Epsilon Open Archive

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate what relational, time-space focused landscape research can contribute to our understanding of the role of roads in the landscape. It is claimed that landscape research can identify the new places and the altered accessibility that are the inevitable result of an ambition to improve accessibility and reduce distances. Landscape research can thereby highlight decision points and conflicts, a precondition for physical planning. Historical landscape studies are promoted as an important method for embodying, and thus problematising, the proposed improvements. Causal definitions, polarisation between nature and society, and absolute definitions of time and space, as well as the division between subject and object characterise the modern research to which the relational approach can offer an alternative. The alternative is to produce differentiated time-space descriptions of how activities create places. With the help of contemporary theories within human geography and e.g. the work of Bruno Latour, the premises and potential of the relational approach are addressed in this thesis. The landscape is defined here in accordance with the landscape researcher John B Jackson as a composition of man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure for society. The case study in this thesis deals with the development of road planning and the road network in Sweden in the period 1900-1939, based on an area in Southern Skåne. This period is of special interest because the current day perception of roads and transport was founded during this time. The road network and road planning were transformed from a local issue to a national, based on a modern understanding of time, space and transport. In conclusion, the importance of the work is discussed in relation to applied landscape analysis. It is claimed that the modern theories of time, space and transport play a major role in contemporary landscape analysis. This weakens the analysis, and is a major impediment to a broader understanding of the role of roads in the landscape.