Socioplastics 11835 A Landscape Has Several Times
A region holds several durations at once. A coastal path follows seasonal use; an industrial field carries a history of extraction; an agricultural terrace depends on maintenance that crosses political changes. RegionalChronotope describes this meeting of spatial extent and uneven time. It asks how maps select some histories as central to a region while leaving other rhythms difficult to see. Kenneth Olwig connects landscape with political and legal histories of belonging. Yi-Fu Tuan examines how experience and memory form place. Anne Whiston Spirn reads landscape through ecological and cultural processes, while Doreen Massey describes space through intersecting trajectories. These approaches support a regional atlas that keeps distinct time scales in relation: tides, seasonal work, maintenance, migration, infrastructure, commodity routes and changing boundaries. The atlas could combine historical maps, field observation, local testimony, ecological data and planning records. Each layer would name its source, date, scale and authority. A tourism map of an estuary might show scenic access; fishing rights, path maintenance and transport links could be added as related records. Comparing them would reveal how the region’s public image relates to work, jurisdiction and everyday movement. RegionalChronotope offers a method for reading place as temporal composition. Its maps preserve the difference among ecological cycles, social practices and political histories while showing where they meet. Local contributors could correct records and explain contested meanings; authorities could use the atlas to coordinate access, conservation and planning with a clear account of the evidence involved. Such an atlas supports planning decisions because it shows how present access, ecological cycles and inherited land arrangements intersect across different time horizons.
REFERENCES
Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: SAGE.
Olwig, K.R. (2002) Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Spirn, A.W. (1998) The Language of Landscape. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Tuan, Y.-F. (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html