories unearthed through the geo-historical wayfaring.
Using walking as a form of performance art, Dunston (2016) combined her professional training as both an agronomist and an artist by immersing herself in the “transmuted” landscape and its constituent flora and fauna of are habilitated open-cut coal mine in Australia (Cottle 203). Dunstan recognized landscape forms and the plants covering the mining waste but found that “they are in strange configurations.” It is Dunstan's phenomenological descriptions of encountering the regenerated landscape that resonate most powerfully from her study:
[The] land is understood through observing, looking, drawing, photographing, walking upon and breathing within. Writing is derived from a lived experience of being-in rehabilitated land and participating in the webs of existence that are slowly redeveloping (Dunstan 2016: 589).
I can intrinsically know the surface of the Earth. And by activating my kinesthetic awareness as I traverse the rehabilitated lands, I can have a deeper appreciation of trees, earth, grass, air and wind (Dunstan 2016: 592).
I . . . take the bigger picture, to move away from the disembodied view. Fundamentally, it also begins to dissolve the boundaries between land and myself, between myself and grass and rocks and alkaline soils and spiders and kangaroos and eucalypts and angophoras that constitute rehabilitated terrain (Dunstan 2016: 594).
My aim of engaging trees, soils, understory and inhabitants forms part of a two way conversation enacted as I move through the land, understanding the earth through my feet, wind through my hair, grasses through my hands . . . I am beginning to understand the odd world of terraformed land through my body and my body through interaction with the land (Dunstan 2016: 596).
The very fact that I was walking in the land was an act of rehabilitation, making attachments grow, and creating special places. In walking, photographing, drawing and painting in the land I was and continue to be, calling rehabilitated land into a world of relating (Dunstan 2016: 597, 603).
As she walks through and witnesses the remodeled waste rock covered in topsoil and planted with trees and grasses according to mine-closure plans, Dunstan questions the wholeness of the site's rehabilitation. For her, rehabilitation is an experimental means to tidy up post-mining landscapes lacking connectivity to the regional context and climate future. Dunstan's (2016) experience in the terraformed landscape and close observation of the expected and unexpected vegetation led her to conclude that “rehabilitated land belongs to many.” She found that birds and mammals play a role in maintaining the site's wild grasses and, by extension, in healing the landscape. Adding to this palimpsest herself, Dunstan hopes that her “landscape art might help twenty-first century Australians to discover the sense of belonging-with land, to find the poetry to animate our lands without history” (Dunstan 2020: 45).
The Narrative Art of Historical Restorative Ecology
Heneghan (2018) surveyed the extent of reference to the five senses and various corporeal terms in two influential anthologies of classic writings on natural history and scientific ecology. His findings revealed that natural historians relied upon all their senses much more frequently when studying nature and employed a personal voice more often than ecologists did. To avoid the sensorial blinkered trap of focusing on paper landscapes (Tilley 2004), ecologists need to move past the traditional disembodied gaze of their profession and join cultural geographers, landscape archaeologists, environmental artists, and urban planners and designers in directly experiencing the phenomenology of the landscapes which they study.
In this respect, ecologists should occasionally and purposely leave their scientific equipment behind in their offices and go out and engage the world simply by walking with no instrument of measurement other than that of their own eyes and bodies. Doing so will allow them to hone their ecological approaches to both visual (Gibson 1979) and multi-sensorial (Degen 2008) perceptions of the sort that was characteristic of the approach used in the nineteenth century by natural historians such as Thoreau (France 2003b). Through this, ecologists will achieve a more fulsome understanding of the sites they study. As Heneghan aptly states: “Experiential walking—that is, walking with the senses wakeful, and alert—is [an] ecological methodology and not conveyance merely. To neglect this—and to fail to notice this fact is perhaps the first step toward disregarding this truth—is to run the danger that contemporary ecologists will not mindfully engage all their faculties as thoroughly as they might in encountering the beings of nature” (2018: 476).
Regarding regenerated landscapes, researchers should, therefore, follow the lead of Dunstan (2020) and push for mine-closure plans that use a holistic model that incorporates cultural and socio-economic values. In part, such an approach involves incorporating personal stories of engagement from members of the broader community in the planning process to help understand how people are intimately connected to the landscape, both in the past and the present. By contributing to the development of such approaches, ecologists can facilitate the practical narratology that Low (2020) considers to be critically needed in restoration ecology. DeSilvey (2020), for example, advances the notion of “ruderal thinking” based on non-quantitative descriptions of opportunistic plant species colonizing the novel ecosystems that emerge, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of disturbed environments.
People make sense of space through sensual engagement, and in the otherwise sterility of urban landscapes, Tim Edensor (2007) believes that few places provoke more powerful sensations than post-industrial ruins. Such places imprint themselves on the body by subsuming time (remembrance) and space (kinesiology). As he states, “The sensory revelations of ruins and those of other interstitial spaces could therefore be exemplars which inform approaches to urban planning and regeneration that are more attuned to the pleasures and effects of sensual diversity in the city” (Edensor 2007; 230). Post-industrial ruins and the landscapes in which they are situated—such as those experienced by Dunstan (2016, 2020), Richards (2022) and Valisena (2022)—function in shaping narratives of history (Cater and Keeling 2013; Chan 2009). These places conjoin the physical and social realms, and “the phenomenological experience of interacting with the industrial ruin environment combined with contemporary notions of industry activates the imagination” (Chan 2009; 27). Citing Edensor, Elisabeth Chan considers post-industrial sites “repositories of memory, generators of creativity, and places of habitation and performance” (Chan 2009; 25). Given that walkscapes are aesthetic creations (Careri 2017) that link together lives and landscapes (Ingold 2002, 2011; Tilley 1994), it is worth reiterating the notion of Dunstan (2016) that sensorially walking through a post-industrial landscape is itself a creation of performance art just as it is an act of rehabilitation. As Richards (2022: 325) states, such an experiential approach adapted to disturbed landscapes is based on conceptual artist Richard Long's “idea of walking as an act that sculpts the landscape, whereby our very movement shapes cultural values and knowledge into the landscape” (Richards 2022: 325).
The narrative-driven genre of place-based writing is the creative combination of personal storytelling with natural history description. If adapted to disfigured landscapes, it can capture “landscape history's elegiac sense of loss” as well as be useful for “articulating anxieties about irreversible local change, nowadays in a context of resource depletion, habitat disturbance, biodiversity loss and atmospheric warming on a global scale” (Daniels and Lorimer 2012: 6). Moreover, self-reflexive scholarship in the form of layered thick descriptions of visual narratives and phenomenological immersions can play an essential role in the comprehensive assessment of landscapes regenerated from post-industrial sites. In the end, regenerating damaged landscapes without restoring personal experiences garnered within and by those landscapes is a job that is only half done due to the outside/inside mutualism concerning holistic healing (Chard 1999; Cohen 1997; Grossman 1998; Marsh et al. 2023).
Acknowledgments
This research is generously supported by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Development Grant.
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