Resilience

The articulation between persistence and change is relevant to a great number of different disciplines. It is particularly central to the study of urban and rural forms in many different fields of research, in geography, archaeology, architecture and history. Resilience puts forward the idea that we can no longer be truly satisfied with the common approaches used to study the dynamics of landscapes, such as the palimpsest approach, the regressive method and the semiological analysis amongst others, because they are based on the separation between the past and the present, which itself stems from the differentiation between nature and society.
This book combines spatio-temporalities, as described in archeogeography, with concepts that have been developed in the field of ecological resilience, such as panarchy and the adaptive cycle. Thus revived, the morphological analysis in this work considers landscapes as complex resilient adaptive systems.
The permanence observed in landscapes is no longer presented as the endurance of inherited forms, but as the result of a dynamic that is fed by this constant dialogue between persistence and change. Thus, resilience is here decisively on the side of dynamics rather than that of resistance.

Auteur
Sandrine Robert is an archeogeographer, an Associate Professor at EHESS, France, and she has defended her professorial thesis. Her work focuses on the long-term dynamics of landscapes and she is the founder and chair of the Landscape Commission of the UISPP.

Contenu

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction xiii

Part 1. Landscape: Continuity and Transformation 1

Introduction to Part 1 3

Chapter 1. Landscape: The Resistance of the Past? 5

1.1. The past in the present 5

1.1.1. Architectural and morphological persistences 5

1.1.2. Looking to the present to uncover the past: regressive history 7

1.1.3. The palimpsest as accumulation 9

1.2. Change, an eternal constant? 12

1.2.1. The diachronic approach 12

1.2.2. Connecting past and present 12

1.2.3. Drivers of change 15

1.2.4. Primary forms: a non-evolving landscape 18

1.2.5. The notion of decay 20

1.3. Reversible time 22

1.3.1. Resistance to change 22

1.3.2. The ancient plan as a work of art 23

1.3.3. The ancient plan as a societal project 24

1.3.4. Artificial versus natural forms 25

1.3.5. Conclusion 26

Chapter 2. Landscape: A Past Surpassed? 29

2.1. A visual revolution 29

2.1.1. A new vision of landscape 30

2.1.2. The allure of a new vision 34

2.1.3. Are we moving toward erasure of the past? 37

2.2. A stratified landscape 38

2.2.1. Erasure in the palimpsest model 38

2.2.2. The fossil landscape 41

2.2.3. Buried landscapes 43

2.2.4. The stratified landscape 45

2.3. The synchronic view 50

2.3.1. Synchronizing forms and society 50

2.3.2. The negation of nature and the division of past from present 52

2.3.3. The break between past and present in methodology 53

2.3.4. The opposition of nature and culture 54

2.4. Conclusion 56

Chapter 3. Landscape: The Articulation of Past, Present and Future 59

3.1. The 1990s: a period of revival 59

3.1.1. Learning from the ground 59

3.1.2. Re-evaluating the nature/culture dichotomy 60

3.2. The inversion of time 63

3.2.1. Non-linear temporalities 63

3.2.2. Evolved forms versus decayed forms 65

3.2.3. From regressive analysis to compiled maps 66

3.3. Discovering new forms 69

3.3.1. River corridors 69

3.3.2. Formation networks 71

3.4. Landscape as a self-organized system 74

3.4.1. Self-organization and morphogenesis 74

3.4.2. Plot layouts and road and path networks as systems 75

3.5. Organizing principles in plot layout and road networks 80

3.5.1. Morphological principles: reproduction of parcel layouts and road networks 80

3.5.2. The role of morphogens 83

3.5.3. Morphostasis, transformission and resilience 88

3.5.4. The articulation of flow, ground footprint and shape 90

3.5.5. Asynchrony in flows, ground footprints and shapes: the importance of lag 95

3.6. Forms in a landscape: specific temporalities 101

3.6.1. New temporalities in archeogeography 102

3.6.2. Time as a spiral 105

3.7. Conclusion 107

Part 2. Resilience: A Tool for Understanding the Dialectics of Persistence and Change 109

Introduction to Part 2 111

Chapter 4. Ecological Resilience as a Systemic Property of Social-ecological Systems 115

4.1. The roots of resilience 115

4.2. Resilience versus stability: the dynamic role of perturbations 120

4.3. A dynamic approach to organization: the adaptive cycle 121

4.4. The panarchy model 124

4.4.1. Development of the model 124

4.4.2. Panarchy and social systems 129

4.5. Alternative attractors and transitions in complex systems 132

4.5.1. Multiple states 132

4.5.2. Alternative attractors and hysteresis 133

4.6. Conclusion 137 Chapter 5. Resilience and Spatial Systems 139</...