Call for Papers
Landscape Research
Special Issue on Law, Landscapes and Ethics
Deadline for Submissions: June 1, 2004

This special issue of Landscape Research seeks to analyse and discuss relationships among ethics, legal structures, and physical landscapes.

The physical/systemic characteristics of landscapes may facilitate or impede social practices occurring within them. Commerce, settlement, natural resource management, and defence are all shaped by their spatial, topographic, climatic, geologic, and hydrological contexts. Because of the fundamental relationship between landscapes and social practices local, national and international agencies develop and enforce legal structures to regulate their use and management. These legal structures may govern natural landscapes (estuaries, forests, wetlands, deserts, etc.) or built landscapes (public spaces, private spaces, highways, navigational channels etc.) Examination of such legal standards exposes and challenges their implicit and explicit ethical basis. We invite papers that consider instances where the law acts to mediate relations between social practices and landscapes and the ethical/political basis of such mediations. The questions briefly outlined below are not intended to inform the special issue directly, but are offered simply to illustrate a range of possibilities for defining patterns of relationships among landscapes, law and ethics.

How do ethical positions regarding landscapes and landscapes themselves change as a result of juridical practices?

In what ways are particular laws regarding landscapes visible only through examination of the practices of living?

How do legal structures express a society‚s concept of what “counts” as nature?

What legal conflicts arise as a result of competing value systems regarding cultural landscapes?

Does the multiplicity of ethical standards within democratic society make the idea of common good‚ impossible? If so, what is the role of laws that govern social practice? And second, what is the role of the physical landscape of public space?

In what ways do legal regulations become problematic when dealing with landscapes that are defined by natural processes whose boundaries are in flux due to drought and flood, patterns of human occupation, and resource depletion or contamination?

Please send papers by email to Michael Levine via email, no later than June 1, 2004. Please consult the Landscape Research website for information on formatting of articles.

Best wishes,

Kristine Miller
Landscape Architecture
University of Minnesota

Michael Levine
Philosophy
University of Western Australia

Kenneth Olwig
Department of Landscape Planning
SLU-Alnarp

Bill Taylor
Architecture
University of Western Australia

“Landscape Research, the journal of the Landscape Research Group, has become established as one of the foremost journals in its field. Landscape Research is distinctive in combining original research papers with reflective critiques of landscape practice. Contributions to the journal appeal to a wide academic and professional readership, and reach an interdisciplinary and international audience. Whilst unified by a focus on the landscape, the coverage of Landscape Research is wide ranging.” (See the website below for more information).